Ministry of Education and Science, Youth and Sports of Ukraine

Sumy State University

A. Yu. PerelomovA. O. Synach

AESTHETICSLectures with guidelines

for foreign students

Approvedby the session of the Philosophy Departmentas a course of lectureson Aesthetics.Minutes № 01 of 31.09.2011 p.

SumySumy State University

2011

Aesthetics: lectures with guidelines for foreign students / compilers A. Yu. Perelomov, A. O. Synach; editor-in-chief V. M. Vandyshev. – Sumy State University, 2011. – 63 p.

Philosophy Department

This book presents a vision of aesthetics, created on the basis of the artistic experience of the classical art of the past and the art of the twenti-eth century. It gives a brief, complete description of the main provisions of aesthetics as a science, orientating on human values and humanistic under-standing of the overall aesthetic of the material world and culture.

Given material comes along with illustrations, which help understand information in the best possible way.

The lectures were prepared according to The State National programme «Education», Doctrine of National Education as well as experience of compiling similar programme of the Centre of humanities of Ukraine, the philosophical faculty of Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University and Vasyl Karazin Kharkiv National University

2

Contents

I. The subject and the history of Aesthetics….………………….………4

II. Ancient Aesthetics…………..………………………………….………11

III. The medieval Aesthetics……………..……………………….……….30

IV. The aesthetics of renaissance and romantism …………….……….35

V. Modern Aesthetics…………………………………………...…………48

VI. The aesthetical ideas of Russian and Ukrainian culture……………54

VII. Notions…………….……………………….………………….………...61

3

Topic №1. THE SUBJECT AND THE HISTORY OF AESTHETICS

P lan 1. The subject of aesthetics and the problem of terminology2. The subject of aesthetics and the formation of science perspective3. The emergence of aesthetics as an independent science4. Aesthetics in the structure of interdisciplinary relationships

§1. The subject of aesthetics and the problem of terminology The ideas of liberalization and humanization of education find its practi-

cal implementation in the teaching of disciplines, aimed at a holistic examina-tion of the role and man's place in the history of world civilization. Thus it is a task that got to be executed by such disciplines as aesthetics, ethics, culturol-ogy and the history of world and homeland culture. These are so called cultur-ological disciplines.

The aim of study of the disciplineSociety cannot exist without a highly developed human and technological

culture. Without the moral and cultural landmarks man loses the general orien-tation of his life. That is why the course is designed for aesthetic education of a healthy sense principle in man.

Aesthetics is multifaceted and diversified science. People study the aes-thetics, not only to find out what art in general and art in particular is, and most importantly to be a cultured and educated man.

The aim of the study of aesthetics is a conscious attitude to the cultural heritage of humanity and his nation.

The course introduces students to the main stages of the aesthetics, con-cepts and categories of aesthetics.

The task of course is to learn the theoretical information about the pecu-liarities of sensory.

Aesthetics is the science of the general laws of artistic development and knowledge of reality, the laws of development of art and its role in society. It covers the entire scope of human emotions, exploring the relationship between man and the world, influences the formation of the aesthetic consciousness.

Students must learn the notion of specificity of aesthetic understanding of reality, the historical pattern of artistic development, a typology of historical art, as well as aesthetic feature alternatives.

Aesthetics in its most general sense of the word can be defined as the sci -ence of beauty in all its forms and modifications of the aesthetic-relativistic re-lation of man to reality, which is realized in his mind, and in various areas of practice.

4

The issue of aesthetics has developed long before the "official recogni-tion" of aesthetics in science. Aesthetic problems arose and developed in the bosom of mankind's spiritual culture as integral aspects of philosophy, theol-ogy, literature, art, everyday practices of people – in the field of material pro-duction, social and political relations in other spheres of life and practice.

However, only in the XVIII century aesthetics has found, finally, the sta-tus of self-autonomy of scientific disciplines.

What exactly is studying aesthetics, what is its object? In the history of aesthetic thought in the modern literature one can find many different defini-tions of the science. The subject of aesthetics is the whole world, viewed in terms of value, the value of its effects for humanity.

§2. The subject of aesthetics and the formation of science perspective

The content of the subject of aesthetics defined the terms of the problems that explores this science. Briefly list the main ones.

The aesthetic relation of man to reality, his essence, origin, analysis of the various approaches to solving this problem.

Aesthetic human activity, its significance and specific characteristics, the main areas (labor, material production, socio-political, family and everyday at-titudes, behavior and communication, play, art, etc.).

Aesthetic consciousness of man, its structure (the need for an aesthetic, an aesthetic emotion, aesthetic sense, aesthetic taste, the aesthetic ideal), espe-cially the functioning and development.

The main categories of aesthetics, the beautiful and ugly, sublime and base, the tragic and the comic, the aesthetic and artistic, and others, the evolu-tion of their content, especially in the use of various "aesthetic contexts."

Art, artistic activities of man in all its diversity (aesthetic and social char-acteristics, the basic functions of the system and the arts, especially art and aesthetic perception of works of art, etc.).

Aesthetic culture of the individual and society (culture behavior and com-munication, the aesthetic potential of the individual and society, etc.).

History of aesthetic doctrines, modern aesthetic concepts, the emergence and development of ideas about beauty in different historical periods, the for-mation of aesthetic concepts, and their interaction in the system of spiritual values of man.

Aesthetics is a science of formation of sensate culture of a man. (Aesthet-ics (also spelled aesthetics or esthetics) is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emo-tional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste. More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as "critical reflection on art, cul-

5

ture and nature." Aesthetics is a subdiscipline of axiology, a branch of philoso-phy, and is closely associated with the philosophy of art. Aesthetics studies new ways of seeing and of perceiving the world.)

The subject of aesthetics is the organic union of two parts: 1) identifica-tion of the dialectics of the process of development, the specificity of the aes-thetic as a manifestation of the value relationship of man to reality, and 2) the artistic activity of man.

These parts are closely linked, although they are relatively independent. The first part examines the nature and specificity of the creative potential of the aesthetic, the categories of aesthetics – a beautiful, tragic and comic. The second part examines the structure and functional characteristics, the nature of artistic talent, types, genre and stylistic originality of art.

The process of finding an adequate balance between these parts is exactly a history of the formation of aesthetics.

Such notions as the beautiful, perfect, harmony, value, philosophy of art combine these two parts. For centuries, aesthetics has been and is "the science of the beautiful", "science of the perfect", "science of the laws of art."

The complexity of determining the object of aes-thetics draws our attention to the problem of terminol-ogy.

The term "aesthetics" was coined in the German form Æsthetik (modern spelling Ästhetik) by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735. It was derived from the Greek αισθητικός (aisthetikos, meaning "esthetic-sensitive-sen-tient"), which in turn was derived fromαίσθηση-αισθάνομαι (aisthese-aisthanomai, meaning "to per-ceive-feel-sense").

It’s also necessary to consider such greek terms as /estanomai/, /estesi/, /estanome/.

These terms correspond to the notion of feelings. But it also absorbed the many shades of the individual human relationship to the object oriented person on their own visual, auditory, tactile sensibility, demanded trust to their own perception of the world.

Still, the aesthetic knowledge formed within philosophy as a kind of part, regardless of the appearance of certain terminology.

§3. The emergence of aesthetics as an independent science The adoption of aesthetics as an independent discipline occurred only in

18-th century. (German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten).The formation of the first aesthetic ideas humanity connects with the im-

portance that ancient Greek philosophy gave human feelings in general.

6

Pythagoras, Alcmaeon, Empedocles, Theophrastus in their reflections are trying to analyze and classify the senses, to determine their nature, clearly dif-ferentiate the feelings of the beautiful and ugly, tragic and comic. These were important components of their philosophical views. Gradually the aesthetics "rebuilt" its own subject of study.

Philosophical school, founded by Pythagoras (6th century BC) the so-called "Pythagoras school" made the first attempt to use feelings as a basis for understanding certain aesthetic phenomena. Pythagoras identified the concept of harmony, perfection, beauty. He considered the number as a basis of harmony. The harmony of numbers Pythagoras` followers found even in the ar-rangement of the planets. Among the arts, the highest car-rier of harmony proclaimed music. Music in his under-standing is the bearer of equanimity; it stimulates the peace of mind.

The immortality of the soul also found reflection in the philosophical views of Pythagoras. Specifically, he believed that the soul can reincarnate into any body (metempsychosis).

Reincarnation is believed to occur when the soul or spirit, after the death of the body, comes back to Earth in a newborn body. This phenomenon is also known as transmigration of the soul.

But in order to be alive and move, in his opinion, should undergo purifi-cation (catharsis), the highest form of which is the takeover of musical-nu-meric structure of space.

The followers of Pythagoras brought the concept of tetraktide (1+2+3+4=10 it includes the main intervals: octave (2:1), quint (3:2) and quart (4:3)).

Famous physician and natural philosopher Alcmaeon (I part of V century B.C.) was the first scientist of Greece, who devided the thinking and feeling. He argued that the perception – is a complex process of movement from sen-sory nerves to the senses and then to the brain.

Theoretical reflections on the feelings expressed also Empedocles (490-430 years. BC). The lowest level of emotions he believed feelings that operate on the principle of "similar is cognized be the similar".

The unity “feelings-perception” generates greater forces – Love and Ha-tred. Cyclical course of world process driven by the alternation of the priori-ties of these forces, which are not material, but they are spatially defined, in the view of Empedocles.

Thus Empedocles continues the tradition of the previous study of the na-ture and significance of feelings. He introduced the concept of catharsis, with emphasis on moral and ethical nature of purification.

7

In the III century BC the theory of emotions finally came to the time of presentation in the works of the famous ancient Greek philosopher Theophras-tus. His works "About feelings," "Ethical character", "The dignity" are in sen-suous direction.

In the historical process of forming the subject of aesthetic science at-tracts the attention of "the principle of the golden section" (another names:

“Golden ratio”, “Golden Cut” “Golden Propor-tion”) – a geometric-mathematical ratio of propor-tions. Its essence is that when crossing the whole also correlated well with its bigger part, as bigger with less. In the geometric form, this principle ap-pears as a ratio: 5:8 = 8:13 = 13:21 = 21:34 = 34 ...

and so on.Greek science, believed that any body, object, geometric figure, the ratio

of parts of which corresponds to a ratio is proportional and make a good im-pression.

The Greek Parthenon, marble columns which divide the church on the principle of "golden section" is the most persuasive example of the practical use of the principle.

In the Renaissance, the law of "golden section" was seen as a mandatory law of architecture, painting and sculpture. Theorists and the creators of that time were trying to find the absolute, perfect geometric basis of beauty.

A treatise of the famous Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli LA called "On the Divine Proportion." He was absolutely convinced that the rule of the golden section is defined aesthetic value "of all earthly things." But absolutisa-tion of this principle is mistaken. The proportion for the proportions formal-izes beauty, mechanizes this complex concept. But still, the rule of golden ra-tio emphasizes the importance of human visual capacity in the formation of aesthetic sense. Why the ratio of 5:8 is the basis for the interpretation of math-ematical proportions? The proportion of 5:8 is the intersection of horizontal and vertical angles of view of human two eyes. Consciously or intuitively Greeks came to the principle of "golden section" due to an innate capacity of human vision. Thus nature is "presented" humans direct and unmistakable way to a sense of proportion and harmony.

§4. Relationship of aesthetics to other sciences It must be borne in mind that aesthetic issues important place on the

methodology of aesthetic cognition and activities, as well as communication and interaction with other aesthetic spiritual values of human.

Relationship with the philosophy of aesthetics, its philosophical nature of the "issues" and himself an aesthetic of categories of science, which are widely used in such philosophical categories as "objective" and "subjective", 8

"content" and "form", "progress" and "regress" and number of other cate-gories.

Of course, one should not literally identify the aesthetics and philosophy. And she and the other spheres of spiritual life retain their specificity. It is only on this interaction of which creates a certain way as philosophical and aes-thetic attitudes. Philosophy, in particular, "arming" the aesthetics of a system-atic approach helps to consider aesthetic objects, like a certain integrity that has one or other specific aesthetic features.

In turn, the aesthetic philosophy helps to create a universal conception of man, his opportunities, reveals the inner harmony of the human world, points to the creative nature of all aspects of his life, the possibility of their transfor-mation under the laws of beauty. In aesthetics are actively used by a variety of philosophical and scientific methods.

One of the most important features of aesthetics lies in its connection with the theory and practice of world culture, which is a powerful source of supply as the aesthetics of ideas, thoughts, and the most important concrete material for the analysis of various aspects of man's spiritual activity. Aesthet-ics at the same time seeks to identify and investigate the general laws of artis-tic creation and development of art as a kind of spiritual whole, establishes its connection with life, social and personal practices of people who identify very specific artistic activity, which is extremely difficult to understand, while re-maining within the limits of any one of Arts

Very close is the relationship between aesthetics and psychology, which investigates and reveals mechanisms for the occurrence, operation, transfor-mation of emotions, including aesthetic and underlying comprehension of hu-man beauty. The role of psychology in the study of this problem is so signifi-cant that some scholars have almost equate these two sciences, or at least, are ready to interpret the psychology of the part, which is associated with the aes-thetic as an experimental aesthetics. The basis of this belief is the idea that pleasure of beauty is the communication process.

Rejecting the extremes of such a comparison of these sciences, we should recognize that their cooperation is indeed extremely valuable for both sides. This interaction is effectively implemented in the investigation of psychology of the creative process of artistic creation of values, analysis of works of art themselves, a process of aesthetic perception of the recipient (viewer, listener, reader).

In recent decades, the methodology of aesthetics and more persistently penetrate trends associated with the era of scientific and technological revolu-tion. Are increasingly being used in aesthetic research methods of science, cy-bernetics, mathematics, etc. This is especially true for these two broad fields of aesthetic, the art and the aesthetic design of a man of his environment. In -creasingly "invade" the aesthetics and methods of cybernetics. With their help

9

it is possible to simulate some aspects of the processes of artistic creation. Ma-chines (more precisely, the program contained in them), write music, write po-etry, play chess, etc.

