This is the pendulum Roth was speaking on swinging from the baroque style back to the Renaissance.Audience. Audience is the group to which a decision is comprised around. An audience is often the most important factor when it comes to design or writing. The audience determines a person based on their works and therefore their presentation must be suitable for their audience. In design, King Louis XIV wanted to prove to his audience his authority and his power through his palace at Versailles. The entire presentation of Versailles was for his audience, the French people and outside nations. Versailles was consumed by displaying power and it was solely to recognize and celebrate the King. His palace was a statement of his absolute monarchy role in France at the time, the King said “’l’état c’est moi (the state is I)’” both verbally and symbolically through his enormous palace at Versailles (Roth 420). Flaunting for an audience was King Louis XIV’s approach towards his audience, the designer Michelangelo Buonarroti related to his audience in his design of the Laurentian Library Vestibule in a different form. He was displaying the significance of the library to his audience through his architectural design of the staircase. The staircase had a sense of ambiguity through a sort of waterfall effect which in turn said to his audience that the library was pouring forth knowledge. Along with the design of the staircase, the actual existence of stairs also spoke to the audience by symbolizing that you had to work hard to achieve knowledge, somewhat like a one-step-at-a-time approach to knowledge. In writing, the author must be aware of their audience, whether it’s an e-mail to a family member or a formal paper as a school application, or even a blog entry for a course at school. The author must be aware of their audience and respond in accordance to what society has deemed the way to behave when communicating with audience X, Y, or Z. In drawing, the audience somewhat takes the backseat, but remains existent in the artist’s mind; it is a form of self expression and frankly doesn’t necessarily HAVE to appeal to an audience for personal art, yet mainstream artists do have to consider the people in which they are painting for, or the people who will be viewing their piece…their audience.
If I created this piece with the intentions of posting it in a retirement home, my piece would be unsuitable for my audience. In creating this, it was important for me to keep my audience in mind.
Character. Character is the presence to which a piece or a person carries. Character is an adjective to describe such presence. The character of a piece can say a lot about the designer; and the character of the designer can say a lot about the piece. Going back to Louis XIV and Michelangelo… his strong power and arrogance sense of character led to his massive, elaborate, Louis-consuming palace at Versailles. Michelangelo remained quiet in his design for the stairs at Laurentian Library, or in his painting of the Sistine Chapel, or his creation of David… he let his pieces speak for him through the character or presence to which he incorporated into his designs.
Transition. Transition is a movement from one known existence to another. Transitions to me go hand in hand with revisions. A transition comes with time and brings about change and movement. In the idea of evolution, human beings experienced transitions from primates to humans. Girls experience transitions into womanhood through their development of menstrual cycles. People transition from helpless infants, to walkers, to puberty, to adulthood, to mid-life crisis, to becoming a senior citizen, to helpless yet accomplished human beings. In music, it’s the movement from one piece to another. In art it can be a texture change, a color change, any sense of movement across the page. In essence, in order for there to be a transition, there must be movement of sorts. In architecture, there are major and minor transitions. I feel over time the major transition in architecture were the movement from abiding by the natural environment to defying the natural environment. Other transitions throughout architecture were from cave peoples to Greek, to Roman, to Medieval, to Gothic, to Renaissance, to Baroque, to Enlightenment, to the technological era. A transition can be for the better or for the worse, but change must occur.
Datum. Is an individual piece of information or data; it is also an axis to which a measurement is made. I feel that during the time of the baroque form of design, the use or thought of using datum is less important, that the emphasis was on ambiguity versus uniformity (Roth, 398). In baroque design, the rules of the Renaissance were disregarded and therefore the mathematic and systematic approach to design wasn’t focused on.
The grammar: syntax week I found the discussion of Michelangelo and his works very interesting, most likely because of my interests in art. I enjoyed dissecting his pieces and interpreting the ways in which he tested the boundaries and broke rules. I feel that without breaking rules you never really know what else is possible and what else is out there. Personally, I did not like much of the baroque form of design; I felt it was too heavy and ornate. While I did like the concept of causing the viewer’s eye to move, and causing them to become engaged in the piece, I felt that the movement and fluidity was emphasized to the extreme. I found the Sant’ Ivo della Sapienza’s dome not appealing to my eye, it seemed too busy to me. I tend to appreciate the geometrically fitting and symmetrical pieces because while my eye still travels across the structure, I also realize the genius that had to go into making the piece pleasing to the eye. I am glad the baroque form was just a phase and that designers reverted back to the classical rules.
This is the Sant' Ivo della Sapienza and it's dome, which isn't my favorite...
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