Earliest print engravings of Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii?

can someone recommend some scholarly texts tabout visual analysis?

Does anyone know of research that investigates whether art stimulates cognitive flexibility and whether there is any evidence that some forms of art (drawing, painting, conceptual, sculpture, etc.,) or art genres (abstract, impressionist, portraiture, etc.,) are more effective at stimulating flexibility than others? Moreover, is there evidence that art stimulate flexibility more than non-art visual inputs or activities? That is, is it creating or viewing art that encourages flexibility or are other forms of creative practice (reading, writing or just some form of non-creative neutral activity) have just as much impact? Are any of the effects in the literature dependent yup on how 1/ how cognitive flexibility is conceived, 2/ how this is operationally measured?

I am currently studying the art of Barnett Newman and his theories upon Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy in his artwork. Do you think that there should initially be a justification to tragedy being found in the visual arts? Nietzsche believed that tragedy was born out of music. How would you go about justifying that the visual arts can also produce tragedy? Are there any contemporary philosophers that have written upon the subject and attempted explanation?

When artists try to cultivate art in three dimensions, works like Michelangelos' "David" result, or the great mobiles we find in airports and stations, or the unusually structured airports themselves. In your opinion, which is the most meaningful and expressive of these artworks? Could you cite specific examples, post pictures, and explain the meanings you find in such works?

Hi!

I'm looking for the radiative decay rate of the vibrational levels (in particular v=1) of CO in the electronic ground state.

David

THE HISTORY OF HUMOR

Old Comedy of the 6th & 5thCenturies BC often made fun of a specific person and of current political issues. Middle Comedy of the 5th& 4th Centuries BC made fun of more general themes such as literature, professions, and society. New Comedy of the 4th & 3rd Centuries BC usually revolved around the bawdy adventures of a blustering soldier, a young man in love with an unsuitable woman, or a father figure who cannot follow his own advice.

During the Middle Ages, Kings’ Court Jesters were not to be in competition with the Kings. So most often they were deformed midgets with humped backs and bug eyes. They acted stupidly and wore strange clothing—cap and bells, motley clothes, and pointed shoes.

Their scepters were made from pig bladders as parodies of the King’s scepter of power.

In many plays, the fool is smarter than the King, but because of his appearance he could be critical of the King and the Kingdom. There are both foolish and wise fools in Shakespeare’s plays. Contrast the dead fool (Yorrick) in Hamletwith the wise/foolish women in The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado about Nothing. Street jugglers and street musicians came out of these Renaissance traditions. So did England’s “Punch and Judy” shows, Italy’s “Commedia d’El Arte,” and France’s “Comedie Française,” as well as England’s “Comedy of Humours,” and “Comedy of Manners,” and America’s ventriloquists and political cartoonists.

The eighteenth century saw the rise of a new kind of humorous author: the wit. A wit is usually a person who can make quick, wry comments in the course of conversation.

During the 19th Century, on the American western frontier, wise fools, con-men, and tricksters like Johnson J. Hooper’s Simon Suggs and George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood were employed to portray the rough and unsophisticated American as an ironic hero. Suggs was lazy and dishonest, and he knew it was “good to be shifty in a new country.”

The golden age of humor was often considered to be the 1920s but would be more accurately placed from the end of WWI to the early 1930s. During this golden age, we see the development of the “little man” in Casper Milquetoast, Andy Gump, Jiggs, Mutt (of “Mutt and Jeff”), and Dagwood (of “Blondie and Dagwood”). The humorous comic strips that were revived after the Second World War (1940s) included Walt Kelly’s “Pogo,” and Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner.” Kelly’s swamp fables were allegorical ‘swamps’ themselves, loaded with social and political commentary lurking behind the antics and interactions of the familiar cast of animal characters. Al Capp’s “hillbillies” gave access to Capp’s views on topical events, government, and American values. So, to how important is humor in determining the zeitgeist of the various periods of human history?