Venn Diagrams and Artwork – What Fun!

For the past unit we have been working on the Renaissance and looking at the influence it had on the western worldview. We had to pick three important people from the Renaissance and draw an image about their worldview. My three people were Pietro Candido Decembrio (Thinker), Domenico Ghirlandaio (Artist), and Ptolemy (Scientist). For Ghirlandaio and Ptolemy information wasn’t too hard to find, but it was a bit of a challenge to research Decembrio. Most of the info I could find was in Italian so that didn’t help.

From the research we had to create a Venn Diagram to show our research. This was not fun as I’m really not a fan of Venn Diagrams at the best of times. In this case it was overly hard as there was not very much overlap between the three guys. In the end I had to use pretty general things to get them to overlap.

As you can see from the diagram my central overlap that applied to all three guys was that they had all done major work on key areas of our modern culture.

The next step was to create an image that represented that idea. I don’t like art so assignments that involve showing my ideas as art are generally bad. I came up with the concept of the world supported by the three guys with their specialized areas placed around the circumference of the world. My first draft was done in a bit of a rush and so I just wrote the words around the edge.

This doesn’t look very good and also uses too many words when the assignment was to use as few words as possible.

For my final draft I wanted to improve the quality of the artwork. I started with an abstract image of the earth that looked quite similar to my drawing style. I also looked at images online to get an idea of how to draw the three guys on the earth in a more stylized way. Then for the edges I drew small images to represent each of their subject areas: art, religion, astronomy, politics, philosophy, justice, optics, geography and music.

The last step was to add the letters of the guys’ names to fill in the spaces between the images. I was pretty happy with how the final image turned out.