Essays on World Arts

Introduction In this essay, I would like to discuss how African art has changed and inspired European art. African art is a beautiful and deeply interesting kind of art, full of traditions and spirituality. Over time, this art has influenced many artists, including Henri Matisse...

During the Roman Empire, mosaics were built in large rooms to make those rooms look more admirable and exciting. There was an architect that wrote a book about mosaics and how they were designed but this book did not include how the check (a pattern...

Judo had its origin in the ancient Japanese art of jujutsu, a system of hand-to-hand combat. The bushi of feudal Japan (samurai) are usually credited for developing jujutsu (at their time the art was known as Yoroi kumi-uchi, a grappling method for fighters fully clad...

In Japan, a country known for its creativity, art and its concepts can be put in one category called aesthetic. Aesthetic is the philosophical approach towards art. (Basinski, 2009) It is concerned with its beauty and value as well. Thus, there are different approaches towards...

‘One fine day’ in 1854 an ominous black ship sailed into Nagasaki harbor, prying open the wall that stood between the East and the West. On another ‘fine day’ in 1904 European audiences saw the premiere of what was to become one of the most...

The Roman Empire is looked back upon as one of the most influential civilizations of human history. Their philosophical, technological, and artistic developments would remain outmatched by the rest of the Western world for over a thousand years after the Roman collapse. However, the Romans...

African art is known to be different by any Western art tradition, simply because African art is created on the basis that the form and the aesthetic of the work come second behind the actual function of the work. A prime example of this is...

Transnationalism and performance art are currently phenomena that have a major holding and influence on art in the contemporary era. The notions of transnationalism and performance art have an integral role in regards with both the content of individual works produced, along with the rationale...

Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong is quoted as having said that a Chinese man has three mountains on his back. The first is colonial oppression, the second is the oppression of tradition, and the third is his own backwardness. A woman, however, has a fourth mountain...

Throughout both Roman and Greek ancient literature, well-renowned writers ranging from Aeschylus to Thucydides have demonstrated the major character flaws of mortals and the effects of their failings on their life and well-being. Although the outcome of each protagonist is different in each of these...

In Satire VI and In Catilinam I and II, Juvenal and Cicero both make attacks on their enemies’ personal conduct to construct a Roman identity while appealing to “Roman values.” Their projects are indeed very similar; both raise questions of class, expressing fear at the...

History, as humankind knows it, encompasses a body of words, and accompanied with these textual artifacts are the ideals, thoughts, and morals of a particular society. Culture, shaped by the thoughts of our predecessors and expanders, can be defined by history’s literary works and texts....

The Comedy of Errors, written by William Shakespeare, is mirrored to a major extent by Plautus’s play The Brothers Manaechmus, both of which deal with the issue of separated twins who find themselves in the same town and are mistaken for each other. However, although...

When you picture Islamic women, the image that immediately comes to mind is a woman cloaked in black, with not one part of her body visible. Even more so, it is hard to imagine this specter as possessing any sort of sexuality. Yet, in Tariq...

By 18 BC, morality among the citizens of Rome had depleted by such degree that the emperor was impelled to enact the lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus, which instituted adultery as a crime punishable by death or exile. This was the Rome of Ovid’s time,...