Connor Mudrick and Juliana Surratt -- The Discoveries of Perspective

  Very good presentation and paper on perspective in art, connections with
  mathematics, and so forth.  Your presentation was very good and I liked
  the way you tried to get the class actively involved by demonstrating
  perspective drawing.  The images used were right "on point" too.  
  
  In a way, I wish you had decided earlier that this was going to be 
  a single paper rather than two papers spliced together.  Then there
  could have been more unification and a bit less repetition.  (For instance,
  in Juliana's section, there is already some discussion of perspective
  in Renaissance art, so the overall organization of the paper is slightly
  non-optimal.)

  I think you also have to be careful about how you think about the idea
  of "progress" in art.  As I said in comments 4 and 5 below, I think 
  it's a mistake to think that medieval artists whose images did not
  emply mathematically correct perspective were making "errors"
  or that Renaissance artists were "better artists" because they were
  employing more accurate mathematical perspective.  Artists choose
  to use perspective (or not) because they are trying to show what 
  an observer would see (or not).  Art needs to be understood in the 
  context of its time and the intentions of the people who created it.  

  Specific comments:

  1)  page 2:  "Though Euclid had no understanding of the vanishing point, it is 
      quite clear that the essence of perspective was understood by him"

      > Yes -- It's Euclid's *Optics* that discusses the geometry of vision
      and that would lead to the mathematical theory of perpective when 
      applied to the creation of drawings on a plane.  (You say more about
      this on page 3.)

  2)  page 5:  About the translation of your source from Lithuanian and 
      the questions about names -- did you think of trying to corroborate the 
      identification of Apollodor with Apollodorus or Zevshy with Zeuxis
      by checking dates or other information about those figures and comparing
      them with information available in English sources (e.g. Wikipedia, which
      is generally pretty good for factual information like that on "non-controversial"
      topics)?  It does seem pretty clear to me that "Zevshy" is the Lithuanian 
      form of the Greek name "Zeuxis" by thinking about what would happen in 
      transliterating from Greek to a Slavic language.  So while I applaud your 
      scrupulosity in not changing the name from the way it appeared in your 
      source, I think it would have been OK to use Apollodorus and Zeuxis in 
      your text.   

  3)  page 11: word choice: "remained obsolete from European art" should
      be something like "remained absent" or "remained foreign to"  

  4)  page 12:  "Despite the errors with the works of Giotto and Duccio"
  
      > I would only call these features "errors" if you think that these
      artists were *consciously trying to* produce paintings that would 
      realistically depict what the eye would see in looking at the scene
      that was being depicted. It's pretty clear, in fact, that these artists 
      were *not* trying to do that.  They were organizing their images in 
      different ways (where, for instance, the size of a human figure might 
      represent that person's importance in the scene and not their apparent 
      size to an observer).  Similarly, I don't think it is really a 
      matter of "advancement in art" that later works show more realistic
      perspective.  It's just that the artists were getting better at
      doing something different.  

  5)  page 15:  The point about perspective as an aspect of a greater desire 
      for *realism* is good.  Another way of saying that is what I was getting 
      at in the previous comment.  "Realism" is not the same thing as "good art;"
      it's a choice regarding how art is to be created and what its goals are. 

  6)  page 17:  "shockwaves rippled across the field of art" -- this is 
      a cliche; try to avoid hackneyed phrases like this in your writing

  
  7)  page 17:  "Although this may seem like a counterintuitive concept to grasp, 
      the artists from Ancient Greece and Rome shared certain characteristics with 
      the artists from the Renaissance"

      > Actually, it's not counterintuitive at all -- part of what started
      the Renaissance was the recovery of literary texts and artistic works
      from the ancient world.  Renaissance artists were consciously trying
      to build on and continue what they saw as a tradition from that past.  

   Final Project Grade Computation 
  
   Bibliography:   10/10  

   Paper:          55/60

   Presentation:   30/30

   Total:          95/100