World culture and the arts: arts, music, and imperialism.

1. What do the dog, on the far right side of the painting, and the working-class passerby, on the far left, have in common? How do they frame, both literally and figuratively, the world of the painting?

2. What is the difference between Classical and Romantic music?

3. What is imperialism and how did imperialism influence nations?

Peter Paul Rubens, The Coronation of Marie de' Medici. 1622-25. Oil on canvas, 12'11" x 23'10". Muse du Louvre, Paris. Watteau was a great admirer of Rubens and copied his work often. He shared with Rubens a great love of painting flesh, as well as the ability to reflect in the sensuality of his brushwork and color the sensuality of his subject matter. In The Signboard of Gersaint, for instance, Watteau fills the room with Rubeniste canvases. One canvas appears to depict a drunken Silenus, a figure from Greek mythology who is the rotund, older tutor of the god of wine, Dionysus, a scene very much in the spirit of Rubens's many paintings of the same theme. Beside it is a reclining nude. Two customers are being shown a reclining nude in the painting, emphasizing the eroticism of the exchange between viewer and painting. The dog is an echo of Rubens's frequent use of a dog as an emblem of the sensual appetites. The art historian Svetlana Alpers has, in fact, identified Watteau's dog as an outright copy, in reverse, of one painted by Rubens in The Coronation of Marie de' Medici, one of the 21 paintings in the series commissioned to celebrate the life of the queen.