I made a challenge to myself during last week's practice.
I had been looking for an introduction point for visual art, and I hadn't really had much luck aside from listing a couple of works that would come up (The Scream, American Gothic, etc.) I hadn't made real progress on this, until a question came up, and looking for the right phrase to teach them, heard a very generic, very quiz bowl piece of advice escape my lips. Something that people have given about art questions since the 80s.
"If you've got nothing better for Renaissance art, might as well guess a turtle."
And so I had my theme for the handout for this week. The namesakes of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
This is a longstanding rule in quiz bowl, and it's actually influenced how people assume questions they write are easy. Because the turtles are given as a group it's assumed that they are the easy answers to write questions about. But they're not exactly the easiest answer, that would probably be a comparative one-hit wonder with a really prominent one hit. Because they're grouped together, a writer needs to lead the players to the group, and also to differentiate the member of the group they want to ask about from the others. The Turtles (as we will refer to the artists in this piece going forward) are just the most explainable, and clashing highbrow with lowbrow, example of this phenomenon.
So I ended up with a draft document that covered some of the lives of the four artists, and a subset of their major works. I'm not including it here, because I wanted it a lot cleaner than what I presented. It was three pages, at least a page too long, and it wasn't my own summary, it was cut and paste of a lot of other sources. Here’s what was included:
Donatello - Zuccone, David, Gattamelata
Leonardo - Vitruvian Man, The Last Supper, Salvator Mundi, Mona Lisa
Michelangelo - The Creation of Adam, his first Pieta sculpture, David, Moses, The Last Judgement
Raphael - La Disputa, School of Athens, The Sistine Madonna
That was probably the best set of 15 I could have chosen as those all have some degree of anecdotal fame which has been passed down into quiz bowl. And these gave me all the ins and outs of concepts to answer the question I wanted to give them: How can there be interesting questions about the Turtles? What similarities can be clues to bring the player to conclude it's a member of the group, and how can we then better our guess from 1 in 4?
First, there’s The Simple Creator-Creation relationship: The tossup will have a uniquely identifying description of a uniquely identifying title, or there will be a very good reason for an ambiguous answer, and a detail that differentiates.
Firsts, Lasts, Onlys: Whenever reviewing a study guide or an article about a subject, pay special attention to key words like "First," "Last," "Only," "Current," and "Previous." Any of these key words are likely to go from article to question verbatim. The use of these words should be a highlighter to your players that something of quiz bowl significance is about to appear.
The Time Period: Donatello flourished nearly a century earlier than the others, and would have been an influence on the later artists. This separation allows us to key on time clues, comparative lack of interaction with the others, and the usual ways one clues the idea of “influential on those that came afterward.”
Contemporaries: Because M, L, and R were working in the same years, often in the same city, and even in the same building, they interacted with each other. Some of that resulted in them being petty or snippy at each other, and that detail is excellent fodder for questions. Being contemporaries also leads to the situation where a clue mentioning a different member of the group leads you to the group as possible answers, and then the other clues differentiate one member.
Works on similar themes: I made special note of the two Davids, and how to differentiate the two, a writer usually employs the clue of their materials.
Where themes repeat we should be careful: there are multiple cases of Madonna paintings, and Pietas accomplished by these artists. Such clues may not be as uniquely identifying as you think they are.
The techniques they developed: techniques like chiaroscuro and sfumato, where one member of the group was a master, but not the exclusive user, tend to be clues which are designed to lead to the group when early in a tossup, but point to the master practitioner when late in the tossup.
Depicting Other People in their Work: A point I made about the book The Originals was that whenever a real person interacts with a creative person, it's possible some element of their character will be transferred into the work. In the case of the Turtles, not only did their pettiness lead to modeling figures in their work on their contemporaries, for good or ill, but they also did the same to their patrons and their patrons' rivals. It was a way to repay their patrons, and denigrate their patrons' enemies, and all of this is grist for the question writing mill.
Where the work is now and how it got there: I used two examples in this, the post-painting life of the Sistine Madonna, and the post-auction prominence of Salvator Mundi. Here would have been a great point to include the 1911 theft of Mona Lisa from the Louvre, but I only realized that today after my presentation to the team.
This is a pattern which can be applied to any group of people tightly associated with each other: French Impressionists, The Mighty Handful, Mexican Muralists, The Lake Poets; all can be dissected for quiz bowl along similar lines. Tackling a group in this way and making it something your team can study allows you to give your whole team a small advantage in play.
Since I probably won't return to fixing this to include more of my own writing until summer, I won't be publishing my work here until at least then. If you'd like to do your own version of this, you can start with these sources:
http://ai.stanford.edu/~csewell/culture/index.html
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/donatello/
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/raphael/
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/da-vinci-leonardo/
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/michelangelo/
The Annotated Mona Lisa
Vasari, The Lives
A footnote: As I was preparing this tonight, I discovered Catie’s assignment for her Religion class for this quarter was to examine several passages from the gospels and compare and contrast details and difference among each of them. I’m very glad I didn’t go after that particular set of four, because I would have half-assed all over her assignment a few days before it was due.