IIIF for Educators

Instruction in the Round

💡 Concept

"David and Goliath" 1550-1555 (site views at The Louvre museum, recto and verso)

The blood sport of primacy in the arts between 1D, 2D, and 3D mediums was contested half a millennium ago by mail. In 1546, at the peak of the Renaissance, poet Benedetto Varchi (1502-1565) sent out a questionnaire to his multitalented peers asking them to rank literature, painting, and sculpture. The epistolary exchange, known as the Paragone ("comparison") debates, yielded foundational insights into artistic representation by the period's lauded practitioners. Michelangelo, for one, feigned neutrality, but his muscular statuary, inspired by the recently unearthed Laocoön, loomed menacingly and challenged all comers. Mannerist aesthetics in the round twisted binary paradigms, such as contrapposto, into suffocating spirals of figura serpentinata. Daniele de la Volterra counterpunched with a double-sided canvas of David atop Goliath. Though Volterra's flashy entrant struck a low blow, in the ensuing melee, most materialists concede that screens won the day. Ask an educator: will a student discriminate photograph from painting, drawing, illustration, or illumination? Pervasive media technologies render the world once again flat: a digital facsimile of an ephemeral object is just another image.   

🖥️ Activity

To resist and not succumb to supremacy of images (especially in archival high resolution), students can "authenticate" visual information by drawing direct perceptual associations between digital surrogates and the physical artifacts they represent. For this lab activity we will view 360 video recordings of student physical encounters with patent medicine trade cards as ephemeral objects of inquiry, and correlate them with our own "hands-on" experience with the same objects in IIIF-compatible interactive viewers.

👓 Examples

 

Do you have an axe to grind about 2D v. 3D you'd like to share?

 

🪛 🤜🤛 Debate

Click Reply to any post for contrapposto