The first half of the 19th century is considered the Golden Age of Danish art. It was a period with economic problems for the country and for many people. As a result new values and ideals became important with emphasis on family and work. The middle classes gained more influence and also became more interested in art. The period was not called a golden age until the end of the century, when the artistic value of the works was more recognized. Nowadays Golden Age portraits and landscape paintings are especially admired.  In this essay I have investigated three family portraits painted 1829-1830 in order to find out who the sitters were, how they were depicted and in what settings. In my view the portraits tell stories of the sitters and the way families adhered to the ideals of family life and diligence. There was a division between male and female spheres and also between private and public parts of family life. As a result he family portraits do not only show what the persons and their homes looked like, the contents of the painting becomes a story presenting them to viewers, although, perhaps, in an idealized version of reality.

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The present research consists of a comparative study of Brigham Young University's Golden Age Comedia (GAC) and Golden Age Theater Production (GATP) courses. The two courses cover much of the same academic material, but one of the differences between the two approaches to the teaching of Golden Age literature is that the GATP course incorporates a theater production and outreach component. Although this outreach program has been seen as intuitively and anecdotally effective, there has been no prior attempt to document student motivation for choosing this course over the traditionally taught course (GAC), nor to discover any of the outcomes experienced by university students who participate in it. Similarly, there have been no studies conducted to compare the educational outcomes of the two approaches. Therefore, the present empirical study was conducted with the goal of determining student motivation and expectations for course selection, academic outcomes of each approach, and whether any additional intellectual or personal growth was experienced by students in the GATP course. This study revealed that there indeed are differences in the motives and expectations behind students' decision to enroll in the GAC course rather than the GATP course, and vice versa, and that each course yields different outcomes for those students. Students receiving instruction through the GATP Outreach program appear to be able to attain a similar mastery of the course material as those in the GAC course. Furthermore, through the inclusion of the outreach program, students are able to acquire additional skills and enriched attitudes that have the potential to prepare them for future studies and life experiences. For universities interested in implementing a similar production and outreach program, this study provides evidence that such a course can indeed provide an alternative path to the teaching of Golden Age literature at the university level and that it proves to be an attractive alternative to certain students that is worth their time and effort.

The study departs from a technical examination of the panel painting Polyxena is Sacrificed in the Stockholm University Collection of Art, establishing the artistic process, level of ambition, and material choices by means of multispectral imaging techniques and elemental analysis. The artist, Jacob de Wet I, was both a well-reputed Haarlem-painter who specialized in small scale history paintings and headed a mass-producing workshop which supplied the low-end art markets of Haarlem and Amsterdam. The study places this artwork within the artist’s broad range of production. Further, the social and cultural contexts of the painting are investigated by comparing it to other artist’s versions of the subject, by means of an iconographical analysis of the image, and by examining its prominent theatrical features in relation to Dutch theatre traditions. By combining the technical, social, and cultural findings, the study aims to establish – and to delimit – a specific place in the art market and to suggest a possible type of customer for the painting. Confirming the work’s originality and authenticity, the results show an intuitive, thus likely time-consuming artistic process, a wide palette including expensive pigments – all indicative of a high level of ambition. In combination with the subject matter, these results suggest the painting to be a commissioned work. Further, the image and its social and cultural context, indicate the commissioner to be a person of some formal power within the Amsterdam society, seeking to communicate high erudition and to express liberal political views.  De Wet effectively expresses his message using a combination of painterly effects, including the materiality of the paint.

This thesis sets out to examine the relationship between science fiction and its conditions of production, specifically interrogating the genre's articulations of the ideology of modernity as progress. Sf has been characterized variously as a characteristically useful critical engagement with the ideologies of its context and as wholly ideological at the level of form, relying on the authority of a scientific episteme in its "cognitive estrangements," while not obligated to operate within the boundaries of this episteme. As such, the genre is unparalleled in its capacity to articulate ideologies under the guise of a putatively neutral science and reason. However, this same formal action places the genre in the unique position of being able to utilize the authority of a scientific episteme to re-evaluate the putative neutrality of that very scientific episteme. As a result, this study concludes that while the genre's reliance on the external authority of science in "cognitively" organizing its estrangements may make it particularly conducive to articulating ideological technoscience and the ideology of modernity as progress, the genre is characteristically ambivalent in this respect, both at the level of form and as a result of the incongruities between form and narrative. To support my thesis I engage a number of science fictional texts, focusing on Golden Age sf of the mid-20th century, while also branching out into explorations of a variety of 20th and 21st century sf texts, including texts from the pulp era, New Wave, cyberpunk, and post-singularity sf. I analyze within the effects of the conceptual mapping of society in terms of the natural sciences in sf, as well as the ambivalent presence of the robot as a megatextual motif, exploring the relationship of these to the ideology of modernity as progress and the post-scarcity fantasy of global mass consumption prosperity.

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Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588-1629), a Dutch Baroque painter, is known as one of the more prominent artists among the Utrecht Caravaggisti, so-named for the city in which he worked and as a follower of Caravaggio. The Caravaggesque style swept through Northern Europe during the cusp of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and genre scenes of half-length figures could be found in every art fair and open market. The label of Utrecht Caravaggisti, however, is a limiting descriptor for ter Brugghen, who created works in response to the changing art market and tastes of a growing Dutch middle class, not motivated solely out of admiration for the Italian painter and his style. Hendrick ter Brugghen’s works featuring musicians at play are prime examples of how an artist in the competitive art market of the northern Netherlands engaged the viewer in a multitude of ways. With the rise of the middle-class merchants, professionals, and city officials, as well as the establishment of music and art academies, the subject of lower class musicians likely would have appealed to a range of buyers. Ter Brugghen’s use of half-length figures find their roots in earlier Dutch and Flemish artists, such as Hieronymus Bosch and Quentin Massys, who preceded Caravaggio in this type of composition by nearly a century, and certainly would have appealed to the market of a newly formed Dutch Republic seeking its own artistic lineage. Ter Brugghen employed allegorical themes and invoked a modern and vernacular variant of the pastoral mode in his string musicians, which would have been instantly recognizable to the learned buyer. In addition to engaging the viewer on a contemplative level, I shall argue that ter Brugghen’s musical compositions also enticed the viewer by activating his innate ideasthetic responses through visual cues and multisensory stimulation. By examining ter Brugghen’s musician paintings within the context and history of Dutch art production, we can more fully understand how his works engage the viewer so effectively and how they extend well beyond a dialogue with Caravaggio to assert his own inventiveness and modernity. / Art History