In my study I will be looking at different time periods, starting with Egyptian sculptures. I will also be exploring various art periods, eventually ending with modern art and sculptures and trying to decipher whether the meaning and use of animals in art has changed.
My First Chapter, as mentioned above, will look at the early work of Egyptian craftsman and how animals were portrayed in that period. I will look at how they crafted animals in their artwork and how their gods came to have the heads of some of their most sacred animals. I will look at their remarkable sculptures and there intricate paintings on the sides of tombs. I want to look at how pictographs of animals were used to make the Egyptian people follow the set beliefs of the upper classes.
I will continue my study by looking at Paulus Potter, in particular his painting “The Piebald Horse”. I have chosen to look at this painting because it is an example of the beauty of animals and how they were painted or sculpted to look attractive and had very little meaning to them but where just an item of magnificence and wealth.
The third study I shall perform will look at the Painter Henri Rousseau and his art work to do with animals, I have chosen Rousseau because his work presents the more animalistic side to are rather than looking at the beauty that animals present it looks at the reality of the lives, and is harsh compared to other artists of his time.
Finally, I will look at the artist Franz Marc and his abstract creations of animals and the meanings behind them and whether his are links to earlier art work. I will look at what his creations mean to him and whether they mean different things to different people. I will also look at why we see very small amounts of animals in art work and why they has disappeared in the modern art world and whether it has something to do with the underlying meaning of their form in art or whether they are simply not fashionable. I will look at how the animals have disappeared in art because they are no longer prominent in our working society and have now been replaced with modern machines.
Conducting this study will hopefully answer the question “are animals symbolic in art?” I will also be able to understand more fully why animals have changed in art and why they are not so prominent in art anymore. I will also be able to discover whether animal’s roles and meanings in art have changed over the centuries and whether the meanings are going back to what they originally were in the beginning where they were first painted on a cave wall.