For example, in art semiotics (science of signs and sign systems), helps to investigate the structure of the artwork. Patterns of sign systems, semiotics of disclosures, allow to identify specific connections between literary works and their meanings (semantics), the structural relations between the elements forming the aesthetic and artistic point (syntactic), the communicative func-tion of art (pragmatics). Semiotic analysis clarifies the content and the rela-tionship of such traditional notions of art as an artistic image, type, form, alle-gory, metaphor, etc. Semiotics claims and a more active part in the study of aesthetic problems. Semiotic approach may have some importance for under-standing the structure of aesthetic values and aesthetic attitude toward them.

Later, the terms «estanome», «estanomai», «eisentikos» have lost their direct link with the concept of feelings, the subject began to make sense of aesthetics much broader in scope and content: perfect, proportional, harmo-nious, beautiful and aesthetical.

Therefore it is necessary to consider the history of aesthetics, which has a long and deep roots.

The first shoots of artistic knowledge and understanding of reality can al-ready be found in mythological texts. The formation of aesthetic knowledge is not linked to any one specific country, as it is characteristic of both Greek phi-losophy and the philosophy of China, India, the Arab-Muslim world, the Byzantine Empire.

Questions1. Give the definition of art2. What is the subject of aesthetics?3. Explain the principle of «Golden cut»4. What is harmony?

10

Topic №2. ANCIENT AESTHETICS

Plan 1. The aesthetics of Ancient Greece2. Islamic aesthetics3. Indian aesthetics4. Chinese aesthetics5. African aesthetics

§1. The aesthetics of Ancient GreeceAlready in the 5th century BC replaced by sense-observation approach to

reality, the rule of cosmology (the perception of space as a harmony, useful-ness, and beauty) comes to sharpening of interest to the person who is able to learn and explore the world around us.

Theoretical views of Socrates relied on the political and ethical basis for attempts to define the concept of good and evil. Criticizing the Athenian democracy, Socrates insisted on the best transfer of power, that is highly moral members of society.

Morality, in his view, should serve pledge fairness, integrity, nobility of man.

Taking as a basis the principle of expediency, Socrates attempts to dis-cover the relationship between ethical and aesthetic, beautiful and useful. He called this ratio Kalos kagathos – the union of the old Greek word "beautiful and good (perfect)

The adjective καλός means beautiful and encompasses meanings equiva-lent to English "good", "noble", and "handsome". The form given by conven-tion is the masculine, but it was equally used of women (the feminine form is καλή) and could also describe animals or inanimate objects.

Plato, in his work Republic, used the term τό καλόν (the neutral form) in his attempts to define ideals. However, his protagonist in the dialogue, Socrates, stated that he did not fully comprehend the nature of this καλόν.

This second adjective «agathos» means good and had no particular phys-ical or aesthetic connotations, but could describe a person's excellence of char-acter (ethical virtue) for example their bravery. Again, around the 4th century, it had become politically meaningful, and carried implications of dutiful citi-zenship.

This is one of the most important concepts of classical aesthetics, which meant the harmony of external and internal that is the condition of the individ-ual beauty.

11

This term was interpreted differently in different times. Pythagoras fol-lowers understood Kalos kagathos as an external human behavior, which si-multaneously determines its internal quality. Herodotus connected Kalos ka-gathos with religious rituals, the priests of morality.

Herodotus linked Kalos kagathos with religious rituals, morals of the priests.

Plato believed that the principle kalos kagathos is directly related to the profession of soldiers, the notion of military honor and morality. Later, the Greeks are in-creasingly begun to transform this concept into the sphere of education, education rights. Since then began philosophical understanding of the concept.

The trend was directly related to the concept of Aristotle, who interpreted the Kalos kagathos as the outer and inner harmony. Under the inner, he under-stood wisdom, which leads a person to a deep under-

standing of the unity of beauty and goodness, the aesthetic and moral, that is, the harmony, which should become the norm of human existence.

Man cannot attain the ideal, but it must at least through the self-improve-ment strive for this. The principle of Kalos kagathos art sought to realize their creative property. (Phidias, Sophocles, Polycleitus).

In subsequent historical periods principle of kalos kagathos was forgot-ten, and the ethics and aesthetics more were separated and each of them to choose its own path of development.

The problem of link of these sciences has moved into the sphere of art, and the most typical aspect of studying the interaction of ethics and aesthetics was the problem of "art and morality."

The name of Sophocles related statement of problem of the relationship between the beautiful and useful, as well as an attempt to as closely as possi -ble to determine what is ideal.

Aesthetic views of Socrates got a creative continuation of the philosophi-cal concept of an outstanding representative of ancient philosophy – Plato (427-347 BC)

He investigated the nature of perception of beauty, sources of talent, the problems of aesthetic education. He paid particular attention the study of art, because it played a special role in the life of Athens t VI-V BC. Athenian democracy won the right to free access to the theater, the whole people en-joyed the work of respected poets and musicians. Plato and Socrates as linked the influence of art with the formation of the moral world of human: it brings both positive and negative qualities.

He expanded the aesthetic perspective. In his theoretical dialogues present ideas about the relativity of beauty, of the absolute best ways to 12

achieve beauty, which exists only as an idea, but the very possibility of move-ment from simple to complex in the formation of fine opens the way for future theoretical developments in the field of aesthetic.

It was Plato, who set the contradictions in the formulation and solution of some aesthetic problems that in the future in different historical periods have become the basis for the formation of new philosophical concepts.

In the dialogs "Ion", "State" Plato admires the one hand, "divine power" of the artist, on the other side – deliberately humiliates him through the lack of utility of the results of its activities. According to Plato the poet and the doctor or craftsmen should be given an advantage because of their significant work in practice. The problem of the role of art in the spiritual development of man, the formation of his sensate culture is not formed theoretically, and at the level of identification of art and craft activities art loses its identity and self-worth.

Comparing God – the poet – rhapsode – spectator, Plato ascribed to the poet the role of an intermediary, who passed from God the benefit to human. This is a formal function, considered a philosopher, thus, high levels of cre-ativity is lost.

Another controversial problem was Plato’s attempt to identify the subject of Aesthetics. This is thinking and watching man, and the world of the abso-lute idea, the world of soul, that are able to comprehend the essense.

While acknowledging that universal beauty created by God, and beautiful objects – it is only an imperfect copy of the universal beauty, Plato notes in the dialogue "Hippias Major", "Great - it's hard".

The pinnacle of ancient aesthetics is considered theoretical legacy of Aristotle (384-322 BC). His work "Poetics", "Rhetoric," "Politics", "Meta-physics," "ethics" covers a wide range of aesthetic problems.

Aristotle was fond of the cosmos as a carrier of harmony, order and in-tegrity.

Aesthetic perception and art he saw as a reflection of world harmony. Aristotle first gave detailed structure of aesthetic categories, offered his own understanding of the beautiful, tragic, comical. He explained the basic princi-ple of the creative activity of the artist – mimesis. He believed that mimesis is peculiar to man from childhood. Man is distinguished from the animal due to the ability to inheritance.

Mimesis (Greek: μίμησις (mīmēsis), from μιμεῖσθαι (mīmeisthai), "to im-itate," from μῖμος (mimos), "imitator, actor") is a critical and philosophical term that carries a wide range of meanings, which include: imitation, represen-tation, mimicry, imitatio, receptivity, nonsensuous similarity, the act of resem-bling, the act of expression, and the presentation of the self.

In ancient Greece, mimesis was an idea that governed the creation of works of art, in particular, with correspondence to the physical world under-stood as a model for beauty, truth and the good. Plato contrasted mimesis, or

13

imitation, with diegesis, or narrative. After Plato, the meaning of mimesis eventually shifted toward a specifically literary function in ancient Greek soci-ety, and its use has changed and been re-interpreted many times since then.

One of the best-known modern studies of mimesis, understood as a form of realism in the arts, is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Re-ality in Western Literature. Published in 1946 and written while the author was in exile from Nazi Germany, the book opens with a famous comparison between the way the world is represented in Homer's Odyssey and the way it appears in the Bible. From these two seminal Western texts, Auerbach builds the foundation for a unified theory of representation that spans the entire his-tory of Western literature, including the Modernist novels being written at the time Auerbach began his study.

The Frankfurt school critical theorist T.W. Adorno made use of mimesis as a central philosophical term, interpreting it as a way in which works of art embodied a form of reason that was non-repressive and non-violent.

The concept of mimesis, was later transformed into the development of cognitive and emotional functions of art. According to Aristotle inheritance promotes knowledge, creates a feeling of satisfaction, and stimulates the imag-ination. This property was used as a mimesis peculiar link to introduce the fig-urative and symbolic conception in the Middle Ages. Aristotle's aesthetic views are associated not only with aesthetic issues, but also to pedagogy, ele-ments of psychology art criticism (genera, genres of literature).

Both Plato and Aristotle saw in mimesis the representation of nature. Plato wrote about mimesis in both Ion and The Republic (Books II, III and X). In Ion, he states that poetry is the art of divine madness, or inspiration. Be-cause the poet is subject to this divine madness, it is not his/her function to convey the truth. As Plato has it, truth is the concern of the philosopher only. As culture in those days did not consist in the solitary reading of books, but in the listening to performances, the recitals of orators (and poets), or the acting out by classical actors of tragedy, Plato maintained in his critique that theatre was not sufficient in conveying the truth. He was concerned that actors or ora-tors were thus able to persuade an audience by rhetoric rather than by telling the truth.

In Book II of The Republic [377], Plato describes Socrates' dialogue with his pupils. Socrates warns we should not seriously regard poetry as being ca-pable of attaining the truth and that we who listen to poetry should be on our guard against its seductions, since the poet has no place in our idea of God.

In developing this in Book X, [596–599] Plato tells of Socrates' metaphor of the three beds: one bed exists as an idea made by God (the Platonic ideal); one is made by the carpenter, in imitation of God's idea; one is made by the artist in imitation of the carpenter's.

So the artist's bed is twice removed from the truth. The copiers only touch on a small part of things as they really are, where a bed may appear dif-ferently from various points of view, looked at obliquely or directly, or differ-ently again in a mirror. So painters or poets, though they may paint or describe a carpenter or any other maker of things, know nothing of the carpenter's (the

14

craftsman's) art, and though the better painters or poets they are, the more faithfully their works of art will resemble the reality of the carpenter making a bed, nonetheless the imitators will still not attain the truth (of God's creation).

Similar to Plato's writings about mimesis, Aristotle also defined mimesis as the perfection and imitation of nature. Art is not only imitation but also the use of mathematical ideas and symmetry in the search for the perfect, the timeless, and contrasting being with becoming. Nature is full of change, de-cay, and cycles, but art can also search for what is everlasting and the first causes of natural phenomena. Aristotle wrote about the idea of four causes in nature. The first formal cause is like a blueprint, or an immortal idea. The sec-ond cause is the material, or what a thing is made out of. The third cause is the process and the agent, in which the artist or creator makes the thing. The fourth cause is the good, or the purpose and end of a thing, known as telos.

Aristotle's Poetics is often referred to as the counterpart to this Platonic conception of poetry. Poetics is his treatise on the subject of mimesis. Aristo-tle was not against literature as such; he stated that human beings are mimetic beings, feeling an urge to create texts (art) that reflect and represent reality.

Aristotle considered it important that there be a certain distance between the work of art on the one hand and life on the other; we draw knowledge and consolation from tragedies only because they do not happen to us. Without this distance, tragedy could not give rise to catharsis. However, it is equally im-portant that the text causes the audience to identify with the characters and the events in the text, and un-

less this identification occurs, it does not touch us as an audience. Aristotle holds that it is through "simulated representation", mimesis, that we respond to the acting on the stage which is conveying to us what the characters feel, so that we may empathize with them in this way through the mimetic form of dramatic role-play. It is the task of the dramatist to produce the tragic enact-ment in order to accomplish this empathy by means of what is taking place on stage.

In short, catharsis can only be achieved if we see something that is both recognizable and distant. Aristotle argued that literature is more interesting as a means of learning than history, because history deals with specific facts that have happened, and which are contingent, whereas literature, although some-times based on history, deals with events that could have taken place or ought to have taken place.

Aristotle thought of drama as being "an imitation of an action" and of tragedy as "falling from a higher to a lower estate" and so being removed to a less ideal situation in more tragic circumstances than before. He posited the

15

characters in tragedy as being better than the average human being, and those of comedy as being worse.

The poets, beginning with Homer, far from improving and educating hu-manity, do not possess the knowledge of craftsmen and are mere imitators who copy again and again images of virtue and rhapsodise about them, but never reach the truth in the way the superior philosophers do.

Plato’s “Theory of Creativity” emphasized the mystical, beyond the real-ity stimuli of talents, the Aristotle’s “Poetics” appeals to generalize the artistic image, transfer it to others during their upbringing and education.

Aristotle developed a new ethical concepts, as well as the theoretical ba-sis of existing (mimesis, Kalos kagathos, catharsis). It includes in the analysis of theoretical concepts such notions as "canon" – a system of norms and rules in the development of art, "hedonism" (pleasure) – the emotional and sensual nature of the arts, "allegory" – imaginative way of saying, “measure", "propor-tion" "association". Aristotle not only enriches the perspective of science, but also develops his own categories and concepts. Based on these concepts and categories aesthetics could subsequently become an independent science.

§2. Islamic aestheicsIslamic art is not, properly speaking, an art pertaining to religion only.

