The man of Renaissance- Lorenzo de Medici

Cosimo de Medici had 2 sons named Pier and Lorenzo. Lorenzo played an important Role in Renaissance era and successed to increased the wealth of the government and family.

He was very powerful in different areas. Everybody knows that he was a very succesful statesman but he was also a poet, politician, banker and patron of artists. He wrote many poetry and songs for carnival. He was also not officialy titled for ruling the country like his father but he helped so many people by paying artists education and buying their work to encourage and help them to continue on art. He was a Renaissance man. He also gave importance in history of Europe and encouraged people to learn about history.

Many succesful artists such as Donatello, Raphael and Michelangelo was occured during their period. Lorenzo also provide them a great education and life. It is known that Michalengelo lived with the Medici Family for many years

He also tried to maintain good political relationships in Italy and protected his country from other powers in Europe. He also had good relationship with the Ottoman Empire and Sultan Mehmet II. The maritime trading with Ottomans were important for them for rich sources.

Cosimo de Medici

When the Medici family was powerful in Italy, Florance became one of the dominant state in the world. Becoming the center of the cultural movement in Europe and the new movement called Humanism.

The family fortune started with Cosimo de Medici who is Giovanni’s son. In 1434 the goverment of Florance started to control by Cosimo. The next sixty years Florance was under the power of Medici Family, Cosimo was at the head of the government but without the official title. Cosimo was also helped banking, trading and industry to develope and spend money for them. At the same time, there was another wealty family in Italy called Albizzi family who were in a political battle most of the time. Even if the Albizzi family won the political debate, lot of people supported Medici’s and they protected their status.

Cosimo de Medici spend lots of money for development of his city. He wa also awared of the importance of art, so he supported art. New churches an libraries were built. We can say he recreated the Florance and made it the center of art for many historians. The title Pater Palrige means “The father of his country” after his death.

In politics he mostly tried to keep the balance and create peace in Northern Italy which includes Florence, Naples, Venice and Milan especially in the wars of Lombardy and tried to avert the other powers in Europe such as French and Holy Roman Empire.

Deconstructivism and Ellen Lupton

Ellen Lupton’s Deconstructivist Theory

Ellen Lupton is a graphic designer who started to work in Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum ( New York) in 1992 and becamethe curator. At the same time she works in Institute College of Art, the director of Graphic Design programme in Baltimore. With her succesful carreer, she is a writer who published many books and articles about graphic design.

She also has one of the most highest reward AIGA Gold Metal that given to a graphic designer and the educator.

I said that she has got many book and here is 2 of them

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When i was searching about her i found her critics about deconstructivism which is our last topic in the class, and i want to share them.

*Deconstruction is part of a broader field of criticism known as “post-structuralism,”           *The phrase “deconstruction” quickly became a cliché in design journalism, where it usually has described a style featuring fragmented shapes, extreme angles, and aggressively asymmetrical arrangements.                                                                                       *Rather than viewing it as a style, you can view deconstructivism as a process – an act of questioning                                                                                                                                                 *It has recently become unfashionable to compare language and design.                                   *For the design fields, “deconstruction” has been reduced to the name of a historical period rather than an ongoing way of approaching design.

emigre magazine

Emigre is a magazine started to publish in San Francisco, by Rudy VanderLans. He is a Duch art director o the magazine and the fonts in the magazine were created by his wife Zuzana Licko. It was an important magazine because it had great impact on many graphic designers and design publications. Machintosh computers started to use emigres publications. Also, it was like the first publications that Machintos used. It helped graphic desigers who started touse a desktop publishing. It has got many impressive articles and designes and layouts for the graphic designers.

Many good essays and articles on design took the magazine to a point that many talented graiphic designers meet and share their thouhts about graphic design. The magazine was like a platform.

I searched the site http://www.emigre.com and looked the part art and design. It has got many successful designes and i want to share some of them.

This a t-shirt design of the company

Helvetica

The History

The sans-serif type Helvetica was developed in 1957 by the designers Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffman at Haas type foundry.

Haas made a new design that can contend in Swiss market with the successful design Akzidenz-Grotesk.At the beginning they called it Neue Haas Grotesk. The aim of the design was to be clear, recognizable and usefull for all purposes.

After that, the design company Linotype adopted the new type and started to work with it. Arthur Ritzel reworked with the new type and transmitted it to a larger family. The other succesful typeface design Univers was also belong to. Linotype Company. They also got success in Helvetica like in Univers.

In 1960, the parent company Stempel decided to change the name of the typeface. They gave the name Helvetica for some purpoises like make it more marketable and recognizable. It means Switzerland. Before that the name was choosen as a Helvetia but Eduard Hoffman did not accept it because he thought that it would not be international and appropiate to give a name of a country. So they called it Helvietica which means Swiss.

 

Avant garde Constructivist Russian fashion

The fashion design following the Russian Revolution was supposed to be readly available because of effects of the Constructivist movement. I want to mention about 2 famous avant-garde Russian artists at that time ,whose works and ideas still effects todays fashion.

