Video Review 3-24-19

This week I watched a video called How Art Made The World 1 - More Human Than Human and A World Inscribed: The Illuminated Manuscript. While the first video was mandatory to watch, I chose the second video, A World Inscribed: The Illuminated Manuscript, because I wanted to know more about the process of the scribes in the Middle Ages before the advent of the printing press. Living in the digital age—where we are bombarded by images and text—I take for granted the ease of access I have to any written text that I desire to read. I watched A World Inscribed: The Illuminated Manuscript because I was intrigued about the process of copying written texts by hand, and I wanted to know what life was like for the people who devoted their lives to doing so.

The first video I watched, How Art Made The World 1 - More Human Than Human, discussed the topic of why today’s images of the human body are so unrealistic, and how the past plays a role in today’s exaggeration of certain areas of the body. The video explained that the Venus of Willendorf is one of many examples of ancient figurines that grossly exaggerated the sexual features of a woman, and Professor V. S. Ramachandran posits that the reasons that the Venus of Willendorf’s sexual features are exaggerated are due to the human brain’s boredom with realism; just as the Kritios Boy, despite his masterful realism, was subsequently eschewed by the Greeks for more exaggerated forms, today we celebrate fashion models who are unrealistically thin and spend billions of dollars exaggerating our own features in order to achieve an unrealistic ideal of beauty.

A World Inscribed: The Illuminated Manuscript gave me a detailed view of the lives of the scribes who copied and illustrated manuscripts before the invention of the printing press. Monasteries and cathedral schools were the intellectual centers of Europe at the time, so it was typically monks who were the scribes of the day and most books came from monasteries. Each book was copied by hand, so it was an excruciating process, and as a result, every monastery only had around 20 books within it. Finishing a book was such a huge accomplishment that most scribes felt the need to leave a final note recording their experience of copying the manuscript, and most of the notes were complaints, or even curses. Many scribes worked in difficult conditions and would sometimes make mistakes, which they blamed on demons, rather than their own error.

The videos relate to the readings in the text, Living With Art (Eleventh Edition), because both How Art Made The World 1 - More Human Than Human and the text focuses on the Venus of Willendorf as having exaggerated sexual features. The text also focuses on Venus de Milo, the ideal of female beauty, which is the main topic of the video. The exaggerated features of the bust of Constantine the Great also aligns with the video’s focus on why humans exaggerate the human body. When the text, Living With Art (Eleventh Edition), focuses on the Middle Ages, it describes what the video A World Inscribed: The Illuminated Manuscript recounts about how monks were the scribes of the day and how hard they worked to copy books by hand. The text also features a page with a lion from the Gospel Book of Durrow, which contains the animal style and interlace patterns that were so popular in that region at the time—a beautiful example of what the video portrays the scribes illuminating so painstakingly.

I appreciated both of the films because of how focused they were; they did not try to cover a range of topics superficially, instead they presented in-depth research on a single topic. I learned about how humans have exaggerated the human body for over 30,000 years, and that the reason that we do it is because humans are actually bored with reality, which propels us to exaggerate it. I also learned that being a scribe was just about as difficult and thankless as I thought it would be. Both videos were beneficial to me because of their focus and how they taught me something that I did not know before by their in-depth concentration on topics that the text mentioned. I also appreciated them because of their alignment to the text Living With Art (Eleventh Edition), in the ways I previously mentioned. Seeing Professor V. S. Ramachandran in a video again was interesting because I really enjoyed the first video I saw of his where he was giving a lecture on aesthetics. Finally, I liked how the A World Inscribed: The Illuminated Manuscript video taught me about the daily life and beliefs of the monks, though I thought that it was ridiculous that the monks actually believed that “for every letter, line, and point, a sin is forgiven,” since the Christian God’s forgiveness cannot be earned—it is a gift to be embraced.

Until next time!