The term "Islamic" refers not only to the religion, but to any form of art cre-ated in an Islamic culture or in an Islamic context. It would also be a mistake to assume that all Muslims are in agreement on the use of art in religious ob-servance, the proper place of art in society, or the relation between secular art and the demands placed on the secular world to conform to religious precepts. Islamic art frequently adopts secular elements and elements that are frowned

upon, if not forbidden, by some Islamic theolo-gians.

According to Islam, human works of art are inherently flawed compared to the work of God; thus, it is believed by many that to attempt to de-pict in a realistic form any animal or person is in-solence to God. This tendency has had the effect of narrowing the field of artistic possibility to such forms of art as Arabesque, mosaic, Islamic calligraphy, and Islamic architecture, as well as more generally any form of abstraction that can claim the status of non-representational art.

The arabesque is a form of artistic decora-tion consisting of "surface decorations based on rhythmic linear patterns of scrolling and interlacing foliage, tendrils" or plain lines, often combined with other elements. Within the very wide range of Eurasian decorative art that in-16

cludes motifs matching this basic definition the term "arabesque" is used con-sistently as a technical term by art historians to describe only elements of the decoration found in two phases: Islamic art from about the 9th century on-wards, and European decorative art from the Renaissance onwards. Arabesques are a fundamental element of Islamic art but they develop what was already a long tradition by the coming of Islam. The past and current us -age of the term in respect of European art can only be described as confused and inconsistent. Some Western arabesques derive from Islamic art, but others are closely based on Ancient Roman decorations. In the West they are essen-tially found in the decorative arts, but because of the generally non-figurative nature of Islamic art arabesque decoration is there often a very prominent ele-ment in the most significant works, and plays a large part in the decoration of architecture.

The limited possibilities have been explored by artists as an outlet to artistic expression, and has been cultivated to become a positive style and tra-dition, emphasizing the decorative function of art, or its religious functions via non-representational forms such as Geometric patterns, floral patterns, and arabesques.

Human or animal depiction is generally forbidden altogether in Islamic cultures because it is said to lead to sculptural pieces which then leads to wor-ship of that sculpture or "idol". Human portrayals can be found in early Is-lamic cultures with varying degrees of acceptance by religious authorities. Hu-man representation for the purpose of worship that is uniformly considered idolatry as forbidden in Sharia law. There are many depictions of Muhammad, Islam's chief prophet, in historical Islamic art.

The calligraphic arts grew out of an effort to devote oneself to the study of the Quran. By patiently transcribing each word of the text, the writer was made to contemplate the meaning of it. As time passed, these calligraphic works began to be prized as works of art, growing increasingly elaborate in the illumination and stylizing of the text. These illuminations were applied to

other works besides the Quran, and it became a re-spected art form in and of itself.

Islamic calligraphy, colloquially known as Arabic calligraphy, is the artistic practice of handwriting, or cal-ligraphy, and by extension, of bookmaking, in the lands sharing a common Islamic cultural heritage. This art form is based on the Arabic script, which for a long time was used by all Muslims in their respective languages. They used it to represent God because they denied repre-senting God with images. Calligraphy is especially

revered among Islamic arts since it was the primary means for the preservation of the Qur'an. Suspicion of figurative art as idolatrous led to calligraphy and

17

abstract depictions becoming a major form of artistic expression in Islamic cultures, especially in religious contexts. The work of calligraphers was col-lected and appreciated.

Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish calligraphy is associated with ab-stract arabesque motifs on the walls and ceilings of mosques as well as on the page. Contemporary artists in the Islamic world draw on the heritage of callig-raphy to use calligraphic inscriptions or abstractions in their work.

Calligraphy has arguably become the most venerated form of Islamic art because the Arabic script was the means of transmission of the Qur'an. The holy book of Islam, the Qur'an, has played an important role in the develop-ment and evolution of the Arabic language, and by extension, calligraphy in the Arabic alphabet. Proverbs and complete passages from the Qur'an are still active sources for Islamic calligraphy.

Islamic Mosque calligraphy is calligraphy that can be found in and out of a mosque, typically in combination with Arabesque motifs. Arabesque is a form of Islamic art known for its repetitive geometric forms creating beautiful decorations. These geometric shapes often include Arabic calligraphy written on walls and ceilings inside and outside of mosques.

The subject of these writings can be derived from different sources in Is-lam. It can be derived from the written words of the Qur'an or from the oral traditions relating to the words and deeds of Islamic Prophet Muhammad.

There is a beautiful harmony between the inscriptions and the functions of the mosque. Specific surahs (chapters) or ayats (verses) from Koran are in-scribed in accordance with functions of specific architectural elements. For ex-ample, on the domes you can find the Nour ayat (the divine stress on light) written, above the main entrance you find verses related to the entrances of the paradise, on the windows the divine names of Allah are inscribed so that re-flection of the sun rays through those windows remind the believer that Allah manifests Himself upon the universe in all high qualities.

Islamic architecture encompasses a wide range of both secular and religious styles from the foundation of Islam to the present day, in-fluencing the design and construction of build-ings and structures in Islamic culture. The principal Islamic architectural types are: the Mosque, the Tomb, the Palace and the Fort. From these four types, the vocabulary of Is-

lamic architecture is derived and used for buildings of lesser importance such as public baths, fountains and domestic architecture.

A specifically recognizable Islamic architectural style emerged soon after Muhammad's time, inspired by Islam with addition of localized adaptations of the former Sassanid and Byzantine models, the Germanic Visigoths in Spain 18

also made a big contribution to Islamic architecture They invented the Horse-shoe arch in Spain and used them as one of their main architectural features, After the moorish invasion of Spain in 711 AD the form was taken by the Um-mayyads who accentuated the curvature of the horseshoe. The Dome of the Rock (Qubbat al-Sakhrah) in Jerusalem (691) is one of the most important buildings in all of Islamic architecture, marked by a strong Byzantine influ-ence (mosaic against a gold background, and a central plan that resembles that of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, although the church itself was renovated several times in the Islamic period), but already bearing purely Islamic ele-ments, such as the great epigraphic frieze. It featured interior vaulted spaces, a circular dome, and the use of stylized repeating decorative arabesque patterns. The desert palaces in Jordan and Syria (for example, Mshatta, Qasr Amra, and Khirbat al-Mafjar) served the caliphs as living quarters, reception halls, and baths, and were decorated to promote an image of royal luxury.

§3. Indian aestheticsIndian art evolved with an emphasis on inducing special spiritual or

philosophical states in the audience, or with representing them symbolically. According to Kapila Vatsyayan, "Classical Indian architecture, sculpture, painting, literature (kāvya), music, and dancing evolved their own rules condi-tioned by their respective media, but they shared with one another not only the underlying spiritual beliefs of the Indian religio-philosophic mind, but also the procedures by which the relationships of the symbol and the spiritual states were worked out in detail."

In the Pan Indian philosophic thought the term 'Satyam Shivam Sun-daram' is another name for the concept of the Supreme. 'Sat' is the truth value, 'Shiv' is the good value & 'Sundaram' is the beauty value. Man through his 'Srabana' or education, 'Manana' or experience and conceptualization and 'Sad-hana' or practice, through different stages of life (Asramas) comes to form and realize the idea of these three values to develop a value system. This Value-system helps us to develop two basic ideas 1) that of 'Daksha' or the adept/ex-pert and 2) of Mahana/Parama or the Absolute and thus to judge anything in this universe in the light of these two measures, known as 'Adarsha'. A person who has mastered great amounts of knowledge of the grammars, rules, & lan-guage of an art-form are adepts (Daksha), where as those who have worked through the whole system and journeyed ahead of these to become a law unto themself is called a Mahana. Individuals idea of 'Daksha' and 'Mahana' is rela-tive to one's development of the concept of 'Satyam-Shivam-Sundaram.' For example, Tagore's idea of these two concepts should be way above any com-mon man's and many perceive Tagore as a 'Mahana' Artist in the realm of lit -erature. This concept of Satyam-Shivam-Sundaram, a kind of Value Theory is the cornerstone of Indian Aesthetics.

19

Of particular concern to Indian drama and literature are the term 'Bhava' or the state of mind and rasa referring generally to the emotional flavors/essence crafted into the work by the writer and relished by a 'sensitive specta-tor' or sahṛdaya or one with positive taste and mind. Poets like Kālidāsa were attentive to rasa, which blossomed into a fully developed aesthetic system. Even in contemporary India the term rasa denoting "flavor" or "essence" is used colloquially to describe the aesthetic experiences in films; "māsala mix" describes popular Hindi cinema films which serve a so called balanced emo-tional meal for the masses, savored as rasa by these spectators.

Rasa theory blossoms beginning with the Sanskrit text Nātyashāstra (nātya meaning "drama" and shāstra meaning "science of"), a work attributed to Bharata Muni where the Gods declare that drama is the 'Fifth Veda' because it is suitable for the degenerate age as the best form of religious instruction. While the date of composition varies wildly among scholars, ranging from the era of Plato and Aristotle to the seventh century CE. The Nātyashāstra presents the aesthetic concepts of rasas and their associated bhāvas in Chapters Six and Seven respectively, which appear to be independent of the work as a whole. Eight rasas and associated bhāvas are named and their enjoyment is likened to savoring a meal: rasa is the enjoyment of flavors that arise from the proper preparation of ingredients and the quality of ingredients. What rasa ac-tually is, in a theoretical sense, is not discussed and given the Nātyashāstra's pithy wording it is unlikely the exact understanding of the original author(s) will be known.

The theory of the rasas develops significantly with the Kashmiri aestheti-cian Ãndandavardhana's classic on poetics, the Dhvanyāloka which introduces the ninth rasa, shānta-rasa as a specifically religious feeling of peace (śānta) which arises from its bhāva, weariness of the pleasures of the world. The pri -mary purpose of this text is to refine the literary concept dhvani or poetic sug-gestion, by arguing for the existence of rasa-dhvani, primarily in forms of San-skrit including a word, sentence or whole work "suggests" a real-world emo-tional state or bhāva, but thanks to aesthetic distance, the sensitive spectator relishes the rasa, the aesthetic flavor of tragedy, heroism or romance.

The 9th – 10th century master of the religious system known as "the non-dual Shaivism of Kashmir" (or "Kashmir Shaivism") and aesthetician, Abhi-navagupta brought rasa theory to its pinnacle in his separate commentaries on the Dhvanyāloka, the Dhvanyāloka-locana (translated by Ingalls, Masson and Patwardhan, 1992) and the Abhinavabharati, his commentary on the Nātyashāstra, portions of which are translated by Gnoli and Masson and Pat-wardhan. Abhinavagupta offers for the first time a technical definition of rasa which is the universal bliss of the Self or Atman colored by the emotional tone of a drama. Shānta-rasa functions as an equal member of the set of rasas but is simultaneously distinct being the most clear form of aesthetic bliss. Abhinav-20

agupta likens it to the string of a jeweled necklace; while it may not be the most appealing for most people, it is the string that gives form to the necklace, allowing the jewels of the other eight rasas to be relished. Relishing the rasas and particularly shānta-rasa is hinted as being as-good-as but never-equal-to the bliss of Self-realization experienced by yogis.

Architecture. The architecture of India is rooted in its history, culture and religion. Indian architecture progressed with time and assimilated the many in-fluences that came as a result of India's global discourse with other regions of the world throughout its millennia-old past. The architectural methods prac-ticed in India are a result of examination and implementation of its established building traditions and outside cultural interactions.

The Rasa theory. Indian art evolved with an emphasis on inducing spe-cial spiritual or philosophical states in the audience, or with representing them symbolically.

Of particular concern to Indian drama and literature are the term 'bhAva' or the state of mind and rasa (Sanskrit रस lit. 'juice' or 'essence') referring gen-erally to the emotional flavors/essence crafted into the work by the writer and relished by a 'sensitive spectator' or sahṛdaya or one with positive taste and mind. Rasas are created by bhavas. They are described by Bharata Muni in the Nātyasāstra, an ancient work of dramatic theory.

Although the concept of rasa is fundamental to many forms of Indian art including dance, music, musical theatre, cinema and literature, the treatment, interpretation, usage and actual performance of a particular rasa differs greatly between different styles and schools of abhinaya, and the huge regional differ-ences even within one style.

Eight primary rasasBharata Muni enunciated the eight Rasas in the Nātyasāstra, an ancient

work of dramatic theory. Each rasa, according to Nātyasāstra, has a presiding deity and a specific colour. There are 4 pairs of rasas. For instance, Hasya arises out of Sringara. The Aura of a frightened person is black, and the aura of an angry person is red. Bharata Muni established the following.

Śṛngāram (शृङ्गारं) Love, attractiveness. Presiding deity: Vishnu. Colour: light green.

Hāsyam (हास्यं) Laughter, mirth, comedy. Presiding deity: Pramata. Colour: white.

Raudram (रौदं्र) Fury. Presiding deity: Rudra. Colour: red.Kāruṇyam (कारुण्यं) Compassion, mercy. Presiding deity: Yama. Colour:

grey.Bībhatsam (बीभत्सं) Disgust, aversion. Presiding deity: Shiva. Colour:

blue.Bhayānakam (भयानकं) Horror, terror. Presiding deity: Kala. Colour: black.Vīram (वीरं) Heroic mood. Presiding deity: Indra. Colour: yellowish.

21

Adbhutam (अद्भतुं) Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow.

Śāntam rasaA ninth rasa was added by later authors (See History section). This addi-

tion had to undergo a good deal of struggle between the sixth and the tenth centuries, before it could be accepted by the majority of the Alankarikas, and the expression Navarasa (the nine rasas), could come into vogue.

Śāntam Peace or tranquility. deity: Vishnu. Colour: blue.Shānta-rasa functions as an equal member of the set of rasas but is simul-

taneously distinct being the most clear form of aesthetic bliss. Abhinavagupta likens it to the string of a jeweled necklace; while it may not be the most ap-pealing for most people, it is the string that gives form to the necklace, allow-ing the jewels of the other eight rasas to be relished. Relishing the rasas and particularly shānta-rasa is hinted as being as-good-as but never-equal-to the bliss of Self-realization experienced by yogis.

