LEAC Final Exam on Cultures Mother

LEAC Final Exam Topics

• Culturas Madre: Include the Greeks, Romans, and Mesoamerica. These civilizations significantly influenced subsequent cultures, differing in time and geography.
• Greeks: Distinguished between major arts (architecture, dance, music, painting, sculpture, literature) and minor arts (gastronomy, crafts, perfumery). They established democracy to avoid tyranny, introduced the Olympics as a period of peace, and used mythology to explain the world's origins through poetry and songs. Greek art aimed to create human masterpieces appealing to the senses.
• Romans: Developed an autocratic government with an emperor responsible for administration, politics, military, and religion, often referred to as Caesar or Augustus. They introduced the Republic, where citizens elected officials, established laws (the right), and created a calendar based on the solar year, though with a minor error. Roman art prioritized functionality over aesthetics.
• Mesoamerica: Specifically focused on the Mayan civilization, known for diverse art forms, including monumental architecture, painted pottery, jade and bone ornaments, and clay figurines. Their calendar ('Ciclo solar Haab') had 365 days and utilized hieroglyphic writing. Mayan customs included tooth modification and cranial deformation.
• Artistic Expressions: Discussion of the Renaissance era, moving from a theocentric worldview to an anthropocentric one. Renaissance artists were considered intellectuals, needing knowledge in math, optics, geometry, anatomy, and philosophy, demonstrating a critical spirit. Examples explored include the "Vitruvian Man," David by Michelangelo, the Birth of Venus by Botticelli, The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, and Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.
• Romanticism: A European movement that reached Latin America, focusing on nostalgia for the past, personal freedoms, and the mysterious. Its relation to dreams, subconscious, and psychoanalysis is examined, relating artists such as Freud and Goya.
• Realism: An art movement characterized by realistic depiction of everyday life, social issues, and working classes. Examples include Gustave Courbet's self-portrait and landscape paintings by Jean-François Millet.
• Expressionism: A pessimistic art movement that emphasized emotional expression and distorted forms, portraying morbidity, the forbidden, and obscenity, as a reaction to the existence experience. Artists like Vincent van Gogh and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner were referenced.
• Surrealism: A 1924 movement that emphasized the subconscious mind, dreams, and unconventional connections. Artists mentioned include Salvador Dalí, Frida Kahlo, with Octavio Paz in the literature realm.
• Elements of Art: Included line, color, shape, form, value, space, and texture, emphasizing their significance in artistic creation and design. Key characteristics of each element were detailed.
• Principles of Art: Covering emphasis, contrast, balance (symmetry and asymmetry), rhythm (movement), proportion, unity/variety, and pattern. These principles describe how artists use elements to achieve specific effects.
• Complex Sentences: Included basic sentence structure (subject-predicate) and various sentence structures- indirect, direct, and circumstantial, along with types of complex clauses (copulative, adversative, disjunctive, subordinate, and juxtaposed).