Visual Art Analysis

A First Look (Chapter 5) Landmarks in Humanities Gloria K. Fiero

The Bayeux Tapestry is a unique record of a major historical event: the Norman conquest of England. This landmark artwork is not, in fact, a woven tapestry, but an embroidery, created to ornament a banquet hall or to line the choir walls of Bayeux Cathedral in northwestern France. Sewn into a roll of bleached linen cloth, some 20 inches high and 231 feet long—two-thirds the length of a football field—the lively visual narrative chronicles the incidents leading up to and including the Battle of Hastings, the outcome of which gave William of Normandy control of England in 1066. Some seventy-nine scenes unroll continuously, in the manner of an ancient parchment scroll, a Roman historical narrative (see Figure 3.14), or a modern comic strip. Above and alongside each scene, Latin captions identify the characters, places, and events. Real and imaginary birds and animals populate the borders above and below, and in the battle scenes, fallen warriors clutter the earth. Epic in scope and robust in style, the Bayeux Tapestry presents a picture of an age in which Christianity became a militant force in the West. It provides a vivid visual record of feudal life, colored by scenes of combat that constitute a veritable encyclopedia of medieval battle gear (seen in this detail; Figure 5.1): kite-shaped shields, conical iron helmets, chain mail, battle axes, and double-edged swords.

figure 5.1 The Battle Rages, detail from the Bayeux Tapestry, late eleventh century. Wool embroidery on linen, height approx. 20 in., entire length 231 ft

A First Look (Chapter 13) Landmarks in Humanities Gloria K. Fiero

Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (Figure 13.1) shows a holiday crowd enjoying a leisurely sun-filled afternoon on an island in the River Seine, four miles northwest of Paris. The subject matter—the middle class at play—has replaced the gods and goddesses, saints and martyrs, kings and heroes that dominated the large canvases of previous centuries. Seurat’s canvas marks the attention to the realities of contemporary life that dominated the arts of the late nineteenth century. While typical of the Impressionist fascination with the activities of urban society, the painting has little of the painterly spontaneity that characterized Impressionism. Seurat shared the Impressionists’ obsession with light and color, but he had little interest in the effects of fleeting sensation. La Grande Jatte’s orderly, geometric composition was distilled from fifty-five preparatory studies (see page 380). Seurat’s fervor for order may have inspired his systematic application of tiny dots of paint (in French, points) to heighten color intensity and emphasize form. While this novel use of color produced the style known as pointillism, Seurat’s canvas was less than popular with the critics, one of whom wrote: “Strip his figures of the colored fleas that cover them; underneath you will find nothing, no thought, no soul. . .” Nevertheless, La Grande Jatte, with its brilliant atomized color and its intriguingly stylized figures, remains a landmark in the annals of French painting.

Figure 13.27 Georges Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884–1886. Oil on canvas, 6 ft. 9½ in. × 10 ft. ⅜ in. Seurat’s universe, with its atomized particles of color and its self-contained figures, may seem devoid of human feeling, but its exquisite regularity provides a comforting alternative to the chaos of experience.