Sculpture. The first sculptures in the Indian subcontinent date back to the Indus Valley civilization, where stone and bronze carvings have been discovered. This is one of the earliest instances of sculpture in the world. Later, as Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism developed further, India produced some of the most intricate bronzes in the

world, as well as unrivaled temple carvings. Some huge shrines, such as the one at Ellora were not actually constructed using blocks, but instead carved out of rock, making them perhaps the largest and most intricate sculptures in the world.

During the 2nd to 1st century BCE in far northern India, in what is now southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, sculptures became more explicit, representing episodes of the Buddha’s life and teachings. Although India had a long sculptural tradition and a mastery of rich iconography, the Buddha was never represented in human form before this time, but only through some of his symbols. This may be because Gandharan Buddhist sculpture in modern Afghanistan displays Greek and Persian artistic influence. Artistically, the Gandharan school of sculpture is said to have contributed wavy hair, drapery covering both shoulders, shoes and sandals, acanthus leaf decorations, etc.

Indian painting. Indian painting has a very long history, although the seasonally humid Indian climate was difficult for the long-term preservation of paintings and there are far fewer survivals than of other forms of Indian art. The earliest Indian paintings were the rock paintings of pre-historic times, the petroglyphs as found in places like Bhimbetka, some of them from before 5500 BC. India's Buddhist literature is replete with examples of texts which 22

describe palaces of kings and the aristocratic class embellished with paintings, but the frescos of the Ajanta Caves are the most significant of the few sur-vivals.

Smaller scale painting in manuscripts was probably also practised in this period, though the earliest survivals are from the medieval period. Mughal painting represented a fusion of the Persian miniature with older Indian traditions, and from the 17th century its style was diffused across Indian princely courts of all religions, each developing a local style. Company paintings were made for British clients under the British raj, which from the 19th century also intro-duced art schools along Western lines, leading to mod-ern Indian painting, which is increasingly returning to its Indian routes.

Indian paintings provide an aesthetic continuum that extends from the early civilization to the present day. From being essentially religious in purpose in the beginning, Indian painting has evolved over the years to become a fusion of various cultures and traditions.

Indian music. India's classical music tradition, including Carnatic and Hindustani music, has a history spanning millennia and, developed over sev-eral eras, it remains fundamental to the lives of Indians today as sources of spiritual inspiration, cultural expression and pure entertainment. India is made up of several dozen ethnic groups, speaking their own languages and dialects, having very distinct cultural traditions.

Hindustani music is an Indian classical music tradition that goes back to Vedic times around 1000 BC, and further developed circa the 13th and 14th centuries AD with Persian influences and from existing religious and folk music. The practice of singing based on notes was popular even from the Vedic times where the hymns in Sama Veda, a sacred text, was sung as Samagana and not chanted. Develop-

ing a strong and diverse tradition over several centuries, it has contemporary traditions established primarily in India but also in Pakistan and Bangladesh. In contrast to Carnatic music, the other main Indian classical music tradition originating from the South, Hindustani music was not only influenced by an-cient Hindu musical traditions, historical Vedic philosophy and native Indian sounds but also enriched by the Persian performance practices of the Mughal-s.During the Medivel age especially in Mughals era various Gharana got fa-mous due to excellence and class in type of musics like raga.Tansen is one of

23

the navratna of Mughals Admiral Akbar. Classical genres are dhrupad, dhamar, khyal, tarana y sadra.

§4. Chinese aestheticsChinese art has a long history of varied

styles and emphases. In ancient times philoso-phers were already arguing about aesthetics. Confucius emphasized the role of the arts and humanities (especially music and poetry) in broadening human nature and aiding "li" (eti-quette, the rites) in bringing us back to what is essential about humanity. His opponent Mozi,

however, argued that music and fine arts were classist and wasteful, benefiting the rich over the poor.

By the 4th century AD, artists were debating in writing over the proper goals of art as well. Gu Kaizhi has 3 surviving books on this theory of paint -ing, for example, and it's not uncommon to find later artist/scholars who both create art and write about the creating of art. Religious and philosophical in-fluence on art was common (and diverse) but never universal; it is easy to find art that largely ignores philosophy and religion in almost every Chinese time period.

Early forms of art in China are found in the Neolithic Yangshao culture (Chinese: 仰韶文化 ; pinyin: Yǎngsháo Wénhuà), which dates back to the 6th millennium BC. Archeo-logical findings such as those at the Banpo have re-vealed that the Yangshao made pottery; early ceramics were unpainted and most often cord-marked. The first decorations were fish and human faces, but these eventually evolved into symmetrical-geometric ab-stract designs, some painted.

The most distinctive feature of Yangshao culture was the extensive use of painted pottery, especially human facial, animal, and geometric designs. Unlike the later Longshan culture, the Yangshao culture did not use pottery wheels in pottery making. Excavations have found that children were buried in painted pottery jars.

Porcelain is made from a hard paste made of the clay kaolin and a feldspar called petuntse, which cements the vessel and seals any pores. China has become synonymous with high-quality porcelain. Most china pots comes from the city of Jingdezhen in China's Jiangxi province. Jingdezhen, under a variety of names, has been central to porcelain production in China since at least the early Han Dynasty.

24

The most noticeable difference between porcelain and the other pottery clays is that it "wets" very quickly (that is, added water has a noticeably greater effect on the plasticity for porcelain than other clays), and that it tends to continue to "move" longer than other clays, requiring experience in han-dling to attain optimum results. During medieval times in Europe, porcelain was very expensive and in high demand for its beauty. TLV mirrors also date from the Han dynasty.

Buddhism arrived in China around the 1st century AD (although there are some traditions about a monk visiting China during Asoka's reign), and through to the 8th century it became very active and creative in the develop-ment of Buddhist art, particularly in the area of statuary. Receiving this distant religion, China soon incorporated strong Chinese traits in its artistic expres-sion.

In the fifth to sixth century the Northern Dynasties, rather removed from the original sources of inspiration, tended to develop rather symbolic and ab-stract modes of representation, with schematic lines. Their style is also said to be solemn and majestic. The lack of corporeality of this art, and its distance from the original Buddhist objective of expressing the pure ideal of enlighten-ment in an accessible, realistic manner, progressively led to a research towards more naturalism and realism, leading to the expression of Tang Buddhist art.

In ancient China, painting and calligraphy were the most highly appreci-ated arts in court circles and were produced almost exclusively by amateurs, aristocrats and scholar-officials who alone had the leisure to perfect the tech-nique and sensibility necessary for great brushwork. Calligraphy was thought to be the highest and purest form of painting. The implements were the brush pen, made of animal hair, and black inks, made from pine soot and animal glue. Writing as well as painting was done on silk. But after the invention of paper in the 1st century, silk was gradually replaced by the new and cheaper material. Original writings by famous calligraphers have been greatly valued throughout China's history and are mounted on scrolls and hung on walls in the same way that paintings are.

Wang Xizhi was a famous Chinese calligrapher who lived in the 4th cen-tury AD. His most famous work is the Lanting Xu, the preface of a collection of poems written by a number of poets when gathering at Lan Ting near the town of Shaoxing in Zhejiang province and engaging in a game called "qu shui liu shang".

Wei Shuo was a well-known calligrapher of Eastern Jin Dynasty who es-tablished consequential rules about the Regular Script. Her well-known works include Famous Concubine Inscription (名姬帖 Ming Ji Tie) and The Inscrip-tion of Wei-shi He'nan (衛氏和南帖 Wei-shi He'nan Tie).

25

§5. African aestheticsAfrican art existed in many forms and styles, and with fairly little influ-

ence from outside Africa. Most of it followed traditional forms and the aes-thetic norms were handed down orally as well as written. Sculpture and per-formance art are prominent, and abstract and partially abstracted forms are valued, and were valued long before influence from the Western tradition be-gan in earnest. The Nok culture is testimony to this. The mosque of Timbuktu shows that specific areas of Africa developed unique aesthetics.

Thematic Elements: Emphasis on the human figure: The human figure has always been the

primary subject matter for most African art, and this emphasis even influenced certain European traditions. For example, in the fifteenth century Portugal traded with the Sapi culture near the Ivory Coast in West Africa, who created elaborate ivory saltcellars that were hybrids of African and European designs, most notably in the addition of the human figure (the human figure typically did not appear in Portuguese saltcellars). The human figure may symbolize the living or the dead, may reference chiefs, dancers, or various trades such as drummers or hunters, or even may be an anthropomorphic representation of a god or have other votive function. Another common theme is the inter-mor-phosis of human and animal.

Visual abstraction: African artworks tend to favor visual abstraction over naturalistic representation. This is because many African artworks gener-alize stylistic norms. Ancient Egyptian art, also usually thought of as naturalis-tically depictive, makes use of highly abstracted and regimented visual canons, especially in painting, as well as the use of different colors to repre-sent the qualities and characteristics of an individual being depicted

Emphasis on sculpture: African artists tend to favor three-dimensional artworks over two-dimensional works. Even many African paintings or cloth works were meant to be experienced three-dimensionally. House paintings are often seen as a continuous design wrapped around a house, forcing the viewer to walk around the work to experience it fully; while decorated cloths are worn as decorative or ceremonial garments, transforming the wearer into a liv-ing sculpture. Distinct from the static form of traditional Western sculpture African art displays animation, a readiness to move.

Emphasis on performance art: An extension of the utilitarianism and three-dimensionality of traditional African art is the fact that much of it is crafted for use in performance contexts, rather than in static ones. For exam-ple, masks and costumes very often are used in communal, ceremonial con-texts, where they are "danced." Most societies in Africa have names for their masks, but this single name incorporates not only the sculpture, but also the meanings of the mask, the dance associated with it, and the spirits that reside within. In African thought, the three cannot be differentiated.26

Nonlinear scaling: Often a small part of an African design will look similar to a larger part, such as the diamonds at different scales in the Kasai pattern at right. Louis Senghor, Senegal’s first president, referred to this as "dynamic symmetry." William Fagg, the British art historian, compared it to the logarithmic mapping of natural growth by biologist D’Arcy Thompson. More recently it has been described in terms of fractal geometry.

The origins of African art lie long before recorded history. African rock art in the Sahara in Niger preserves 6000-year old carvings. The earliest known sculptures are from the Nok culture of Nigeria, made around 500 BC. Along with sub-Saharan Africa, the cultural arts of the western tribes, ancient Egyptian paintings and artifacts, and indigenous southern crafts also contrib-uted greatly to African art. Often depicting the abundance of surrounding na-ture, the art was often abstract interpretations of animals, plant life, or natural designs and shapes.

More complex methods of producing art were developed in sub-Saharan Africa around the 10th century, some of the most no-table advancements include the bronzework of Igbo Ukwu and the terracottas and metalworks of Ile Ife Bronze and brass castings, often ornamented with ivory and precious stones, became highly prestigious in much of West Africa, sometimes being limited to the work of court artisans and identified with royalty, as with the Benin Bronzes.

The Nok culture appeared in Nigeria around 1000 B.C. and mysteriously vanished around 500 AD in the region of West Africa. This region lies in Central Nigeria. The culture’s social system is thought to have

been highly advanced. The Nok culture was considered to be the earliest sub-Saharan producer of life-sized Terracotta. It is suggested that the society even-tually evolved into the later Yoruba Kingdom of Ife.

The refinement of this culture is attested to by the image of a Nok digni-tary at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The dignitary is portrayed wearing a "shepherds crook" affixed with an elastic material to the right arm. The digni-tary is also portrayed sitting with flared nostrils, and an open mouth suggest-ing performance. According to some accounts, based on artistic similarities to both early Yoruba art forms and Nok forms, there may be connections be-tween them and the contemporary Yoruba people. Later brass and terracotta sculptures of the Ife and Benin cultures show significant similarities with those found at Nok.

Iron use, in smelting and forging for tools, appears in Nok culture in Africa at least by 550 BC and more probably in the middle of the second mil-lennium BC (between 1400 BC and 1600 BC depending on references).

27

Nok sculptures also depict animals and humans. Their function is still un-known, since scientific field work is still missing. For the most part, the terra-cotta is preserved in the form of scattered fragments. That is why Nok art is well known today only for the heads, both male and female, whose hairstyles are particularly detailed and refined. The statues are in fragments because the discoveries are usually made from alluvial mud, in terrain made by the erosion of water. The terracotta statues found there are hidden, rolled, polished, and broken. Rarely are works of great size conserved intact making them highly valued on the international art market.

The terracotta figures are hollow, coil built, nearly life sized human heads and bodies that are depicted with highly stylized features, abundant jew-ellery, and varied postures. Some artifacts have been found illustrating a plethora of physical ailments, including debilitating disease and facial paraly-sis. Other associated pieces include plant and animal motifs.

Little is known of the original function of the pieces, but theories include ancestor portrayal, grave markers, and charms to prevent crop failure, infertil-ity, and illness. Also, based on the dome-shaped bases found on several fig-ures, they could have been used as finials for the roofs of ancient structures.

Margaret Young-Sanchez, Associate Curator of Art of the Americas, Africa, and Oceania in The Cleveland Museum of Art, explains that most Nok ceramics were shaped by hand from coarse-grained clay and subtractively sculpted in a manner that suggests an influence from wood carving. After some drying, the sculptures were covered with slip and burnished to produce a smooth, glossy surface. The figures are hollow, with several openings to facil-itate thorough drying and firing. The firing process most likely resembled that used today in Nigeria, in which the pieces are covered with grass, twigs, and leaves and burned for several hours.

The Nok culture was discovered in 1928 on the Jos Plateau during tin mining.