Liubov Popova and Varvana Stepanova created new design institutions and tried to involve themselves to market with their new types of designes with in the same direction of communist beliefs. They had both studied under the cubistartist Le Fauconnier, in Paris, in early 20th century

Varvara Stepanova’s mass-produced designes were mostly bright and had a geometrical patterns. These were also used as a working clothes

Lyubov Popova was also a succesful cubist painter and a designer. She mostly designed constructivist flapper dress. I loved the illustrations of her dresses, here is the example

This avant garde artists gave a new meaning for both s-Soviet women and men. They were the most succesfull avant garde artists at the world at that time and they gave an inspiration to European art and culture.

Marchel Duchamp’s Fountain-inspiration of avant garde movements

Most of the avant-garde movements from Dada to Surrealism are inspired by the radical ideas and works of  Duchamp . He is a French- American artist and also he is poet and a chess player. In 1917, his famous ready-made work “porcelain urinal” was shown in the expedition and in 2004, British art experts chosed Fountain as a most influential artwork of 20th century.

Here is astory about fountain;

“I threw the urinal in their faces and now they come andadmire it for its beauty,”

Duchamp was a member of of Society of Indipendent Artists. ın 1917, In the annual exhibition of the Society, he sent his work Fountain to his friends to question the meaning of art. He signed it with another name – R.Mutt. to know what was his friends thinking about the indipendence of art. The Fountain was rejected from the society. After that Duchamp understood that he was not belong to Society where his ideas was opposite. In one of the dialogs made with him he said that “So, that cooled me off so much that, as a reaction against such behavior coming from artists whom I had believed to be free. I got job. I became a librarian…” After that, he got attention from many artist and people and the definiton of art started to change. Maybe it started to lost.. The important thing was the chosen object. He took and ordinary object and gave it a new meaning and thought to that object.

photography-Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge is a well known English photographer who spent most of his time with capturing the movement and motion of people or animal. He spend his life in US and started to work  photography at the time between 1861 and 1866. and Most people know him with his pionerring work  Animal Locomation which he called ” The movement of horse”It is known that he used multiple cameras to catch the moment when the horse was moving.  At that time it was really hard to make something like video. He used zoopraxiscope, a device to projecting motions in a film strip.

He started to take photos of Yosemite and San Francisco in 1867 and gained his fame at that time. He took many lanscape photographs and published them as a “Helios”. One year later, he was selected as a photographer of the Army of U.S expedition.

When he was in University of Pennysylvania he used many cameras to capture both animals and human and made them videographic. He used models either naked or they had a very little dress to understand the movement much better. He used a scenes like people walking down stairs, dancing, boxing, throwing water.. he had nearly 100,000 images of movement. The 20,000 of them published in a title of Animal Locomation. Also he started to gave a lecture about animal movement. The beginning of biometrics and mechanics of athlethics started near with the Muybridge’s works.

Some examples of his works;

Renaissance fair

Renaissance Fair, or festival is an outdoor weekenc activity which people come together in United States. The aim of this festival is getting people together and showig them the themes, characters and historic times in Renaissance in a amusing way. It is open for public, everyone can go and visit the activity. There are many shows held in the fair and they can take place in different places like theme parks or public places. Also, some of them are permanent and some of them are short term.

The festival includes many amusement. It creates a Renaissance theme in every area. There are music shows, costume entertainments, theatres and art. Furthermore, there are special festival foods and special handcraft arts for guests.

Most of the shows set at the time during the period of Queen Elizabeth 1 of England. Apart from United States, there are several countries that has Renaissance fair and the sets changes according to countries. For example in France, the historic period goes earlier like Vikings or 18^th century pirates. They can also includes fantasy elements like witches and wizards.

Some interesting photos during the festival

Caravaggio

Caravaggio is a succesful painter who spend most of his life in Italy. Mostly, he is known as the first artist of the Baroque art. The most important issue about him is the using light and shadow in his paintings. He succesfully gave the emotinal and physical meaning of presenting human body with a dramatic light effects in a very realistic way.

He got his education in Milan and Titian was his teacher. During the 16th century when he was moved to Rome, the Roman Catholic church was looking for a new art which is religious at the same time to have a Counter Reformation.  The dramatic use of chiaroscuro -means using light and dark with a distinctive value.

The birth of Baroque

Chiaroscura was known before Caravaggio but no one became succesful as him in using this technique. He put oscuros- means shadows, in a very definitive way bu doing darkening the shadows and trasmit it with a light.

Baroque style was seen in many areas with the Counter reformation. Mostly in architecture. This is the example of German Baroque architecture.

Baroque Architecture in Turkey

Istanbul has many examples of Baroque architecture. The most famous ones are Nuruosmaniye Mosque and Ortaköy Mosque. The sytle is combined with the Islamıc culture.