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And Moses Smote the Rock: The Reemergence of Water in Landscape Painting In Late Medieval and Renaissance Western Europe

Silberstein, Edward
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1288378722

Abstract Details

2010, MA, University of Cincinnati, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Art History.
This thesis undertook the analysis of the realistic painting of water within the history of art to examine its evolution over four millennia. This required a detailed discussion of what realism has meant, especially over the centuries of the second millennium C.E. Then the trends in the painting of water from Cretan and Mycenean eras, through Hellenistic and Roman landscape, to the limited depiction of landscape in the first millennium of the Common Era, and into the late medieval era and the Renaissance were traced, including a discussion of the theological and philosophical background which led artists to return to their attempts at producing an idealized realism in their illuminations and paintings. To reduce or avoid the subjectivity inevitable in my analysis of the relative quality of the 266 images of water which I found in texts and museums, a semi-quantitative scale was devised. The scale provided descriptions and images of four levels of quality in areas of hue, luminosity, reflection, motion, immersion, and perspective. The criteria were designed to be used by any observer, although the verbal scale and accompanying illustrative images would be used in any attempt to assess interobserver variability. The examination of my intraobserver variability was crucial to this thesis, since the data have no validity if they cannot be reproduced. Both the six individual components and the summed scores (resulting from adding these components) were found to have a high degree of reproducibility on statistical testing. This fact permitted a quantitative analysis of the trends in the development of the painting of water in the medieval era where the scores were very low until the criterion of hue first rises in the duecento. Not until the fifteenth century do the slopes of the six components graded for the quality of water painting all rise significantly. The subject matter of these images changes from having secular content in about 10% of images in the fourteenth century to 50% in the next century Comparisons were undertaken between the levels of quality scores between Italian and Northern European artists. No differences were found in the summed scores between paintings and illuminations of the two regions except in the component of reflection, which received higher quality scores in Northern European painting than in Italian works. An analysis of which region produced the highest quality scores earlier revealed that the Northern European artists dominated in this area, led by Jan van Eyck.
Kristi Ann Nelson, PhD (Committee Chair)
Kimberly Paice, PhD (Committee Member)
Mikiko Hirayama, PhD (Committee Member)
139 p.
Art History
water; landscape; painting; medieval; Renaissance

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Silberstein, E. (2010). And Moses Smote the Rock: The Reemergence of Water in Landscape Painting In Late Medieval and Renaissance Western Europe [Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1288378722

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Silberstein, Edward. And Moses Smote the Rock: The Reemergence of Water in Landscape Painting In Late Medieval and Renaissance Western Europe. 2010. University of Cincinnati, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1288378722.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Silberstein, Edward. "And Moses Smote the Rock: The Reemergence of Water in Landscape Painting In Late Medieval and Renaissance Western Europe." Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1288378722

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.