Lt-Colonel John Dent-Young, an Englishman, was leading mining opera-tions in the Nigerian village of Nok. During these operations, one of the min-ers found a small terracotta of a monkey head. Other finds included a terra-cotta human head and a foot. The colonel, at a later date, had these artifacts placed in a museum in Jos.

Questions1.What is Kalos kagathos?2.What was the Plato’s attitude to art?3.What was the Aristotle’s contribution in the development of Aesthetics?4.What is mimesis?5.What arabesque?6.What are the main features of islamic architecture?

28

7.How Buddhism has influenced the Chinese aesthetics?8.Give the characteristics of the Nok art.

29

Topic №3. THE MEDIEVAL AESTHECTICS(5th to the 15th century)

Plan1. General characteristics of Medieval aesthetics2. Early Christian art3. Byzantine art4. Insular art5. Gothic art

§1. General characteristics of Medieval aestheticsSurviving medieval art is primarily religious in focus and funded largely

by the State, Roman Catholic or Orthodox church, powerful ecclesiastical in-dividuals, or wealthy secular patrons. These art pieces often served a liturgical function, whether as chalices or even as church buildings themselves. Objects of fine art from this period were frequently made from rare and valuable mate-rials, such as gold and lapis, the cost of which commonly exceeded the wages of the artist.

A chalice (from Latin calix, cup, borrowed from Greek kalyx, shell, husk) is a goblet or footed cup intended to hold a drink. In general religious terms, it is intended for drinking during a ceremony.

Medieval aesthetics in the realm of phi-losophy built upon Classical thought, con-tinuing the practice of Plotinus by employ-ing theological terminology in its explica-tions. St. Bonaventure’s “Retracing the Arts to Theology”, a primary example of this method, discusses the skills of the artisan as gifts given by God for the purpose of dis-closing God to mankind, which purpose is achieved through four lights: the light of skill in mechanical arts which discloses the world of artifacts; which light is guided by the light of sense perception which discloses the world of natural forms; which light, con-sequently, is guided by the light of philoso-

phy which discloses the world of intellectual truth; finally, this light is guided by the light of divine wisdom which discloses the world of saving truth.

Saint Thomas Aquinas's aesthetic is probably the most famous and influ-ential theory among medieval authors, Thomas, like many other medievals, never gives a systematic account of beauty itself, but several scholars have 30

conventionally arranged his thought—though not always with uniform conclu-sions—using relevant observations spanning the entire corpus of his work. While Aquinas's theory follows generally the model of Aristotle, he develops a singular aesthetics which incorporates elements unique to his thought. Um-berto Eco's The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas identifies the three main char-acteristics of beauty in Aquinas's philosophy: integritas sive perfectio, conso-nantia sive debita proportio, and claritas sive splendor formae. While Aristo-tle likewise identifies the first two characteristics, St. Thomas conceives of the third as an appropriation from principles developed by neo-Platonic and Au-gustinian thinkers.

§2. Early christian art Early christian art, more generally described as Late Antique art, covers

the period from about 200 (before which no distinct Christian art survives), until the onset of a fully Byzantine style in about 500. There continue to be different views as to when the medieval period begins during this time, both in terms of general history and specifically art history, but it is most often placed late in the period. In the course of the 4th century Christianity went from being a persecuted popular sect to the official religion of the Empire, adapting exist-ing Roman styles and often iconography, from both popular and Imperial art. From the start of the period the main survivals of Christian art are the tomb-paintings in popular styles of the catacombs of Rome, but by the end there were a number of lavish mosaics in churches built under Imperial patronage. Over this period imperial Late Roman art went through a strikingly "baroque" phase, and then largely abandoned classical style and Greek realism in favour of a more mystical and hieratic style—a process that was well underway be-fore Christianity became a major influence on imperial art. Influences from

Eastern parts of the Empire—Egypt, Syria and beyond, and also a robust "Italic" ver-nacular tradition, contributed to this process. Figures are mostly seen frontally staring out at the viewer, where classical art tended to show a profile view - the change was eventually seen even on coins. The in-dividuality of portraits, a great strength of Roman art, declines sharply, and the anatomy and drapery of figures is shown with much less realism. The models from which medieval Northern Europe in partic-ular formed its idea of "Roman" style were nearly all portable Late Antique works, and

the Late Antique carved sarcophagi found all over the former Roman Empire; 31

the determination to find earlier "purer" classical models, was a key element in the art all'antica of the Renaissance.

§3. Byzantine artByzantine art is the art of the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire formed

after the division of the Roman Empire between Eastern and Western halves, and sometimes of parts of Italy under Byzantine rule. It emerges from the Late Antique period in about 500 and soon formed a tradition distinct from that of Catholic Europe but with great influence over it. In the early medieval period the best Byzantine art, often from the large Imperial workshops, represented an ideal of sophistication and technique which European patrons tried to emu-late. During the period of Byzantine iconoclasm in 730–843 the vast majority of icons (sacred images usually painted on wood) were destroyed; so little re-mains that today any discovery sheds new understanding, and most remaining works are in Italy (Rome and Ravenna etc.), or Egypt at Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai.

§4. Insular artInsular art refers to the distinct style found

in Ireland and Britain from about the 7th cen-tury, to about the 10th century, lasting later in Ireland, and parts of Scotland. The style saw a fusion between the traditions of Celtic art, the Germanic Migration period art of the Anglo-Saxons and the Christian forms of the book, high crosses and liturgical metalwork. Ex-tremely detailed geometric, interlace, and stylised animal decoration, with forms derived from secular metalwork like brooches, spread boldly across manuscripts, usually gospel books like the Book of Kells, with whole carpet pages devoted to such designs, and the devel-opment of the large decorated and historiated

initial. There were very few human figures—most often these were Evangelist portraits—and these were crude, even when closely following Late Antique models.

The insular manuscript style was transmitted to the continent by the Hi-berno-Scottish mission, and its anti-classical energy was extremely important in the formation of later medieval styles. In most Late Antique manuscripts text and decoration were kept clearly apart, though some initials began to be enlarged and elaborated, but major insular manuscripts sometimes take a whole page for a single initial or the first few words (see illustration) at begin-32

nings of gospels or other sections in a book. Allowing decoration a "right to roam" was to be very influential on Romanesque and Gothic art in all media.

The buildings of the monasteries for which the insular gospel books were made were then small and could fairly be called primitive, especially in Ire-land. There increasingly were other decorations to churches, where possible in precious metals, and a handful of these survive, like the Ardagh Chalice, to-gether with a larger number of extremely ornate and finely made pieces of sec-ular high-status jewellery, the Celtic brooches probably worn mainly by men, of which the Tara Brooch is the most spectacular.

"Franco-Saxon" is a term for a school of late Carolingian illumination in north-eastern France that used insular-style decoration, including super-large initials, sometimes in combination with figurative images typical of contem-porary French styles. The "most tenacious of all the Carolingian styles", it continued until as late as the 11th century.

§4. Gothic artGothic art is a variable term depend-

ing on the craft, place and time. The term originated with the Gothic architecture which developed in France from about 1137 with the rebuilding of the Abbey Church of St Denis. As with Romanesque architecture, this included sculpture as an integral part of the style, with even larger portals and other figures on the facades of churches the location of the most impor-tant sculpture, until the late period, when large carved altarpieces and reredos, usu-ally in painted and gilded wood, became an important focus in many churches. Gothic painting did not appear until around 1200 (this date has many qualifica-tions), when it diverged from Romanesque style. A Gothic style in sculpture originates in France around 1144 and spread throughout Europe, becoming by the 13th century the international style, re-placing Romanesque, though in sculpture and painting the transition was not as sharp as in architecture.

The majority of Romanesque cathedrals and large churches were re-placed by Gothic buildings, at least in those places benefiting from the eco-nomic growth of the period – Romanesque architecture is now best seen in ar-eas that were subsequently relatively depressed, like many southern regions of France and Italy, or northern Spain. The new architecture allowed for much

33

larger windows, and stained glass of a quality never excelled is perhaps the type of art most associated in the popular mind with the Gothic, although churches with nearly all their original glass, like the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, are extremely rare anywhere, and unknown in Britain.

Most Gothic wall-paintings have also disappeared; these remained very common, though in parish churches often rather crudely executed. Secular buildings also often had wall-paintings, although royalty preferred the much more expensive tapestries, which were carried along as they travelled between their many palaces and castles, or taken with them on military campaigns – the finest collection of late-medieval textile art comes from the Swiss booty at the Battle of Nancy, when they defeated and killed Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and captured all his baggage train.

During this period panel painting for altarpieces, often polyptyches and smaller works became newly important. Previously icons on panels had been much more common in Byzantine art than in the West, although many now lost panel paintings made in the West are documented from much earlier peri-ods, and initially Western painters on panel were very largely under the sway of Byzantine models, especially in Italy, from where most early Western panel paintings come. The process of establishing a distinct Western style was be-gun by Cimabue and Duccio, and completed by Giotto, who is traditionally re-garded as the starting point for the development of Renaissance painting. Most panel painting remained more conservative than miniature painting however, partly because it was seen by a wide public.

With the shift from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, art likewise changed its focus, as much in its content as in its mode of expression.

Questions1. What are the main motifs of aesthetics of medieval times?2. How can you characterize the early Christian art?3. Give the characteristics of gothic art.

34

Topic №4. THE AESTHETICS OF RENAISSANCE AND ROMANTICISM

Plan1. Renaissance as a cultural movement2. Latin and Greek phases of Renaissance3. Cultural conditions in Florence4. Renaissance art 5. Romanticism art

§1. Renaissance as a cultural movementThe Renaissance was a cultural movement that profoundly affected Euro-

pean intellectual life in the early modern period. Beginning in Italy, and spreading to the rest of Europe by the 16th century, its influence affected liter-ature, philosophy, art, politics, science, religion, and other aspects of intellec-tual inquiry. Renaissance scholars employed the humanist method in study, and searched for realism and human emotion in art.

Renaissance thinkers sought out in Europe's monastic libraries and the crumbling Byzantine Em-pire the literary, historical, and oratorical texts of an-tiquity, typically written in Latin or ancient Greek, many of which had fallen into obscurity. It is in their new focus on literary and historical texts that Renais-sance scholars differed so markedly from the medieval scholars of the Renaissance of the 12th century, who had focused on studying Greek and Arabic works of natural sciences, philosophy and mathematics, rather than on such cultural texts. Renaissance humanists did not reject Christianity; quite the contrary, many of the Renaissance's greatest works were devoted to it, and the Church patronized many works of Renaissance art. However, a subtle shift took place in the way that intellectuals approached re-ligion that was reflected in many other areas of cultural life. In addition, many Greek Christian works, including the Greek New Testament, were brought back from Byzantium to Western Europe and engaged Western scholars for the first time since late antiquity. This new engagement with Greek Christian works, and particularly the return to the original Greek of the New Testament promoted by humanists Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus, would help pave the way for the Protestant Reformation.

Artists such as Masaccio strove to portray the human form realistically, developing techniques to render perspective and light more naturally. Political philosophers, most famously Niccolò Machiavelli, sought to describe political

35

life as it really was, that is to understand it rationally. A critical contribution to Italian Renaissance humanism Pico della Mirandola wrote the famous text "De hominis dignitate" (Oration on the Dignity of Man, 1486), which consists of a series of theses on philosophy, natural thought, faith and magic defended against any opponent on the grounds of reason. In addition to studying classi-cal Latin and Greek, Renaissance authors also began increasingly to use ver-nacular languages; combined with the introduction of printing, this would al-low many more people access to books, especially the Bible.

In all, the Renaissance could be viewed as an attempt by intellectuals to study and improve the secular and worldly, both through the revival of ideas from antiquity, and through novel approaches to thought. Some scholars, such as Rodney Stark, play down the Renaissance in favor of the earlier innovations of the Italian city states in the High Middle Ages, which married responsive government, Christianity and the birth of capitalism. This analysis argues that, whereas the great European states (France and Spain) were absolutist monar-chies, and others were under direct Church control, the independent city re-publics of Italy took over the principles of capitalism invented on monastic es-tates and set off a vast unprecedented commercial revolution which preceded and financed the Renaissance.

Most historians agree that the ideas that characterized the Renaissance had their origin in late 13th century Florence, in particular with the writings of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), as well as the painting of Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337). Some writers date the Renais-sance quite precisely; one proposed starting point is 1401, when the rival ge-niuses Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi competed for the contract to build the bronze doors for the Baptistery of the Florence Cathedral (Ghiberti won). Others see more general competition between artists and polymaths such as Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, and Masaccio for artistic commis-sions as sparking the creativity of the Renaissance. Yet it remains much de-bated why the Renaissance began in Italy, and why it began when it did. Ac-cordingly, several theories have been put forward to explain its origins.

During the Renaissance, money and art went hand in hand. Artists de-pended totally on patrons while the patrons needed money to sustain geniuses. Wealth was brought to Italy in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries by expanding trade into Asia and Europe. Silver mining in Tyrol increased the flow of money. Luxuries from the Eastern world, brought home during the Crusades, increased the prosperity of Genoa and Venice.

