Exploration Document Draft
Shima Shirazi
HUM200
Cultural Artifacts
Intended audience for this essay is high school and college students who like to learn about
artifacts that share a main theme to create an essay.
My first work which is “The Lamentation” is a painting created by an artist called Giotto di
Bondone in early fourteenth century around the year 1305 in Italy. I also like to share about
Giotto's work motives beyond this painting that he could pursue to make him as one of the main
characters to improve Fresco style in Italy, and he also became an important role to improve
painting in the renaissance era.
I like to bring two quotations extracted from my sources found to support my claim about how
Giotto's approach inspired by Messiah and his earthly family could improve his paintings and
also expand Fresco Style in Italy. According to Eva Frojmovic, the Author of one of my sources,
I can tell that Giotto had been a pioneer in using psychology, physiognomy, and the art of
rhetoric which is a persuasion approach of painting in his artifacts. He mainly used the holy
family as a stimulus in his masterpieces. The author is wondering how Giotto could alone take
care of the conceptualization of his work to improve his approach to paint his ideas. “The young
Tuscan painter had been given responsibility for decorating the entire inner surface of the church
with a set of frescoes picturing the life of the Virgin, the Passion of Jesus, the Last Judgment, the
Virtues and Vices, the Evangelists and Church Fathers, and a number of small Old Testament
scenes. The execution of the work was apparently by Giotto alone, but what about the
conceptualization? Who helped him devise such a complex program of images?" (Frojmovic,
2007).
1
In my other sources found to support my claim about Giotto's paintings authored by Michelle A.
Erhardt, I have retrieved a paragraph to address this fact that Giotto had been using the Holy
Family as his main aspiration to improve the Fresco Style in Florence, Italy. “By the mid-century
numerous fresco cycles depicting the Infancy of the Virgin were painted in Florence, many in
Franciscan contexts, paralleling the Order’s support for Scotus’s teachings on the Immaculate
Conception." (Erhardt, 2008)
My other work is a piece of melody retrieved from a Cantata called “Jesu, Joy of man
desiring”. This melody was originally created by a German musician called Johann Schop and
later was modified by Johann Sebastian Bach in 1716. Bach could deliver his cantatas in musical
performances for churches, and could convey an extraordinary collection to be studied by well-
known artists like Mozart and Beethoven succeeding him. Bach could improve different
melodies to religious motives to be served in churches mainly in Leipzig, Germany. He decided
to modify motives as a result of inviting his work schedule to liturgical calendar, and he could
improve them to better meet church's expectations from cantatas. I can tell that Bach wanted to
dedicate his tribute and gratitude to messiah by composing this precious piece of art.
