World Art I – History of Painting (AHD-1010-3DS) Fall 2020

Instructions for the term paper ! This semester’s term paper is a research project on a painting at the Met Museum. It will be due in class on November 21,2020. ! The paper should be at least 1200 words long, double-spaced, and typed rather than handwritten. (I suggest that you use12-point Times New Roman font, with 1-inch margins on all sides. This will result in a paper four pages long.) It can be longer if you want, but it doesn’t have to be. ! Here is a summary of what you will have to do for this assignment. Each of these steps is described in more detail below: !

• Go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and choose a painting to write about (see the detailed instructions below for instructions on how to choose the painting)

• While at the museum, sketch the painting and take notes • Research the painting in at least three reliable, scholarly sources, not including your

textbook or the Met website • Write a paper about the painting • Properly cite all of your research with footnotes, and include a bibliography • Submit your paper on the due date, along with your sketch and a dated museum receipt !!

! Step 1: museum visit ! Go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York (1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street) and select any European painting that falls within the periods and styles covered by this class (late Gothic through Neoclassical, or roughly the years 1250 to 1800). You don’t have to limit yourself to the periods I’ve already talked about so far; it can be from any kind of painting that will be discussed during this semester. However, the painting must be from before the year 1830. ! Be sure to get a dated ticket or receipt when you go to the Museum (or take a photo of yourself with the painting you’ve chosen); you will need to attach it to your paper when you turn it in. ! Once you’re at the museum and you’ve chosen the piece you want to write about, sketch it and take notes. In addition to recording any important facts about the painting that are included in the museum’s wall text, you might want to write down your impressions of it. If you’re looking at a

piece that you picked in advance from the textbook or the Met website, make note of anything you see that wasn’t apparent in photos that you saw beforehand. (Note: the Met doesn’t allow flash photography or the shooting of videos, and in some galleries photography is not allowed at all. In addition, you can only use pencils for taking notes and sketching; no pens, paints, pastels, or charcoal are allowed for general visitors.) !!! Step 2: research: ! For the next step, you have to research the painting using at least three reliable sources that are based on scholarly research, not including your textbook or the Met website. Here are the rules for this:

! 1. You can’t use your textbook as one of your main sources. However, you can use the

textbook as a fourth/additional source. 2. The following kinds of sources are OK to use: art history books; academic/scholarly art

journals; writings by professional art historians; museum websites (not including the Met website, although you can use it as a fourth source). Basically, anything written by an art historian is perfect for this assignment.

3. These kinds of sources are NOT OK, and your grade will go down a lot if you use them: blogs of any kind; writings by people who aren’t art historians; Wikipedia or other encyclopedias; newspaper or magazine articles (See the appendix below for more information about this rule.)

4. Finally, do not use the following sites: theartstory.org; arthistory.net; artsy.net; biography.com; history.com; bbc.com; any website with a name like artist’s name.com or artist’s name.org (for example, pablopicasso.org); or any other site that doesn’t have citations and a bibliography. If you use any of these sources, I may return your paper ungraded and either have you rewrite it or do another one on a different artwork.

5. If you’re not sure about whether a source is OK to use, e-mail me