§2. Latin and Greek phases of RenaissanceIn stark contrast to the High Middle Ages, when Latin scholars focused al-

most entirely on studying Greek and Arabic works of natural science, philoso-phy and mathematics, Renaissance scholars were most interested in recovering 36

and studying Latin and Greek literary, historical, and oratorical texts. Broadly speaking, this began in the 14th century with a Latin phase, when Renaissance scholars such as Petrarch, Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), Niccolò de' Niccoli (1364–1437) and Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459 AD) scoured the libraries of Europe in search of works by such Latin authors as Cicero, Livy and Seneca. By the early 15th century, the bulk of such Latin literature had been recovered; the Greek phase of Renaissance humanism was now under way, as Western European scholars turned to recovering ancient Greek literary, historical, oratori-

cal and theological texts.Unlike the case of those Latin texts, which had been preserved and stud-

ied in Western Europe since late antiquity, the study of ancient Greek texts was very limited in medieval Western Europe. Ancient Greek works on sci-ence, maths and philosophy had been studied since the High Middle Ages in Western Europe and in the medieval Islamic world, but Greek literary, oratori-cal and historical works, (such as Homer, the Greek dramatists, Demosthenes and Thucydides and so forth), were not studied in either the Latin or medieval Islamic worlds; in the Middle Ages these sorts of texts were only studied by Byzantine scholars. One of the greatest achievements of Renaissance scholars was to bring this entire class of Greek cultural works back into Western Eu-rope for the first time since late antiquity. This movement to reintegrate the regular study of Greek literary, historical, oratorical and theological texts back into the Western European curriculum is usually dated to Coluccio Salutati's invitation to the Byzantine diplomat and scholar Manuel Chrysoloras (c.1355–1415) to Florence to teach Greek.

§3. Cultural conditions in FlorenceIt has long been a matter of debate why the Renaissance began in Flo-

rence, and not elsewhere in Italy. Scholars have noted several features unique to Florentine cultural life which may have caused such a cultural movement. Many have emphasized the role played by the Medici, a banking family and later ducal ruling house, in patronizing and stimulating the arts. Lorenzo de' Medici (1449–1492) was the catalyst for an enormous amount of arts patron-age, encouraging his countryman to commission works from Florence's lead-ing artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, and Michelangelo Buonarroti.

The Renaissance was certainly underway before Lorenzo came to power; indeed, before the Medici family itself achieved hegemony in Florentine soci-ety. Some historians have postulated that Florence was the birthplace of the

37

Renaissance as a result of luck, i.e. because "Great Men" were born there by chance. Da Vinci, Botticelli and Michelangelo were all born in Tuscany. Ar-guing that such chance seems improbable, other historians have contended that these "Great Men" were only able to rise to prominence because of the pre-vailing cultural conditions at the time.

§4. Renaissance artRenaissance art is the painting, sculpture and decorative arts of that pe-

riod of European history known as the Renaissance, emerging as a distinct style in Italy in about 1400, in parallel with developments which occurred in philosophy, literature, music and science. Renaissance art, perceived as a "re-

birth" of ancient traditions, took as its foundation the art of Classical antiquity, but transformed that tradition by the absorption of recent developments in the art of Northern Europe and by application of contemporary scientific knowledge. Renais-sance art, with Renaissance Humanist philosophy, spread throughout Europe, affecting both artists and their patrons with the development of new techniques and new artistic sensibilities. Renais-sance art marks the transition of Europe from the medieval period to the Early modern age.

In many parts of Europe, Early Renaissance art was created in parallel with Late Medieval art. By 1500 the Renaissance style prevailed. As Late Renaissance art (Mannerism) developed, it took

on different and distinctive characteristics in every region.The influences upon the development of Renaissance art in the early 15th

century are those that also affected Philosophy, Literature, Architecture, The-ology, Science, Government and other aspects of society. The following list presents a summary, dealt with more fully in the main articles that are cited above:

Classical texts, lost to European scholars for centuries, became avail-able. These included Philosophy, Prose, Poetry, Drama, Science, a thesis on the Arts and Early Christian Theology.

Simultaneously, Europe gained access to advanced mathematics which had its provenance in the works of Islamic scholars.

The advent of movable type printing in the 15th century meant that ideas could be disseminated easily, and an increasing number of books were written for a broad public.

The establishment of the Medici Bank and the subsequent trade it generated brought unprecedented wealth to a single Italian city, Florence.38

Cosimo de' Medici set a new standard for patronage of the arts, not associated with the church or monarchy.

Humanist philosophy meant that man's relationship with humanity, the universe and with God was no longer the exclusive province of the Church.

A revived interest in the Classics brought about the first archaeologi-cal study of Roman remains by the architect Brunelleschi and sculptor Do-natello. The revival of a style of architecture based on classical precedents in-spired a corresponding classicism in painting and sculpture, which manifested itself as early as the 1420s in the paintings of Masaccio and Uccello.

The improvement of oil paint and developments in oil-painting tech-nique by Netherlandish artists such as Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden and Hugo van der Goes led to its adoption in Italy from about 1475 and had ultimately lasting effects on painting practices, worldwide.

The serendipitous presence within the region of Florence in the early 15th century of certain individuals of artistic genius, most notably Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Piero della Francesca, Donatello and Michelozzo formed an ethos out of which sprang the great masters of the High Renais-sance, as well as supporting and encouraging many lesser artists to achieve work of extraordinary quality.

A similar heritage of artistic achievement occurred in Venice through the talented Bellini family, their influential inlaw Mantegna, Giorgione, Titian and Tintoretto.

The publication of two treatises by Leone Battista Alberti, De Pitura (On Painting), 1435, and De re aedificatoria (Ten Books on Architecture), 1452.

The "universal genius" Leonardo da Vinci was to further perfect the as-pects of pictorial art (lighting, linear and atmospheric perspective, anatomy, foreshortening and characterisation) that had preoccupied artists of the Early Renaissance, in a lifetime of studying and meticulously recording his observa-tions of the natural world. His adoption of oil paint as his primary media meant that he could depict light and its effects on the landscape and objects more naturally and with greater dramatic effect than had ever been done be-fore, as demonstrated in the Mona Lisa. His dissection of cadavers carried for-ward the understanding of skeletal and muscular anatomy, as seen in the un-finished St Jerome. His depiction of human emotion in The Last Supper set the benchmark for religious painting.

The art of Leonardo's younger contemporary Michelangelo took a very different direction. Michelangelo, in neither his painting nor his sculpture demonstrates any interest in the observation of any natural object except the human body. He perfected his technique in depicting it, while in his early twenties, by the creation of the enormous marble statue of David and the

39

group the Pieta, in St Peter's Basilica, Rome. He then set about an exploration of the expressive possibilities of the human anatomy. His commission by Pope Julius II to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling resulted in the supreme master -piece of figurative composition, which was to have profound effect on every subsequent generation of European artists.

Standing alongside Leonardo and Michelangelo as the third great painter of the High Renaissance was the younger Raphael, who in a short life span painted a great number of lifelike and engaging portraits, including those of Pope Julius II and his successor Pope Leo X, and numerous portrayals of the Madonna and Christ Child, including the Sistine Madonna.

In Northern Italy the High Renaissance represented by the religious paintings of Giovanni Bellini which include several large altarpieces of a type known as "Sacred Conversation" which show a group of saints around the en-throned Madonna. His contemporary Giorgione left a small number of enig-matic works, including The Tempest, the subject of which has remained a matter of speculation. The earliest works of Titian date from the era of the High Renaissance, including a massive altarpiece The Assumption of the Vir-gin which combines human action and drama with spectacular colour and at-mosphere.

The Renaissance marks the period of European history at the close of the Middle Ages and the rise of the Modern world. It represents a cultural rebirth from the 14th through the middle of the 17th centuries. Early Renaissance, mostly in Italy, bridges the art period during the fifteenth century, between the Middle Ages and the High Renaissance in Italy. It is generally known that Re-naissance matured in Northern Europe later, in 16th century. One of the distin-guishing features of Renaissance art was its development of highly realistic linear perspective. Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337) is credited with first treat-ing a painting as a window into space, but it was not until the demonstrations of architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) and the subsequent writings of Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) that perspective was formalized as an artis-tic technique. The development of perspective was part of a wider trend to-wards realism in the arts. To that end, painters also developed other tech-niques, studying light, shadow, and, famously in the case of Leonardo da Vinci, human anatomy. Underlying these changes in artistic method, was a re-newed desire to depict the beauty of nature, and to unravel the axioms of aes-thetics, with the works of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael representing artistic pinnacles that were to be much imitated by other artists. Other notable artists include Sandro Botticelli, working for the Medici in Florence, Do-natello another Florentine and Titian in Venice, among others.

Concurrently, in the Netherlands, a particularly vibrant artistic culture de-veloped, the work of Hugo van der Goes and Jan van Eyck having particular influence on the development of painting in Italy, both technically with the in-40

troduction of oil paint and canvas, and stylistically in terms of naturalism in representation. (For more, see Renaissance in the Netherlands). Later, the work of Pieter Brueghel the Elder would inspire artists to depict themes of ev-eryday life.

In architecture, Filippo Brunelleschi was foremost in studying the re-mains of ancient classical buildings, and with rediscovered knowledge from the 1st century writer Vitruvius and the flourishing discipline of mathematics, formulated the Renaissance style which emulated and improved on classical forms. Brunelleschi's major feat of engineering was the building of the dome of Florence Cathedral. The first building to demonstrate this is claimed to be the church of St. Andrew built by Alberti in Mantua. The outstanding architec-tural work of the High Renaissance was the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica, combining the skills of Bramante, Michelangelo, Raphael, Sangallo and Maderno.

The Roman orders types of columns are used: Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite. These can either be structural, supporting an ar-cade or architrave, or purely decorative, set against a wall in the form of pi -lasters. During the Renaissance, architects aimed to use columns, pilasters, and entablatures as an integrated system. One of the first buildings to use pi-lasters as an integrated system was in the Old Sacristy (1421–1440) by Filippo Brunelleschi.

Arches, semi-circular or (in the Mannerist style) segmental, are often used in arcades, supported on piers or columns with capitals. There may be a section of entablature between the capital and the springing of the arch. Al-berti was one of the first to use the arch on a monumental. Renaissance vaults do not have ribs. They are semi-circular or segmental and on a square plan, unlike the Gothic vault which is frequently rectangular.

The Renaissance artists were not pagans although they admired antiquity and they also kept some ideas and symbols of the medieval past. Nicola Pisano (c. 1220 – c. 1278) imitated classical forms by portraying scenes from the Bible. The Anunciation by Nicola Pisano, from the Baptistry at Pisa, demonstrates that classi-cal models influenced Italian art before the Renaissance took root as a literary movement

Italian renaissance paint-ing is the painting of the period beginning in the late 13th century and flourishing from the early 15th to late 16th centuries, occurring within the area of present-day Italy, which was at that time divided into many political areas. The painters of Re-

41

naissance Italy, although often attached to particular courts and with loyalties to particular towns, nonetheless wandered the length and breadth of Italy, of-ten occupying a diplomatic status and disseminating both artistic and philo-sophical ideas.

The city that is renowned as the birthplace of the Renaissance and in par-ticular, Renaissance painting, is Florence. A detailed background is given in the companion articles Renaissance and Renaissance architecture.

Italian Renaissance painting can be divided into four periods: the Proto-Renaissance, 1300–1400; the Early Renaissance, 1400–1475; the High Re-naissance, 1475–1525, and Mannerism, 1525–1600. These dates are approxi-mations rather than specific points because the lives of individual artists and their personal styles overlapped the different periods.

The Proto-Renaissance begins with the professional life of the painter Giotto and includes Taddeo Gaddi, Orcagna and Altichiero. The Early Renais-sance was marked by the work of Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Paolo Uccello, Piero della Francesca and Verrocchio. The High Renaissance period was that of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. The Mannerist period in-cluded Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo and Tintoretto.

Renaissance architecture is the architecture of the period between the early 15th and early 17th centuries in different re-gions of Europe, demonstrating a conscious re-vival and development of certain elements of an-cient Greek and Roman thought and material cul-ture. Stylistically, Renaissance architecture fol-lowed Gothic architecture and was succeeded by Baroque architecture. Developed first in Florence, with Filippo Brunelleschi as one of its innovators, the Renaissance style quickly spread to other Ital-ian cities. The style was carried to France, Ger-many, England, Russia and other parts of Europe at different dates and with varying degrees of im-pact.

The Renaissance style places emphasis on symmetry, proportion, geometry and the regularity of parts as they are demon-strated in the architecture of classical antiquity and in particular ancient Ro-man architecture, of which many examples remained. Orderly arrangements of columns, pilasters and lintels, as well as the use of semicircular arches, hemi-spherical domes, niches and aedicules replaced the more complex proportional systems and irregular profiles of medieval buildings.

Historians often divide the Renaissance in Italy into three phases. Whereas art historians might talk of an "Early Renaissance" period, in which they include developments in 14th century painting and sculpture, this is usu-42

ally not the case in architectural history. The bleak economic conditions of the late 14th century did not produce buildings that are considered to be part of the Renaissance. As a result, the word "Renaissance" among architectural his-torians usually applies to the period 1400 to ca. 1525, or later in the case of non-Italian Renaissances.

Historians often use the following designations: Renaissance (ca. 1400–1500); also known as the Quattrocento and

sometimes Early Renaissance High Renaissance (ca.1500–1525) Mannerism (ca. 1520–1600)Quattrocento. In the Quattrocento, concepts of architectural order were

explored and rules were formulated. The study of classical antiquity led in par-ticular to the adoption of Classical detail and ornamentation.

Space, as an element of architecture, was utilised differently from the way it had been in the Middle Ages. Space was organised by proportional logic, its form and rhythm subject to geometry, rather than being created by intuition as in Medieval buildings. The prime example of this is the Basilica di San Lorenzo in Florence by Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446).

High Renaissance. During the High Renaissance, concepts derived from classical antiquity were developed and used with greater surety. The most rep-resentative architect is Bramante (1444–1514) who expanded the applicability of classical architecture to contemporary buildings. His San Pietro in Montorio (1503) was directly inspired by circular Roman temples. He was, however, hardly a slave to the classical forms and it was his style that was to dominate Italian architecture in the 16th century.

Mannerism. During the Mannerist period, architects experimented with using architectural forms to emphasize solid and spatial relationships. The Re-naissance ideal of harmony gave way to freer and more imaginative rhythms. The best known architect associated with the Mannerist style was Michelan-gelo (1475–1564), who is credited with inventing the giant order, a large pi-laster that stretches from the bottom to the top of a façade. He used this in his design for the Campidoglio in Rome.

