SAT Passage Based Reading: Test 3

Questions #1-6 are based on the following passage.

As difficult as it may be to comprehend the abstract shapes and forms of contemporary paintings and sculptures, it may be even more difficult for most people today to appreciate the art of ancient times. Though the individuals who create these works thousands of years ago were not, mentally or emotionally, so different from ourselves, few of us are willing to do what is necessary to understand the true beauty of ancient masterpieces.

But what, after all, is required of the viewer to understand the beauty of art, beyond the capacity to perceive it? Why should ancient art require more effort to appreciate than contemporary works? The answer, in a word, is context. In order to obtain a new sense of meaning in a work of art, we must interpret its depictions using the cultural language of our time. If we see a painting of a man in a business suit or a hard hat, we have some idea of what his life is like and can therefore understand the work emotionally. Even abstract works are prone to the effects of cultural context; our aesthetic sensibilities for features like shape and color are shaped from birth by the colors and shapes that appear in our environment.

For modern art, these examples might seem obvious, even trivial. Virtually everyone possesses the necessary contextual frame to understand the contemporary art of their own particular culture. When viewing ancient art, however, most of us fail to realize how very different the artist’s life was from our own, and we end up seeing through the wrong set of eyes. Take, for instance, a very simple visual figure: the straight line. Though common in today’s man-made world, straight-lines are rare in nature, so their meaning would be much different to, say, a cave painter, whose only common experiences with them might be in tree trunks and the flat line of the horizon. Color is another example. Our immediate surroundings are literally saturated with thousands of colors, but think about how different the world of color would be to an artist in an ancient forest and one in the desert. How very different must the concept of “greenness” be for each, one surrounded by it constantly, the other viewing it only rarely. Consider tales of certain Amazon tribes, raised in such thick jungle that their visual world was at all times limited to objects a few feet in front of them. When taken out onto the plains and shown mountains for the first time, such tribesmen became disoriented and could not understand why they could not reach out and touch them. As difficult as it may have been for them to appreciate our visual world, it would be equally difficult for us to appreciate theirs.

These differences obviously extend to more complex visual forms, and, in some cases, we can only speculate about the metaphorical meanings of the figures in ancient artwork. We must always keep in mind that art strives not only to depict, but also to evoke, and, as such, our understanding is always limited by our knowledge of the artist’s time and place.