{"id":41734,"date":"2019-11-28T07:23:21","date_gmt":"2019-11-28T07:23:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=41734"},"modified":"2019-11-28T07:23:21","modified_gmt":"2019-11-28T07:23:21","slug":"enter-the-universal-museum-of-human-creativity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=41734","title":{"rendered":"Enter the &#8216;universal museum&#8217; of human creativity"},"content":{"rendered":"<div readability=\"52.353658536585\">\n<p class=\"theme-subheading\">Painting ourselves, we reveal a whole world<\/p>\n<p>Humans started depicting their own bodies artistically with the very earliest sculptures and paintings, dating back to tens of thousands of years ago.<\/p>\n<p>Yet artists have rarely crossed the line to producing accurate portraits of regular individuals, worthy of standing apart, alongside leaders, saints, and gods.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn the Venetian Republic, they didn\u2019t allow portraits of individuals in public spaces, because they didn\u2019t want individuals to assert themselves, at the expense of the Republic,\u201d explained James Hall, the author of \u201cThe Self-Portrait: A Cultural History.\u201d \u201cThere have often been controls of the diffusion of portraiture.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Self-portraits are rarer still. Only Europeans developed a prevalent tradition of self-portraiture before the 19th century, said Hall.<\/p>\n<p>European societies traditionally had a preoccupation with the individual and individuality, in contrast with other cultures that emphasize the collective and communal.<\/p>\n<p>But in the greatest self-portraits, we see more than an accurate copy of a person\u2019s appearance, Hall explains. Whether naturalistic or not, we see the material, spiritual and cultural society the artist inhabits, and their place in it.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe self-portrait becomes the microcosm: those are the most interesting ones,\u201d said Hall. \u201cYou\u2019re not just seeing someone\u2019s face and eyes, you\u2019re getting a sense of the whole world, the world in which they operate.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#art-ourselves-1\" class=\"louvre-btn first-obj js-goto-art\" data-goto=\"all-themes\"><\/p>\n<p>GO TO FIRST OBJECT <i class=\"icon-arrow-right\"><\/i><\/p>\n<p><\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Painting ourselves, we reveal a whole world Humans started depicting their own bodies artistically with the very earliest sculptures and paintings, dating back to tens of thousands of years ago. Yet artists have rarely crossed the line to producing accurate portraits of regular individuals, worthy of standing apart, alongside leaders, saints, and gods. \u201cIn the&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":41735,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/41735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}