AP Art History Students Venture to Venice, Florence and Paris

Richard Conn, Berkeley High School Advance Placement Art History teacher and art enthusiast, discussed his class’s trip, in conjunction with the French Club, to Europe from February 11 to 21. The trip was intended to be a “trip to Venice, Florence, and Paris for the art history students,” Conn said.

It was a look “at all the art works we’ve been studying this year and a chance to view up close the various cathedrals, chapels, and art works that we’ve looked at.” This year anyone who wanted to come could, and Conn added, “If there is still an art history class next year and there are still students interested in going abroad, I’ll do it again.”

For his students who didn’t go, Conn said, “I have taken a queue from [technologically–savvy AP Chemistry teacher Aaron] Glimme and recorded video lectures. I have slide shows of artwork plus a little video of myself talking. I have about four days of those. So the sub is going to put a little DVD in the player and it will show about 50 minutes or so of me pretending like I’m actually there giving the lecture.”

As with any AP class, “I needed to make sure that we’re still keeping up with the pacing of the class. The students who are going on the trip will be able to download the video lecture, put it on their iPod and watch or listen to it while they’re on the plane or trains. When we get back, we might have a half a day of recap and then pick it up as if nothing was missed.”

BHS junior Juetzinia Kazmer wrote of her decision to travel, “I personally decided to go because this is probably the only opportunity I’ll have to study art with my favorite class at Berkeley High. This was a too good an opportunity to pass up, and [looking back], to really see and be in the architecture we have studied very hard to learn was indescribable.”

Conn said the trip consisted of “roughly five days in Venice and Florence and five days in the French Riviera and Paris.” Some of the notable places they visited include St. Marks Square, St. Marks Cathedral in Venice, and the Venetian Carnival. In Florence, they visited various outside sculptures and the Bargello and Uffizi museums. In Pisa, the group saw the cathedral complex, the leaning tower, and the baptistery; the French Riviera, including Monaco, Monte Carlo, and Nice; in Paris, the Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Eiffel tower at night, and a concluding boat tour down the river Seine and back.

Conn remarked, “I think the funniest thing was maybe our first day in Paris. We’d just gone to Notre Dome and we gave the students some free time to wander around. We said meet back in front of the Notre Dame at so and so time, and as we’re meeting we see students kind of rushing up saying, 'Oh my god, oh my god!' It turns out they’d met Rupert Grint and taken photographs of themselves with him. Then another group ran off to see if they could get their photograph. I was kind of like, ‘I take you guys four thousand miles to Italy and France and you get most excited about seeing Ron Weasley?’”

However, Conn's favorite moment was “the second day when we were in Venice and the students saw their very first artwork they had studied. [It was] this little sculpture, called The [Four] Tetrarchs. Their eyes lit up at seeing for the first time that, 'Oh my god, we’re going to see these pieces that we’ve studied. We're going to see them in person!’”
“Although it was a minor work, we all ditched the tour and ran over to it because it was the first work that we saw that we had really studied. So that was great,” explained BHS senior and AP Art History student Rachel Kane. “We also got to touch it because it was on the side of a building [St. Marks]. Seeing the art in person that we had spent hours memorizing was like seeing celebrities.”

Conn added that, “It's such a different experience to see a sculpture, work of architecture, or a painting in person than it is on a photograph, a computer screen, or a postcard. There is just such a gulf between a reproduction and the original, no matter how good the reproduction is, it lacks something that you just can't get.”

Kane agreed, adding, “In general, it was really cool to be able to see so much of the art we had studied in class. It's really hard to tell how magnificent the art works are in real life from our textbook or in the slides in Mr. Conn's lectures ... Prior to the trip, we learned about a handful of pieces that had intense gold–leafed background and the pictures we had explored just looked tacky or ugly, but seeing them in person it was completely different. I could really see how the artist used the gold to transcend the natural world to illustrate the spiritual world.”

To alleviate other students’ jealousy, Kazmer added that in one hotel, “The bathrooms were an issue … The sink, toilet, and shower were combined in a small and cramped space. The shower was open and situated extremely close to the toilet and water would splash everywhere and leave a half–inch puddle at your feet. Many showers began to flood the bathrooms and into the rooms and would require a swift kicking motion to squeegee the water into the drain, while of course trying to shower.”

Despite this, for the future students of AP Art History, Kazmer said, “I feel that this trip was an amazing experience and something I’ll always hold dear to me. It was great!”

Kane added, “Everyone should sign up to take AP Art History next year! It's easily one of the best classes I've taken in my four years at Berkeley High School.”

Photos:

• AP Art History (Co Richard Conn)