Prior to the 20th century, the term Mannerism had negative connotations, but it is now used to describe the historical period in more general non-judge-mental terms.

§5. Romanticism artRomanticism (or the Romantic Era or the "'Romantic Period"') was an

artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution. In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific ratio-

43

nalization of nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education and natural history.

In a basic sense, the term "Romanticism" has been used to refer to certain artists, poets, writers, musicians, as well as political, philosophical and social thinkers of the late 18th and early to mid 19th centuries. It has equally been used to refer to various artistic, intellectual, and social trends of that era. De-spite this general usage of the term, a precise characterization and specific def-inition of Romanticism have been the subject of debate in the fields of intel-lectual history and literary history throughout the 20th century, without any great measure of consensus emerging.

Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of defining Ro-manticism in his seminal article "On The Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars see romanticism as essentially continuous with the present, some like Robert Hughes see in it the inaugural moment of modernity, some like Chateaubriand, 'Novalis' and Samuel Taylor Coleridge see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to Enlightenment rationalism – a 'Counter-Enlightenment' – to be associated most closely with German Romanticism. Still others place it firmly in the di-rect aftermath of the French Revolution. An earlier definition comes from Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling."

The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aes-thetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, hor-ror and terror and awe-especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, made of spontaneity a desirable character (as in the musical impromptu), and argued for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage.

Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate a revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes more authentic than Rococo chinois-erie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.

Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rational-ism, the ideologies and events of the French Revolution laid the background from which both Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment emerged. The confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities; indeed, in the second half 44

of the 19th century, "Realism" was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanti-cism. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as heroic individualists and artists, whose pioneering examples would elevate society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority, which per-mitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong re-course to historical and natural inevitability, a zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas.

Romanticism in music. Although the term "Romanticism" when applied to music has come to imply the period roughly from the 1820s until around 1900, the contemporary application of "romantic" to music did not coincide with this modern interpretation. In 1810 E.T.A. Hoffmann called Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven the three "Romantic Composers", and Ludwig Spohr used the term "good Romantic style" to apply to parts of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Technically, Mozart and Haydn are considered Classical com-posers, and by most standards, Beethoven represents the start of the musical Romantic period. By the early 20th century, the sense that there had been a de-cisive break with the musical past led to the establishment of the 19th century as "The Romantic Era", and it is referred to as such in the standard encyclope-dias of music.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky's wide ranging output includes symphonies, operas, ballets, instrumental and chamber music and songs. He wrote some of the most popular concert and theatrical music in the classical repertoire, including

the ballets Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and opera Eugene Onegin.

The traditional modern discussion of the music of Romanticism includes elements, such as the grow-ing use of folk music, which are also directly related to the broader current of Romantic nationalism in the arts as well as aspects already present in 18th-century music, such as the cantabile accompanied melody to which Romantic composers beginning with Franz Schubert applied restless key modulations.

It is the period of 1815 to 1848 which must be regarded as the true age of Romanticism in music – the age of the last compositions of Beethoven (d. 1827) and Schubert (d. 1828), of the works of Schumann (d. 1856) and Chopin (d.1849), of the early struggles of Berlioz and Richard Wagner, of the great virtuosi such as Paganini (d. 1840), and the young Liszt and Thalberg. Now that we are able to listen to the work of Mendelssohn (d. 1847) stripped of the Biedermeier reputation unfairly attached to it, he can also be placed in this more appropriate context. After this period, with Chopin and Paganini dead, Liszt retired from the concert platform at a minor German court, Wagner effectively in exile until he obtained royal patronage in Bavaria, and Berlioz

45

still struggling with the bourgeois liberalism which all but smothered radical artistic endeavour in Europe, Romanticism in music was surely past its prime-giving way, rather, to the period of musical romantics.

Romanticism in literature. In literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation or criticism of the past, the cult of "sensibility" with its emphasis on women and children, the heroic isolation of the artist or narra-tor, and respect for a new, wilder, untrammeled and "pure" nature. Further-more, several romantic authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their writings on the supernatural/occult and human psy-chology. Romanticism also helped in the emergence of new ideas and in the process led to the emergence of positive voices that were beneficial for the marginalized sections of the society.

The roots of romanticism in poetry go back to the time of Alexander Pope (1688–1744). Early pioneers include Joseph Warton (headmaster at Win-chester College) and his brother Thomas Warton, professor of Poetry at Ox-ford University. Joseph maintained that invention and imagination were the chief qualities of a poet. The "poet's poet" Thomas Chatterton is generally considered to be the first Romantic poet in English. The Scottish poet James Macpherson influenced the early development of Romanticism with the inter-national success of his Ossian cycle of poems published in 1762, inspiring both Goethe and the young Walter Scott.

An early German influence came from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther had young men throughout Europe emulating its protagonist, a young artist with a very sensitive and pas-sionate temperament. At that time Germany was a multitude of small separate states, and Goethe's works would have a seminal influence in developing a unifying sense of nationalism. Another philosophic influence came from the German idealism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schelling, making Jena (where Fichte lived, as well as Schelling, Hegel, Schiller and the brothers Schlegel) a center for early German romanticism ("Jenaer Romantik"). Impor-tant writers were Ludwig Tieck, Novalis (Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 1799), Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Hölderlin. Heidelberg later became a center of German romanticism, where writers and poets such as Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff met regularly in liter-ary circles.

Important motifs in German Romanticism are travelling, nature, and an-cient myths. The later German Romanticism of, for example, E. T. A. Hoff-mann's Der Sandmann (The Sandman), 1817, and Joseph Freiherr von Eichen-dorff's Das Marmorbild (The Marble Statue), 1819, was darker in its motifs and has gothic elements.

Early Russian Romantism is associated with the writers Konstantin Batyushkov (A Vision on the Shores of the Lethe, 1809), Vasily Zhukovsky 46

(The Bard, 1811; Svetlana, 1813) and Nikolay Karamzin (Poor Liza, 1792; Ju-lia, 1796; Martha the Mayoress, 1802; The Sensitive and the Cold, 1803). However the principal exponent of Romanticism in Russia is Alexander Pushkin (The Prisoner of the Caucasus, 1820–1821; The Robber Brothers, 1822; Ruslan and Ludmila, 1820; Eugene Onegin, 1825–1832). Pushkin's work influenced many writers in the 19th century and led to his eventual recognition as Russia's greatest poet. Other Russian poets include Mikhail Ler-montov (A Hero of Our Time, 1839), Fyodor Tyutchev (Silentium!, 1830), Yevgeny Baratynsky's (Eda, 1826), Anton Delvig, and Wilhelm Küchel-becker. Influenced heavily by Lors Byron, Lermotov sought to explore the Ro-mantic emphasis on metaphysical discontent with society and self, while Tyutchev's poems often described scenes of nature or passions of love. Tyutchev commonly operated with such categories as night and day, north and south, dream and reality, cosmos and chaos, and the still world of winter and spring teeming with life. Baratynsky's style was fairly classical in nature, dwelling on the models of the previous century.

In the United States, romantic Gothic literature made an early appearance with Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) and Rip Van Winkle (1819), followed from 1823 onwards by the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper, with their emphasis on heroic simplicity and their fervent landscape descriptions of an already-exotic mythicized frontier peo-pled by "noble savages", similar to the philosophical theory of Rousseau, ex-emplified by Uncas, from The Last of the Mohicans. There are picturesque "local color" elements in Washington Irving's essays and especially his travel books. Edgar Allan Poe's tales of the macabre and his balladic poetry were more influential in France than at home, but the romantic American novel de-veloped fully in Nathaniel Hawthorne's atmosphere and melodrama. Later Transcendentalist writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson still show elements of its influence and imagination, as does the ro-mantic realism of Walt Whitman. The poetry of Emily Dickinson – nearly un-read in her own time—and Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick can be taken as epitomes of American Romantic literature. By the 1880s, however, psycho-logical and social realism was competing with romanticism in the novel.

Questions1. What are the main features of Renaissance?2. Who are the main representatives of the Renaissance period of art?3. What are the characteristic features of Romanticism?4. What famous composers of these periods do you know?

47

Topic №5. MODERN AESTHETICS

Plan1. Modernism as an aesthetic movement of late 17-th-early 20-th century2. Modernism in art3. Postmodern aesthetics

§1. Modernism as an aesthetic movement of late 17-th-early 20-th century

From the late 17th to the early 20th century Western aesthetics under-went a slow revolution into what is often called modernism. German and British thinkers emphasised beauty as the key component of art and of the aes-thetic experience, and saw art as necessarily aiming at absolute beauty.

For Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten aesthetics is the science of the sense experiences, a younger sister of logic, and beauty is thus the most perfect kind of knowledge that sense experience can have. For Immanuel Kant the aes-thetic experience of beauty is a judgment of a subjective but similar human truth, since all people should agree that “this rose is beautiful” if it in fact is. However, beauty cannot be reduced to any more basic set of features. For Friedrich Schiller aesthetic appreciation of beauty is the most perfect reconcil-iation of the sensual and rational parts of human nature.

For Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, the philosophy of art is the "organon" of philosophy concerning the relation between man and nature. So aesthetics began now to be the name for the philosophy of art. Friedrich von Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Georg Wil-helm Friedrich Hegel have also given lectures on aesthetics as philosophy of art after 1800.

For Hegel all culture is a matter of "absolute spirit" coming to be mani-fest to itself, stage by stage, changing to a perfection that only philosophy can approach. Art is the first stage in which the absolute spirit is manifest immedi-ately to sense-perception, and is thus an objective rather than subjective reve-lation of beauty.

For Arthur Schopenhauer aesthetic contemplation of beauty is the most free that the pure intellect can be from the dictates of will; here we contem-plate perfection of form without any kind of worldly agenda, and thus any in-trusion of utility or politics would ruin the point of the beauty. It is thus for Schopenhauer one way to fight the suffering.

The British were largely divided into intuitionist and analytic camps. The intuitionists believed that aesthetic experience was disclosed by a single men-tal faculty of some kind. For Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury this was identical to the moral sense, beauty just is the sensory version of 48

moral goodness. For Ludwig Wittgenstein aesthetics consisted in the descrip-tion of a whole culture which is a linguistic impossibility. That which consti -tutes aesthetics lies outside the realm of the language game.

On 7 January 1904 James Joyce attempted to publish A Portrait of the Artist, an essay-story dealing with aesthetics, only to have it rejected from the free-thinking magazine Dana. He decided, on his twenty-second birthday, to revise the story into a novel he called Stephen Hero. It was a fictional render-ing of Joyce's youth, but he eventually grew frustrated with its direction and abandoned this work. It was never published in this form, but years later, in Trieste, Joyce completely rewrote it as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The unfinished Stephen Hero was published after his death.

For Oscar Wilde the contemplation of beauty for beauty's sake was not only the foundation for much of his literary career but was quoted as saying "Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.".

Wilde famously toured the United States in 1882. He travelled across the United States spreading the idea of Aesthetics in a speech called "The English Renaissance." In his speech he proposed that Beauty and Aesthetics was "not languid but energetic. By beautifying the outward aspects of life, one would beautify the inner ones." The English Renaissance was, he said, "like the Ital-ian Renaissance before it, a sort of rebirth of the spirit of man".

For Francis Hutcheson beauty is disclosed by an inner mental sense, but is a subjective fact rather than an objective one. Analytic theorists like Henry Home, Lord Kames, William Hogarth, and Edmund Burke hoped to reduce beauty to some list of attributes. Hogarth, for example, thinks that beauty con-sists of (1) fitness of the parts to some design; (2) variety in as many ways as possible; (3) uniformity, regularity or symmetry, which is only beautiful when it helps to preserve the character of fitness; (4) simplicity or distinctness, which gives pleasure not in itself, but through its enabling the eye to enjoy va-riety with ease; (5) intricacy, which provides employment for our active ener-gies, leading the eye on "a wanton kind of chase"; and (6) quantity or magni-tude, which draws our attention and produces admiration and awe. Later ana-lytic aestheticians strove to link beauty to some scientific theory of psychol-ogy (such as James Mill) or biology (such as Herbert Spencer).

§2. Modernism in artModernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or

practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

49

Modernism was a revolt against the conservative values of realism. Ar-guably the most paradigmatic motive of modernism is the rejection of tradition and its reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms. Modernism rejected the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking and also rejected the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Cre-ator God in favor of the abstract, unconventional, largely uncertain ethic brought on by modernity, initiated around the turn of century by rapidly changing technology and further catalyzed by the horrific consequences of World War One on the cultural psyche of artists.

In general, the term modernism encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it new!" was paradig-matic of the movement's approach towards the obsolete. Another paradigmatic exhortation was articulated by philosopher and composer Theodor Adorno, who, in the 1940s, challenged conventional surface coherence and appearance of harmony typical of the rationality of Enlightenment thinking. A salient characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness. This self-consciousness of-ten led to experiments with form and work that draws attention to the pro-cesses and materials used (and to the further tendency of abstraction).

The modernist movement, at the beginning of the 20th century, marked the first time that the term "avant-garde", with which the movement was la-beled until the word "modernism" prevailed, was used for the arts (rather than in its original military and political context). Surrealism gained fame among the public as being the most extreme form of modernism, or "the avant-garde of modernism".

In the 1880s a strand of thinking began to assert that it was necessary to push aside previous norms entirely, instead of merely revising past knowledge in light of current techniques. The growing movement in art paralleled such developments as the Theory of Relativity in physics; the increasing integration of the internal combustion engine and industrialization; and the increased role of the social sciences in public policy. It was argued that, if the nature of real-ity itself was in question, and if restrictions which had been in place around human activity were falling, then art, too, would have to radically change. Thus, in the first fifteen years of the 20th century a series of writers, thinkers, and artists made the break with traditional means of orga-nizing literature, painting, and music.

