2018-2019 Fall: Essay Assignment 2

Visual Analysis of a Ruin Image

Printable Essay Rubric | Printable Essay Prompt

Assignment

Find and analyze a work of art from the seventeenth to mid-nineteenth century (~1600–1850) that depicts actual or imaginary ruins. How and why does this visual representation of ruins offer a perspective about empire that relates to the style and social attitudes of its time?

Your essay should contain a sustained visual description of the work of art that highlights the formal, iconographic, and art historical components of the image which relate specifically to your argument. While your essay will be primarily focused on formal pictorial analysis, you must also make use of scholarly reference sources in order to account for the cultural context in which the image was produced and circulated.

Your final paper will be between 4–5 pages in length (no more than 6) and will be worth 35% of your writing grade.

Note: The artwork you choose will likely be European or American and be classified by art historians as part of the Neoclassicist, Romantic, or Hudson River School movements. Individual seminar leaders may be open to the idea of you working with a primary source from another period of time or region, provided that you have some understanding of the context of the image (and perhaps some background in visual analysis). Please speak directly with your seminar leader about your proposed artwork.

Learning Goals

• Make specific, clear, arguable claims
• Produce cohesive body paragraphs and rhetorically persuasive introductions and conclusions
• Present well-selected, well-contextualized, thoroughly explained evidence from visual analysis that anticipates and reinforces claims
• Develop strong warrants and effective transitions between ideas
• Adopt the appropriate stance, style, and genre conventions of visual and art historical analysis
• Demonstrate beginning-level information literacy skills for establishing context by locating and evaluating information in scholarly reference sources
• Practice active revision such that the final draft demonstrates that the student has developed flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proofreading drafts while also reflecting on the process of writing itself

Required Reading

Before you begin brainstorming for this assignment, make sure you have read the following:

• Buhanan, Kurt. “Visual Analysis.” Humanities Core Writer’s Handbook, edited by Larisa Castillo and Tamara Beauchamp, XanEdu, 2018, 94–100.
• Beauchamp, Tamara. “Building a Critical Toolkit.” Humanities Core Writer’s Handbook, edited by Larisa Castillo and Tamara Beauchamp, XanEdu, 2018, 7–16.
• Morse, Susan. “Paragraph Writing Strategies.” Humanities Core Writer’s Handbook, edited by Larisa Castillo and Tamara Beauchamp, XanEdu, 2018, 51–61.
• Short, Gretchen. “Writing Transitions.” Humanities Core Writer’s Handbook, edited by Larisa Castillo and Tamara Beauchamp, XanEdu, 2018, 79–86.

The Writing Process

Finding and Selecting a Primary Source

In this assignment, you will be conducting a visual analysis of a work of art depicting a ruin and developing an argument about the relationship of that image to ideas about empire. The purpose of this assignment is for you to focus on a single primary source in detail, thinking not only about how form creates meaning, but also about how an artifact relates to the environment in which it was produced. As you learned in Kurt Buhanan’s chapter in the Writer’s Handbook, effective “close looking” at a visual artifact requires that you address multiple levels: formal composition, iconography, and art historical context.

First, you must locate an image that interests you. Don’t settle on the first image you learned about in lecture; instead, allow your curiosity to lead you as you explore the work of different artists. Ideally, you want to select an image that you believe offers a particular perspective on empire (on philosophical, formal, stylistic, or even political or social grounds). This will help you to position yourself to make an effective argument that will be maximally responsive to the artifact’s involvement in various conversations of the time.

Start your search by browsing the Humanities Core Image Gallery. Notice the source material for the image in the caption, along with a link to the digital collection that houses it. Many museum collections and digital archives contain helpful curatorial notes about the work of art and artist, so extend your search by browsing the page after you click through the links on the Image Gallery. Another important source is the Artstor Digital Library, a searchable database of high-quality digital images. Here are some other keywords and ideas for potential artists to get you started:

Key Art Movements / Schools

(links to the Heilbrunn Timeline at the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Key Terms

(links to The Oxford Dictionary of Art and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms)

Potential Artists

Once you have located a work of art that captures your interest, make sure a high-resolution version of the image is available for close examination, and be sure to record the online source of the image file as well as the information needed for citation.

Depicting the Image

The most significant distinction between literary and visual analysis lies in the kind of evidence you use to support your claims. Literary analysis takes language and rhetoric as its evidence, which, when cited, is present for the audience to see on the page. Visual analysis requires that you translate the visual into words, that is, you must describe your evidence.

You will have two objectives in describing your visual evidence. The first, a brief overview of your image, is meant to provide context for your audience. This depiction will likely appear at the beginning of your essay because it situates your audience as a viewer of the image you are analyzing. This form of description will not account for all aspects of the image, only those relevant to your argument; yet it should offer enough description to help your reader understand the image’s compositional space, as well as the relationship between the image and the viewer.

The second form of description offers specific evidence. Once you have presented a visual overview, you will take your reader on a tour of the image, addressing specific formal features, one-by-one, to build an argument about its meaning. Because the purpose of this second form of description is to support your claims, it should be more detailed and limited in scope.

But, where to begin? One helpful way to determine your essay’s organization is to trace (literally, with your finger) how your eye moves from one point to the next. That process itself does not make an argument, but it helps you highlight the points you may wish to address and strategize about how to organize those details. Your job is to show why and how the eye moves in the way it does when surveying this image.

Situating Context Using Scholarly Reference Resources

For this assignment, you are required to consult scholarly reference sources in order to offer context for your image and the artist who created it. In many cases, your interpretation of an image changes depending upon the artist’s style, medium, audience, mode of circulation, and cultural context. Artists who took part in the Grand Tour, for instance, were fascinated by Greco-Roman architecture, but their interpretations and renderings of classical ruins varied greatly. Robert Seldon Duncanson, a second-generation Hudson River School painter, took one such tour of Europe in 1853 and produced many romantic landscapes containing ruined structures. But while Duncanson’s style is closely related to other members of the Hudson River School, the mode of circulation of his images was somewhat unique. As the only African-American member of the movement, his work was supported and exhibited by a network of abolitionists in Ohio. Unlike the travels of many of the independently wealthy artists who went on tours of France and Italy, Duncanson’s time abroad was sponsored by abolitionist patrons who believed his success would aid the anti-slavery cause. Art historians still debate about what role Duncanson’s identity plays in the iconography of his paintings. Undoubtedly, however, Duncanson’s audience and the cultural context in which his paintings circulated is significant to our understanding of his work.

To find accurate information about the creator and socio-cultural context of your image, as well as terminology about medium and style, first make use of any curatorial notes in the digital collection where the work of art is catalogued. Try searching digital collections by artist name, time period, or keyword. Wikipedia can be a useful place to start researching an artist’s larger oeuvre, but make sure you follow the guidelines for responsible use in the “Building a Critical Toolkit” chapter of the Writer’s Handbook. Some of the most useful scholarly reference resources for this assignment are detailed in the Fall folder of the UCI Libraries Humanities Core Course Research Guide. These specialized encyclopedias and dictionaries will be particularly helpful in clarifying unfamiliar art terminology. You may also look for secondary sources using Library Search or Google Scholar, but remember, the focus of this essay is the pictorial analysis of a single primary source.