Hello everyone and welcome back to another one of my blogs. In this post I’ll be talking about as it says in the title, the Renaissance and historical significance. First lets talk about what historical significance is?

We started this project off while we were on a field study in Loon Lake. We learned what historical significance is by filling in a N.A.M.E chart.

N – Novelty

A – Applicability

M – memory

E – Effects

 

This taught us about not only about the events we came up with for the examples but how to figure out something’s historical significance. Run that event or object through the N.A.M.E chart and see how historically significant it is (ex. Was it something new? Is it similar to something happening now? How has it been remembered over time? What were the effects of it?). While filling in this chart I found the category ‘memory’ very interesting. My attention was attracted to this section because I never thought about how people would remember things differently overtime. The example I used was with King Tutankhamun also known as king Tut. He died at a early age but it didn’t impact or effect many people. But then his tomb stone was found with a whole bunch of treasure inside. Suddenly he was well known because of this great discovery of his riches. Having a event or object or person being remembered differently over time is very interesting to me.

 

Once we came back from Loon Lake we continued the project in class. We started off with a simulation to teach us about how day to day life worked during the Renaissance. Everyone was given different roles and positions to play (I was a serf).

 

 

We all acted and used improvisational skills during this simulation that also taught us how life was back then. I found this exercise very fun and I’d love to do it again. Hopefully we get to do something similar sometime soon.

 

Then we started working on charts to figure out the historical significance in certain things. We got one chart that gave us things to chose from and another to fill out about that thing. The things I chose were: 

Access to libraries + educational materials

Flushable toilets

Global exploration + Cartography 

The parachute

The Mona Lisa

Martin Luther

A lot of people didn’t like doing the charts but I found them sort of fun. I am not sure if we are going to do more but I wouldn’t mind it if we did. Doing the research is very interesting and writing it down is pretty easy.

 

Eventually we started looking closer into older art. We did a few projects to get a general idea of what it looked like and how its different from art now. Some of the art looked very strange and others looked beautiful. I didn’t think art would change so much over time but it really did.

 

 

Finally after learning about ‘Historical significance’ ‘The Renaissance’ and ‘Historical art’ we were finally ready to move on to the main part of the whole project. The Triptych!

A Triptych is a piece of art with three different sections. Here are some examples:

Each art piece is put into three different sections that correspond with each other in different ways. We made something similar and added some of the things we researched into it.

In the middle is supposed to be contemporary time and the two other sides are what they used to be. They are each the same objects but in complete different time periods. On the top left is art, then the other side is parachutes, toilets, classrooms, and maps. It is very interesting looking at other peoples triptych to see what they came up with.

 

We are almost at the end of the blog! Before I end I’d like to answer the driving question: What significant developments emerged from the past and how do they impact us today? 

This is a very large question that can be answered with many different things but the first thing that I thought of was the study of human anatomy. This huge advancement in 1400s is significant in my opinion because with out we would be way worse off. Many people now days fully rely on medication or physical treatment to survive but those things wouldn’t exist if the study of human anatomy was not around. They started human anatomy exploration by doing autopsy’s and dissecting the dead. This helped them understand way more on the body and how it works. It also helped them think of many medical treatments. This would be beneficial then because they would be way healthier then the people that didn’t practice medicine. The death rates would go down rapidly over time and the normal age of death would recede.

  • L0012385 Graeco-Roman surgical instruments. Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org Graeco-Roman surgical instruments; the large obstetric dilator on right is a replica. Published: - Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Many developments that emerged from the past impact us greatly to this day. With out all the inventions that were created and then improved over time our world would look very different to how it looks today.

 

Thank you for reading about my project on the Renaissance. Hopefully you learned something, bye for now!