Our lovely Visit to the De Vinci Exhibition.
Hi all,
Okay! I think some of you would disagree already by reading the title. Although this might be the case, I definitely enjoyed it. It seems to me that the only reason we went there was to see Ibn Sina’s name mentioned only once and in-between the lines. De Vinci’s work is great, but I think Ibn Sina should been accredited more. In my opinion there should have been at least a small paragraph about him and his influence. As a class, It would have been very cool-for lack of a better word- to write a letter to the Exhibition explaining to them our views and backing them with academic evidence. Although we might not get anywhere, I am sure it is worth trying. (We could make it part of our project! and Yasmin will hate me for ever!)
Anyway what have you guys learned form our visit? what sort of questions popped in your heads as you all viewed the rest of the gallery? Did anyone thing where does art fit in Islam? how does Islam view and define art? I am going to challenge myself and answer those questions in my next post!
Rima
April 12th, 2010 at 11:00 am
Well Reema, you’re not alone. I also really enjoyed the exhibit! … I was so into it, I didn’t realize everyone had gone upstairs.
I think we’ve firmly established, in our class at least, that there is a tremendous amount of credit lacking where it is due. I found another interesting example of this at the exhibit, in the last section (I forget what it was called) which was not about De Vinci but rather about the transition in the approach to the depictions of anatomical images and cadavers, from artistic to realistic.
There were several anatomy textbooks in this section (most courtesy of our very own Woodward Library at UBC) from the early Renaissance era. One of these was Fasciculus Medicinae, which was first printed in 1491. The caption next to one of the images from the book, depicting an anatomical drawing of the human body, states that this was the first book published to ever show diagrams of the human body. Which we all know is very incorrect! How many anatomical drawings have we seen from the 9th and 10th centuries? I’m astounded that living in a time like this, where knowledge is so accessible, things like this still happen.
April 12th, 2010 at 11:16 am
Art in Islam
Interesting question. I wish we could have tackled this a bit in our class, after Celeste’s presentation on Math and Raheem’s on Engineering I’ve been really curious about the same thing.
So where does art fit into Islam? One of the things that resounds with me from what we’ve learned about the Islamic empire at its height, was that everything was beautiful. I feel as if Islam’s approach to art is “holistic,” in the sense that perhaps art was never viewed as a separate entity but was rather incorporated automatically into everything that was created. I have no evidence to back this up; just my personal thoughts. I mean how many “paintings” or objects created specifically for the purpose of being on display purely for aesthetic purposes have we come across? Yet if we look at the architecture, the mechanical devices, essentially anything that was built during that time period, it could be seen as art. What do you guys think?
April 14th, 2010 at 11:13 pm
I definitely enjoyed the exhibition as well even though I had already gone and seen it once, but even the second time around; it blew my mind looking at Da Vinci’s sketches of the different anatomical parts as they were done in such detail that it by far blew the computerized drawings out of the water. Can you imagine the effort and time it took him to draw every muscle? The small attribution/mention of Ibn Sina’s name was a disappointment, especially now that we’ve discussed him and his contributions so much in class; if we weren’t in the class, and to others who were at the exhibit, it would’ve been easy to overlook his name and misunderstand the way that Da Vinci was giving credit (as it looked more like a quote said by Ibn Sina that he used). I’m not sure if everyone went and saw the corner that had the flat screen TVs that had generated 3D images of different machines that Da Vinci had come up with (a hydraulic pump and some other ones I can’t remember) there was so little written on the walls as description, that it would have been nice to even have a small paper explaining the inspiration he got in building the machines and whose work he used to help develop his own.