Monday, December 6, 2010

The Glass Bathyscaphe, How Glass Changed the World

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The Glass Bathyscaphe: How Glass Changed the WorldI recently completed an on again off again reading of The Glass Bathyscaphe, How Glass Changed The World by Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin. The book delives into the history of glass looking at  the impacts this material had on science, art, education and society. The excerpt below is taken from the chapter on glass and the Renaissance. I enjoyed this chapter in particular and thought I would share a bit of it with you here.

"Prespective and realist portraits are natural and normal, but usually the cultural conventions of a society teach artists and others that the representations their audience want are not of this kind. Artists are, as it were, systematically taught to distort the world they see and would normally portray, in order to make it fit a symbolic system which conveys deeper meaning then the prosaic world of sight. What is the point of art if it mearly duplicates what the eye sees?"
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