September 16, Art History Class

So every Thursday we have our art class in museums, a lot of the days, if not all in the Prado. I took the metro in and then met up with my class just outside the museum. After finally getting everyone together we headed in. The years for my class are prehistory to the baroque period, but today we started in just two rooms. The first was the recreated inside of a church and the paintings on the walls from the 12^th century.

It was a small church with just one window and arched doorway, but the entire inside was covered in paintings. They were all two dimensional and all biblical. There is very little motion in any of the paintings and they are mostly just the figures. However there is one scene with Adam and Eve where it shows both the snake giving her the apple along with them covering themselves since there is limited space in the church. It was from a time when almost all people didn’t know how to read or write, so paintings were one of the main forms of communication.

The next room had paintings from another church from about the same time period, but these showed men hunting and other similar scenes. This is most likely because it was a church that was later converted to a hunting lodge. Some people have tried to argue at one point that these were actually truly only religious and that the hunters and animals represented Jesus and other biblical figures, but our teacher doesn’t buy it. Only a few paintings were there (other museums have some of the other paintings) compared to the room before that was the entire church recreated.

We looked at one more painting in the same room and then that was the end of our 1 ½ hour class. We have to listen to a foreign language about foreign material, write in a foreign language, and look very inquisitively at the art being talked about all at the same time. It’s hard at first but the professora says it will get better.

So I haven’t really talked much yet about my history of art class, but the teachers seem like they are going to be awesome. There is an older man and a younger than him woman. He is actually a painter and she is his agent, but they also teach and are really good at it. He will be teaching the Tuesday classes in class and she will be teaching the Thursday museum classes.

They are a lot of fun, and we even talked about the professora’s past job of castrating bulls in Argentina. She also really wants us to ask her all types of questions about Madrid and what we should do here along with our other travels in Spain and the rest of Europe.

In the Tuesday class we talked a little bit about some of the most ancient art from prehistory and the paintings in caves along with going over the plan and layout of the class in the two different parts. I've never taken an art class before so I hope to learn a lot!