So, what have I been doing...?

Up to this point, I've read passages in the college text book about Gothic architecture (and can distinguish betwixt Italian, French, and Anglo/Germanic styles), finished Teach Yourself Art History which was a very good starting point for learning about what exactly is art, different genres, the correlation betwixt the artist and the painting in regards to why it's done, what's in it, etc.... why certain art pieces are in museums, and styles of art (watercolour, pastel, fresco...). Also the significance of the architecture of the buildings was discussed, which was interesting for me because I've been to the Louvre, the National Gallery in London, and Musee d'Orsay, (all of which were discussed), and besides the fact that Musee d'Orsay is a converted train station, I had not given much thought to the fact that the buildings are art too.

I planned to learn about genres chronologically, but since I allready learned about Medieval and Renaissance art through European History (mainly "The Agony and the Ecstasy") I thought I should go into Impressionism... but I forgot about the whole Baroque period. So today I got three more books, one about Delacroix, another about Goya, and one a general reference book. I skimmed through the Delacroix book, and made note of the many simliarities it had to the Renaissance period. In the book Delacroix was labeled as a Romantic, but his work seems to reflect the Enlightenment to me. Especially his most famous work, the emblem of the French Revolution, Liberty, does not really reflect nature, or natural occurances as most things I would label romantic. In any case, I found it interesting that the girl holding the flag first appeared in his work earlier, in a depiction of a massacre by the Turks to the Greeks, and she continues to appear in almost all of his work after that.