Emina Hadrovic

Humanities 1100

April 21, 2017

Museum of Human Experience

Romantic and Passionate Love

The museum that I am going to build is going to be about the human experience with

romantic and passionate love. The museum will have exhibits that include paintings, poems,

articles, and in the entrance there will be famous love songs playing, old and new songs. The

goal of these exhibits is to provide my audience information on how love is perceived. The

audience will leave thinking romanic and passionate love is bad, good, or both for the greater

good. I will also answer the question of how we express romanic and passionate love and what it

tells us about our culture.

The museum will show the human experience with romanic and passionate love by

having poems displayed that shows the effect on what love did to the people who wrote the

poems. One popular poem that will be displayed is Fires Run Through My Body by an

anonymous Kwakiutl Indian of Southern Alaska. The poem expresses a lot of pain and that pain

is mostly from the person they love leaving them and not coming back. What this say about the

culture of this writer is that love is important to them and losing it causes great pain. Another

poem that will be displayed is Funeral Blues by W.H. Auden. This poem is about someone

expressing that the love of his life has died. The man explains that he was his everything and

now that he is gone there is nothing. He expresses love by trying to make everyone feel what he

feels and mourn like he is mourning. This author shows how love is good and how bad it can be

when you lose the love of your life. You can tell that the culture of this artist has him treat love as
precious and that losing it is painful. The two poems show how love is bad and good, they show

how different people write about love, and that love is what you make it.

To further show the human experience of romanic and passionate love we will have

paintings to show a visual element for love. One painting that will be shown is the Dance in the

County by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. This painting shows a man and a woman dancing. The couple

looks like they are having good time but some argue that they are just putting on a show. We will

also have the painting La Surprise by Jean-Antoine Watteau. This painting shows a man playing

music while there is a couple kissing next to him. The couple kissing seems to be having a

passionate kiss, but the man playing music is watching. The man might love the woman but she

is with someone else. The painting Honeysuckle Bower by Peter Paul Rubens will also be in the

exhibit. The painting is a portrait of Peter Paul Rubens and his wife Isabella Brant. The couple

looks like they are enjoying each others company and that the man highly respects his wife. Also

a painting representing courtly love will be shown. The painting God Speed by Edmund Blair

Leighton shows courtly love by a woman giving a red cloth to a knight going into battle. Courtly

love is an interesting kind of love to show, it is love without any physicality but just doing favors

for one another. Another painting we will show is The Love Letter by Jean-Honore Fragonard.

This painting shows a woman receiving a love letter and she looks very happy. The woman

receiving the letter looks like she likes the secrecy and enjoys the attention.

Paintings are great way to show the human experience with love because with visual

examples people can make up their own stories and have their own stories on how the artists are

representing love.

Another way of showing the experience of romantic and passionate love is through

articles and music. An article that will be included is The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas
Capellanus. The article explains what courtly love is and shows how courtly love is different

then the love people are used to. This article shows another side of love by having two people

love in the way that they only do each other favors. They dont think about getting married and

following the standards everyone has set. Another way of expressing the human experience with

romantic and passionate love is through music. A recent love song is Thinking Out Loud by Ed

Sheeran and an older song is I Say a Little Prayer by Aretha Franklin. Music is wonderful way of

expressing what people are feeling and getting others to understand how they are feeling.

The human experience with romantic and passionate love has been good and bad. People

when they fall in love feel really good but when they lose that love they are in so much pain.

Love is good when you have it and wonderful art is created when artist are going through this

phase. The same goes for when artist lose love. All the art created from these experiences show

us the cultures that they have and how they express what they went through.