mayhap: hennaed hands, writing (Default)
mayhap ([personal profile] mayhap) wrote2003-10-26 01:42 pm

Wah.

There's a world of difference between searching for a piece of classical art/architecture and searching for a piece of medieval art/architecture, let me tell you.

When you search for a certain Gothic cathedral, you get people's blurry snapshots, postage-stamp-sized scanned images, pages that are locked to students of a certain university by their departmental webmasters, and little to no accompanying information. When you search for a certain Archaic kore, you get dozens of nice complete citations with nice, clear images that are made freely available to the public. When you search for a certain classical building, you get dozens of images from all possible angles and various useful drawings of the plan and reconstructions of the original building.

I believe I have chosen the wrong field.

I feel lousy. And lazy. Between the two, I've put off making my flash cards for my Parthenon midterm (in 28 and a third hours, now) until pretty much this very moment.

I hate slide exams. I'm not particularly good at them. I look forward to writing a paper instead in the second half of the semester.

[identity profile] aesc.livejournal.com 2003-10-26 03:00 pm (UTC)(link)
Grah! You know, that is very, very true :-/ I was looking online for a good-sized picture of the Mappa Mundi to show my class (because it has cool-looking monsters on it, mostly), and every picture I found was either tiny or of very poor quality.

Of course, if I had run a search for The Mona Lisa or The Pantheon, I would have been inundated with high-quality pictures.

What the world needs is a good medieval art and architecture database, but I don't see that coming any time soon. Curses.