Art "Bloopers"

Happy New Year everyone. Its appropriate to start the new year on a happy note. This is a list of student "bloopers" reproduced with permission from an art academics list.

Please enjoy.

Blakkbyrd
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From a student essay answering the question, 'What is Architecture?':'An architect must compose like a musician, must draw like a painter, and he must present his work like an actress.'

Rembrandt was known for his heavy antipasto.

Rubens: Marriage portrait of the artist and his wife Isabella Bronte
(Charlotte's little known sister?)

Brancacci Chapel, title of paintings: St. Peter raising someone from the grave. St. Peter and John distributing welfare.

On the Sarcophagus of Junius Bassius:
An Archaic Greek sculpture depicting Christ and his apostles.
The Esophagus of Junius Bassies.
A tombstone where Christ shows his power and majesty by stepping on the head of a peasant.

Brueghel is known as a great genie painter.

Hogarth: Author of many satirical works, among them "The Rape's Progress".

Both these artists exhibit in their works an unquenchable desire for attraction on observing their paintings through their different styles they reach a point of genius which the artistic lover cannot overcome.

A comparison: In the Egyptian statue the dead stone is not cut away. But the Greeks show a completely idealized male with nothing between his legs.

In Courbet's "Source of the Love," all the lines and patterns converge to a point well inside the cave. They form a concave bowel effect adding to the shape of the composition.

Rodin sculpture: The Buggers of Calais.

The Abstract Expressionists suffered permanent discourse as a result of the uproars of WWII.

To paraphrase (on surrealism) it seems that the phenomena of "paranoic critical activity" is a sudden irrational understanding of a sudden perceived association welded into "structuralized criticism" of the association, yielding in the cohabitation of the two a juxtaposition that is, in its "procedural" aspects one and the same with the thought of the canvas.

Demeter: An Egyptian kind of measurement.

There are many coffins on the ceiling of the Pantheon; and there is an oculist at the top.

Bestiary: A place in the monastery where they kept the animals.

Post and Lintel: The two architects who built the Parthenon.

The Salon de Refuse is the Ash Can School.

Cubicula: A room in the catacombs carved out of tofu.

Contrapasto means the weight is shifted to the hind leg.

Jamb sculpture is sculpture which is jambed into the side of the church.

Barrel vaulting is a religious ceremony.

A groin vault is the vault that male gymnasts hate the most.

Caravaggio painted "moral-sized pictures."

The first Gothic structure was the "Ambugulatory of Dennis by Abbot Sugar,"

Egg tempera is composed of eggs, flour, and milk.

Moissac tympanum shows Christ and the 24 elves.

Reynolds painted Mrs. Siddons as a Tragic Mouse.

The tombstone of Hegeso is an example of bra-relief.

Contrapposto is where the structure emphasizes the bone in the lower abdomen.

A module is a small hill or promontory.

Egyptian relief figures from the tomb of Ti combine profile views and frontal views: an example of contraceptive art.

Botticelli's Birth of Venus: Thus the virgin may be presented to the Judeo-Christian ethic divested of even her maidenform.

In the Baths of Caracalla one could see enormous groin faults.

MISTAKEN IDENTITIES:
Alfred Dite
Arnold Fini and his wife
Cephren with Horace the Hawk
Chephren was a pharaoh, not a common pheasant.

A prehistoric sculpture: "The Venus of Zeckendorf"

Contrapposto means against the post. In classical times tree-trunks and posts were used to support the statue.

A pharoh is an Egyptian mummy raped in linen.

The Church of Hagia Sophia is built on a pedantic style dome.

The back part of the church is the asp.

The Greek attitude towards the nude is shown in the Aphrodite of the Cnidians. Aphrodite places her hand over her public zone.

A Basilica is a church with a knave running up the aisle.

Philip of Mastadon

[On the Merode Altarpiece:] The gesture of the angel implores the Virgin to accept the sacred sperm flying in through the window.

Picasso's exploits with women are almost as legendary as those of his contemporary, the Spanish sculptor Casanova.

In the fresco "The Expulson of Joachim from the Temple," it is easy to see
Giotto's smile at work.

Vitruvius was the volcano that erupted and preserved all the Roman art and
life of Pompeii.

Donatello's Pertinent Magdalene
Donatello's Penitent Mandolin

The Gothic style flours from the Romanesque.

The manuscript shows the Abraham entering the angels.

This [Hellenistic] style can be traced back to the portrait of Meander.

Justinian is even more powerful than the army who are smashed together in the corner.

Courbet and Manet were more or less isolated although necessary onramps to the great freeway of Impressionism.

The Parable of the Prodigious Son

The hortus conclusus is a symbol that the Madonna's virginity is intacked

Goya: Saturn Devouring His Children
Saturn Devouring Someone
Satan Devouring His Childern
Satan Eating (my favorite)
The Sultan Devouring Children
Santa Devouring His Children (I don't know if this was a
misspelling or if undergrads have truly become so cynical!)

Delacroix: The Bark of Dante and Virgil
Barking Dante and Virgil
Burnt Dante and Virgil
Two Men on a Boat
Dante Barking on Virgil
Dante and Virgil Parking

Rogier van der Weyden: Deposition
Decomposition
Disposition
Desecration
Desolution
and Desmentation (???)

Monet's "Beaujolais" (for La Grenouillere)
Titian's "Rape of Europa: "Woman on Cow"

On Masaccio's Expulsion "Recently they have cleaned off the leaves that once covered the gentiles."

Michelangelo was a "pre-Madonna."

The beginning line of a paper that began: "Standing turgid within the feet of time,....." ends with remarks on: the Bozar tradition of painting.""

Talking about Sansovino's Mint in Venice a student wrote:
"…The columns are banded and the windows look very foreboding, almost like a guillotine. This was imagery that suited the Mint because it was supposed to look fornicated." [Poor Mint. It must have felt like a Venetian courtesan.]

In dealing with the late 16th century: The Count of Reformation.

"Mary and the Three Angles." Sounds like a punk rock band to me!

"Manet's painting Olympia, 1863, portrays a high-class cortisone that scandalized visitors to the Salon..." [was Victorine on steroids?]

The Enunciation [where Mary is told: be sure to speak clearly]

One student converted the title of Rubens' "The Raising of the Cross" to "The Raison on the Cross." Perhaps he was just hungry...

Protestants thought the depiction of religious figures in art was adulterous.

Don't forget those dread dental scourges of yore--the Seven Plaques of Egypt
and the Bubonic Plaque.

A student explained that the pope Alexander was one of the pioneers of picturesque gardening in England...

Identification of Botticelli's _Birth of Venus_ as "Mary on the Clam."

An explanation of Gros' "Napoleon visiting the Pesthouse at Jaffa" reads "Napoleon is visiting his soldiers who have caught the Ebonics plague."

Caravaggio's "The Conversion of St. Paul" - "The Pope that fell off the hourse"

Gentileschi's "Judith Beheading Holofernes" - "Judy beheading Hollbene"

Gros - "Japolian at Pent House of Jaffe"

"Love of the Gods" by Crotchi.

Raphael's "Madonna and the Goldfish", Michelangelo's "Moses" for the tomb of Julius Caesar, and my favorite, Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sixteenth Chapel.

Cezanne's "Nature Morte au Compotier"

The [crenellated] rooftop was used for fornication.

Some mistaken identities on exams: "The Abolition of the Magi"; "The Holy Trilogy"

And not just by students: "To this end, I must underline the phallicism endemic to the dialectics of penetration routinely deployed in descriptions of pictorial space and the operations of spectatorship." [from a published article in a major journal; once won a prize for "Bad Writing."]