Schuhplattler:

traditional style of folk dance popular in the Alpine regions of Bavaria & Tyrol (southern Germany, Austria & German speaking regions of N. Italy); performers stomp, clap and strike the soles of their shoes (Schuhe), thighs and knees with their hands held flat (platt).

 

Vasari:

(1511-1574) Italian artist (painter, architect); enjoyed success in art but most famous for his book Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), considered the ideological foundation of art-histy; born in Tuscany, received humanist education, befriended by Michelangelo, whose painting style would influence his own.  Considered the first art historian he invented the genre of the encyclopaedia of artistic biographies with his Lives, dedicated to Grand Duke Cosimo Medici, he was the first to use the term "Renaissance"

 

Cimabue: * see Endnote <A>

(1240-1302) Italian painter, regarded as first great painter to break from the Italo-Byzantine style.  He was influenced by Byzantine models & 13th Century medieval art which used forms that were relatively flat & highly stylized.  However his figures were depicted with more-advanced lifelike proportions & shading than other artists of his time.  He taught Giotto, who was the first great artist of the Italian Proto-Renaissance.

 

Giotto: * see Endnote <B>

(1267-1337) Italian painter & architect from Florence, active during the Proto-Renaissance period.  Vasari claimed Giotto made a decisive break with the prevalent Byzantine style & initiated "the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years".  His masterwork was the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel, (aka the Arena Chapel); the fresco cycle depicts the Life of the Virgin & Christ.

 

Meister Eckhart:

 (1260-1328) German theologian, philosopher & mystic, born near Gotha (Thuringia) in the Holy Roman Empire.  The father of German mysticism, especially prevalent among the Dominicans, in his life he influenced the mystics Tauler & Suso.  A celebrated teacher & preacher, joined Dominicans & taught in Paris, Strasberg, Erfurt; a scholastic well-acquainted with Aristotelianism, Augustinianism & Neo-Platonism.  Most famous for his sermons in the vernacular, his theme was the presence of God in the individual soul & the dignity of the soul of the just man.  Influential 13th-century Christian Neoplatonists, widely read in the later Middle Ages, to include Nicholas of Cusa, Archbishop of Cologne in the 1430s and 1440s, who engaged in extensive study of Eckhart.  In 1326 Eckhart was accused of heresy, brought before the local Franciscan-led Inquisition & tried as a heretic by Pope John XXII; died before his verdict was received; posthumously condemned for heresy in 1329.

 

Megalopolis:

an urban region, especially one consisting of several large cities and suburbs that adjoin each other.  In Spengler’s nomenclature a city built in the later Civilization stage, a period in which urbanization totally dominates.

 

naturalism (as art): * see Endnote <C>

late 19th & early 20th-century movement inspired by adaptation of principles & methods of natural science (in particular the Darwinian view of nature) in literature & art.  In literature it extended the tradition of realism, aiming at faithful, unselective representation of reality, a “slice of life,” without moral judgment.  It differed from realism with its assumption of scientific determinism, which led naturalistic authors to emphasize man’s accidental, physiological nature rather than his moral or rational qualities.  Individuals seen as helpless products of heredity & environment, motivated by internal instinct, harassed by external social & economic pressures; as such they lack little will or responsibility for their fates, the prognosis for their “cases” was pessimistic at the outset.