Creator | Title | Emotional Sum (Sense of Life or emotional World View) | Theme |
---|---|---|---|
Playwright: Rostand, Edmond | Cyrano de Bergerac | Life can be exciting. Life can be grand, literally. There is also some great sadness about consummated love, since it is portrayed as unreachable. |
The importance of independence and independent thought. Compromise is deadly to one's soul. |
Sculptor: Buonarotti, Michelangelo | David | Man is a strong, indomitable creature who has the intelligence to overcome terrible odds. | [requires assumption of some context of this work -- not a "cold" introduction to it]: A man able to face a daunting task, with tremulous calm and determination. This is the depiction of the David/Goliath story of the Bible in which David takes on the much more formidable Goliath and wins. |
Biviel Design | Biviel Shoe BV2773 | Feeling: texture and line create a sense of elegance and beauty. | |
Sculptor: Saint-Gaudens, Auguste | Diana | Serenity in action. But not a strong world view in any case, quite placid. | |
Director: Hallstrom, Lasse | Chocolat | Pleasure is good; religion and conventional thinking is bad. | Follow your dream and disregard convention. |
Director and Screenwriter: Curtis, Richard | Love Actually | Romantic love, family love, filial love, and the love of friendship are of central importance to human existence, and are possible to achieve. | Wonderful experiences of love are found in many forms and places. |
Creator: Weiner, Matthew | Mad Men | Men must sell their souls in order to live, and they are chauvinist pigs to boot. And women are sluts. Dark. | |
Vase Painter: Euphronios | Euphronios Krater aka Sarpedon Krater | Exquisitely beautiful hardship. | |
Director: Benigni, Roberto | Monster, The | Just laughter and more of the same. | |
Classical Persian School | Ardabil Carpet | sumptuous eye candy. | |
Composer: Verdi, Giuseppe | Attila (live performance) | Life is a mix of strength, heroism, romantic passion. The work is a long complex opera, so it has many other lyrical emotions as part of it, but this covers the basic sense of life. |
Loving a heroic woman leads to death |
Painter: Dewing, Thomas Wilmer | Comedia | Life is sumptuous and beautiful and alive. | Feminine vivacity and gaiety |
Screenwriter: Coward, Noel | Brief Encounter | Passionate love. Tragic choices. | High romance is possible. Such love is unlikely to survive. |
Architect: Anonymous | Sainte-Chapelle | The world is brilliant, light, colorful, orderly. | The world is brilliant, light, colorful, orderly. |
Creator: Nix, Matt | Burn Notice | Anything can be done if you are smart and motivated enough. | |
Author: Steinbeck, John | East of Eden | Life is filled with great and important choices. | The battle between good and evil, guilt and innocence. Takes the position that we are influenced by many things, but ultimately we have free will. |
Director: Reiner, Rob | American President | Romance is fun, funny and important. | |
Director: Stone, Oliver | Wall Street | There are bad people in power who use ordinary people as pawns in their endless pursuit of money. Those who are not ruthless are sheep to be slaughtered by the rich and powerful. Greed is bad. |
|
Hiroshige | Senso-ju Temple at Asakusa | Pure, simple, quiet tranquility. | |
De Felitta, Raymond | City Island | Anxiety and pain from all the lies and mistaken motives. Catharsis from the climax, leading to feelings of wanting to be truthful in life! | Lying is not the way to live. |
Painter: Van Rijn, Rembrandt | Feast of Belshazzar | The only way to know the sense of life or world view of the painting is through it's history, since the image is very mixed. Shows an opulent and sumptuous world, but the people are obviously distressed over something. Assuming one knows its history, you could conclude it is an exercise in depicting the dangers of the worldly pursuits and wealth. |