【正确答案】 D

【答案解析】[听力原文]

Art: Self-Portraits

Professor: If I were to ask you to name an artist you associate with the term "self-portrait", many of you would say Van Gogh or Rembrandt. And you would be correct in naming either of those artists. Rembrandt, as you know, was Dutch and rived during the 1600"s. Van Gogh, who was also Dutch, lived during the last half of the 19th century and died in France in 1890. But these two men were not the only artists who painted self-portraits. The art of painting serf-portraits is an ancient art. In fact, carved self-portraits have been found to have existed in Egypt as long ago as 1365 B.C. Sometimes artists would use their self-portrait as a signature and in other instances, they would paint their own image in a painting"s scene where there was a crowd of people. But there were artists who also painted images of themselves at different stages in their fife. To do this the artist would not be able to look at a photograph as one might do today but instead the artist needed to look into the mirror to be able to reproduce what he saw.
Rembrandt was one of those artists. He painted numerous self-portraits and he did so, scholars think, to delve into his own personality and do a self-study of the changes throughout his life. Rembrandt"s paintings of himself showed very detailed facial features. And there are about sixty of those portraits which are known to exist. Most of his self-portraits were painted in about a forty-year period and it is thought that the reason he painted several when he was a young artist was that he was snuggling, probably financially, and was trying to gain a reputation as an artist and he was readily available. So he used himself as the object of the painting. In fact, his last self-portrait was finished just a few months before he died in 1669.
Van Gogh is also known for his self-portraits but there are significant differences between his works and the works of Rembrandt. Van Gogh painted most of his—thirty or so—serf images during the last five years of his life where Rembrandt"s works spanned much of his life. Van Gogh also focused on his face but concentrated on emphasizing his eyes in every picture. Still, Van Gogh used a lot of variety in his paintings. He used color in an interesting way where Rembrant focused on definite, bold brush strokes and emphasized lighting, dark and fight contrasts. Van Gogh, on the other hand, used bright splashes of color in his works and created art with varying techniques that had a lot of Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist features and his changing mental state seemed to affect his style. These are not the only famous painters who created a number of self-portraits. Do any of you remember any others you might have studied?.
Student A: I think Picasso is known for self-portraits, too, isn"t he?
Professor: Absolutely. And, he represents a different time period than Rembrandt and Van Gogh, too.
Student A: Yeah ... I think ... I think he was born about 1880 and then he didn"t die until the 1970s. Is that right?
Professor: Yes. And what do you know about Picasso"s self-portraits?
Student A: Well, I know that he painted self-portraits during most of the span of his painting career.
Professor: Yes, he did. And if you remember, some of his paintings were made during what was called, the Blue Period, and he also painted in the Cubist period. And his stir-images represented these styles of paintings. So you can remember that Picasso"s self-portraits corresponded to the style or mariner in which he was painting at the time.
Student B: Are you saying he painted a self-portrait, for example, during the Blue Period, and that the picture was the Blue Period type of painting?
Professor: Yes, and that is why his works are so expressive and varied in style. You remember that Picasso painted abstract works of art. Some of his earlier self-portraits were similar in style to those painted by Rembrandt. But as he developed different "periods" of style, then his self-portraits corresponded. And, as such, his paintings of himself did not appear real or life-like. Rather they were more like a narration of himself as depicted in color and design.
There were several other artists who were known for their self-portraits. Next class I want to discuss an Italian artist—a woman—who lived during the Renaissance and painted self-portraits because she had no other models to use. So her purpose of painting self-images was more to gain experience rather than to convey meanings about her inner self. I will leave you in suspense until next time when I tell you her name.

[解析] 教授在课堂上讲到了梵高、伦勃朗和毕加索三位艺术家的自画像的特点，并且在快下课时说下节课将讲述一位画自画像的意大利女性艺术家。由此可知，这节课的主要内容是“自画像”。