Explosion period, 1910–1930. On the eve of the First World War a growing tension and unease with the social order, seen in the Russian Revolution of 50

1905 and the agitation of "radical" parties, also manifested itself in artistic works in every medium which radically simplified or rejected previous prac-tice. Young painters such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were causing a shock with their rejection of traditional perspective as the means of structuring paintings—a step that none of the impressionists, not even Cézanne, had taken. In 1907, as Picasso was painting Demoiselles d'Avignon, Oskar Kokoschka was writing Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, Hope of Women), the first Expressionist play (produced with scandal in 1909), and Arnold Schoenberg was composing his String Quartet No.2 in F-sharp minor, his first composition "without a tonal center." In 1911, Kandinsky painted Bild mit Kreis (Picture With a Circle) which he later called the first abstract paint-ing. In 1913—the year of Edmund Husserl's Ideas, Niels Bohr's quantized atom, Ezra Pound's founding of imagism, the Armory Show in New York, and, in Saint Petersburg, the "first futurist opera," Victory Over the Sun—an-other Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, working in Paris for Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, composed The Rite of Spring for a ballet, chore-ographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, that depicted human sacrifice.

Second generation, 1930–1945. By 1930, Modernism had entered popu-lar culture. With the increasing urbanization of populations, it was beginning to be looked to as the source for ideas to deal with the challenges of the day. As modernism gained traction in academia, it was developing a self-conscious theory of its own importance. Popular culture, which was not derived from high culture but instead from its own realities (particularly mass production) fueled much modernist innovation. By 1930 The New Yorker magazine began publishing new and modern ideas by young writers and humorists like Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, E.B. White, S.J. Perelman, and James Thurber, amongst others. Modern ideas in art appeared in commercials and lo-gos, the famous London Underground logo, designed by Edward Johnston in 1919, being an early example of the need for clear, easily recognizable and memorable visual symbols.

Abstract expressionism. In abstract painting during the 1950s and 1960s several new directions like hard-edge painting and other forms of geometric abstraction began to appear in artist studios and in radical avant-garde circles as a reaction against the subjectivism of abstract expressionism. Clement Greenberg became the voice of post-painterly abstraction when he curated an influential exhibition of new painting that toured important art museums throughout the United States in 1964. Color field painting, hard-edge painting and lyrical abstraction emerged as radical new directions.

Pop art. In 1962 the Sidney Janis Gallery mounted The New Realists, the first major pop art group exhibition in an uptown art gallery in New York City. Janis mounted the exhibition in a 57th Street storefront near his gallery at 15 E. 57th Street. The show sent shock-

51

waves through the New York School and reverberated worldwide. Earlier in England in 1958 the term "Pop Art" was used by Lawrence Alloway to de-scribe paintings that celebrated consumerism of the post World War II era. This movement rejected abstract expressionism and its focus on the hermeneu-tic and psychological interior in favor of art that depicted and often celebrated material consumer culture, advertising, and iconography of the mass produc-tion age. The early works of David Hockney and the works of Richard Hamil-ton and Eduardo Paolozzi were considered seminal examples in the move-ment. Meanwhile in the downtown scene in New York's East Village 10th Street galleries artists were formulating an American version of pop art. Claes Oldenburg had his storefront, and the Green Gallery on 57th Street began to show the works of Tom Wesselmann and James Rosenquist. Later Leo Castelli exhibited the works of other American artists, including those of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein for most of their careers. There is a con-nection between the radical works of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, the re-bellious Dadaists with a sense of humor, and pop artists like Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein, whose paintings reproduce the look of Benday dots, a technique used in commercial reproduction.

§3. Postmodern aestheticsEarly twentieth century artists, poets and composers challenged existing

notions of beauty, broadening the scope of art and aesthetics. In 1941, Eli Siegel, American philosopher and poet, founded Aesthetic Realism, the phi-losophy that reality itself is aesthetic, and that "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites."

Various attempts have been made to define Post-modern aesthetics. The challenge to the assumption that beauty was central to art and aesthetics, thought to be original, is actually continuous with older aesthetic theory; Aris-totle was the first in the Western tradition to classify "beauty" into types as in his theory of drama, and Kant made a distinction between beauty and the sub-lime. What was new was a refusal to credit the higher status of certain types, where the taxonomy implied a preference for tragedy and the sublime to com-edy and the Rococo.

Croce suggested that “expression” is central in the way that beauty was once thought to be central. George Dickie suggested that the sociological insti-tutions of the art world were the glue binding art and sensibility into unities.

Marshall McLuhan suggested that art always functions as a "counter-environment" designed to make visible what is usually invisible about a society. Theodor Adorno felt that aesthetics could not proceed without confronting the role of the culture industry in the com-modification of art and aesthetic experience. Hal Fos-

52

ter (art critic) attempted to portray the reaction against beauty and Modernist art in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Arthur Danto has described this reaction as "kalliphobia" (after the Greek word for beauty – 'ka-los'). André Malraux explains that the notion of beauty was connected to a particular conception of art that arose with the Renaissance and was still domi-nant in the eighteenth century (but was supplanted later). The discipline of aesthetics, which originated in the eighteenth century, mistook this transient state of affairs for a revelation of the permanent nature of art. Brian Massumi suggests to reconsider beauty following the aesthetical thought in the philoso-phy of Deleuze and Guattari.

Daniel Berlyne created the field of experimental aesthetics in the 1970s, for which he is still the most cited individual decades after his death.

Pneumaist aestheticism is a theory of art and a highly experimental ap-proach to art negating historical preconceptions of the aesthetic.

Jean-François Lyotard re-invokes the Kantian distinction between taste and the sublime. Sublime painting, unlike kitsch realism, "...will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain."

Sigmund Freud inaugurated aesthetical thinking in Psychoanalysis mainly via the "Uncanny" as aesthetical affect. Following Freud and Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan theorized aesthetics in terms of sublimation and the Thing.

Questions1. What are the main aesthetical ideas of the modern times?2. What period covers modern aesthetics3. What are the characteristic features modern aesthetics4. What art movement arises during this period?

53

Topic №6. THE AESTHETICAL IDEAS OF RUSSIAN AND UKRAINIAN CULTURE

Plan1. Russian culture2. Russian art forms3. Ukrainian culture4. Ukrainian art forms

§1. Russian cultureRussian culture is associated with the country of Russia and, sometimes,

specifically with ethnic Russians. It has a rich history and can boast a long tra-dition of excellence in every aspect of the arts, especially when it comes to lit -erature and philosophy, classical music and ballet, architecture and painting, cinema and animation, which all had considerable influence on the world cul-ture. The country also has a rich material culture and a strong tradition in tech-nology.

Russian culture started from that of the East Slavs, with their pagan beliefs and specific way of life in the wooded areas of Eastern Europe. Early on, the culture of Russian ancestors was much in-fluenced by neighbouring Finno-Ugric tribes and by nomadic, mainly Turkic, peoples of the Pontic steppe. In the late 1st millennium AD the Scandi-navian Vikings, or Varangians, also took part in the forming of Russian identity and Kievan Rus' state. Kievan Rus' had accepted Orthodox Christianity from the Eastern Roman Empire in 988, and this largely defined the Russian culture of next millen-nium as the synthesis of Slavic and Byzantine cul-tures. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Rus-sia remained the largest Orthodox nation in the world and claimed succession to the Byzantine legacy in the form of the Third Rome idea. At different points of its history, the country also was strongly in-fluenced by the culture of Western Europe. Since Peter the Great's reforms for two centuries Russian culture largely developed in the general context of Eu-ropean culture rather than pursuing its own unique ways. The situation changed in the 20th century, when the Communist ideology became a major factor in the culture of the Soviet Union, where Russia, or Russian SFSR, was the largest and leading part.

54

Nowadays, Russian cultural heritage is ranked seventh in the Nation Brands Index, based on interviews of some 20,000 people mainly from the Western countries and the Far East. That's with the fact, that due to relatively late involvement of Russia into the modern globalisation and international tourism, many aspects of Russian culture, like Russian jokes and the Soviet Art, remain largely unknown to foreigners.

§2. Russian art formsFolklore. Old Russian folklore takes its roots in the pagan beliefs of an-

cient Slavs and now is represented in the Russian fairy tales. Epic Russian bylinas are also an important part of Slavic mythology. The oldest bylinas of Kievan cycle were actually recorded mostly in the Russian North, especially in Karelia, where most of the Finnish national epic Kalevala was recorded as well.

Many of Russian fairy tales and bylinas were adapted for animation films, or for feature movies by the prominent directors like Aleksandr Ptushko (Ilya Muromets, Sadko) and Aleksandr Rou (Morozko, Vasilisa the Beautiful). Some Russian poets, including Pyotr Yershov and Leonid Filatov, made a number of well-

known poetical interpretations of the classical Russian fairy tales, and in some cases, like that of Alexander Pushkin, also created fully original fairy tale po-ems of great popularity.

Literature. Russian literature is considered to be among the most influen-tial and developed in the world, contributing many of the world's most famous literary works. Russia's literary history dates back to the 10th century; in the 18th century its development was boosted by the works of Mikhail Lomonosov and Denis Fonvizin, and by the early 19th century a modern na-tive tradition had emerged, producing some of the greatest writers of all time. This period and the Golden Age of Russian Poetry began with Alexander Pushkin, considered to be the founder of modern Russian literature and often described as the "Russian Shakespeare". It continued in the 19th century with the poetry of Mikhail Lermontov and Alexey Nekrasov, dramas of Aleksandr Ostrovsky and Anton Chekhov, and the prose of Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Tur-genev, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Ivan Goncharov, Aleksey Pisemsky and Nikolai Leskov. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in particular were titanic figures to the point that many literary critics have de-scribed one or the other as the greatest novelist ever.

55

Architecture. Russian archi-tecture began with the woodcraft buildings of ancient Slavs. Since Christianization of Kievan Rus' for several ages Russian architec-ture was influenced predomi-nantly by the Byzantine architec-ture, until the Fall of Constantino-ple. Apart from fortifications (kremlins), the main stone build-ings of aincient Rus' were Ortho-dox churches, with their many domes, often gilded or brightly painted. Aristo-tle Fioravanti and other Italian architects brought Renaissance trends into Rus-sia. The 16th century saw the development of unique tent-like churches culmi-nating in Saint Basil's Cathedral. By that time the onion dome design was also fully developed. In the 17th century, the "fiery style" of ornamentation flour-ished in Moscow and Yaroslavl, gradually paving the way for the Naryshkin baroque of the 1690s. After Peter the Great reforms had made Russia much closer to Western culture, the change of the architectural styles in Russia gen-erally followed that of Western Europe.

Icon painting. Russian icons are typically paintings on wood, often small, though some in churches and monasteries may be as large as a table

top. Many religious homes in Russia have icons hanging on the wall in the krasny ugol, the "red" or "beautiful" corner (see Icon Corner). There is a rich history and elaborate religious symbolism as-sociated with icons. In Russian churches, the nave is typically separated from the sanctuary by an iconostasis (Russian ikonostás) a wall of icons. Icon paintings in Russia attempted to help people with their prayers without idolizing the figure in the painting. The most comprehensive collection of Icon art is found at the Tretyakov Gallery.

Classical painting. The Russian Academy of Arts was created in 1757, aimed to give Russian artists an international role and status. Notable portrait painters from the Academy include Ivan Argunov, Fyodor Rokotov, Dmitry Levitzky, and Vladimir Borovikovsky.

In the early 19th century, when neoclassicism and romantism flourished, famous academic artists focused on mythological and Biblical themes, like Karl Briullov and Alexander Ivanov.

56

Soviet Art. During the Russian Revolution a movement was initiated to put all arts to service of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The instrument for this was created just days before the October Revolution, known as Proletkult, an abbreviation for "Proletarskie kulturno-prosvetitelnye organizatsii" (Proletarian Cultural and Enlightenment Organizations). A prominent theorist of this movement was Alexan-der Bogdanov. Initially, Narkompros (ministry of education), which was also in charge of the arts, supported Proletkult. Although Marxist in charac-ter, the Proletkult gained the disfavor of many party leaders, and by 1922 it had declined consid-erably. It was eventually disbanded by Stalin in

1932. De facto restrictions on what artists could paint were abandoned by the late 1980s.

However, in the late Soviet era many artists combined innovation with socialist realism including Ernst Neizvestny, Ilya Kabakov, Mikhail She-myakin, Erik Bulatov, and Vera Mukhina. They employed techniques as var-ied as primitivism, hyperrealism, grotesque, and abstraction. Soviet artists pro-duced works that were furiously patriotic and anti-fascist in the 1940s. After the Great Patriotic War Soviet sculptors made multiple monuments to the war dead, marked by a great restrained solemnity.

Folk music and dance. Russians have distinctive traditions of folk mu-sic. Typical ethnic Russian musical instruments are gusli, balalaika, zhaleika, balalaika contrabass, bayan accordion, Gypsy guitar and garmoshka. Folk music had great influence on the Russian classical composers, and in modern times it is a source of inspiration for a number of popular folk bands, most prominent being Melnitsa. Russian folk songs, as well as patriotic songs of the Soviet era, constitute the bulk of repertoire of the world-renown Red Army choir and other popular Rus-

sian ensembles.Ethnic Russian dances include khorovod, barynya, kamarinskaya, kaza-

chok and chechotka (a tap dance in bast shoes and with a bayan).Music. Music in 19th century Russia was defined by the tension between

classical composer Mikhail Glinka along with his followers, who embraced Russian national identity and added religious and folk elements to their com-positions, and the Russian Musical Society led by composers Anton and Niko-lay Rubinstein, which was musically conservative. The later Romantic tradi-tion of Tchaikovsky, one of the greatest composers of the Romantic era,

57

whose music has come to be known and loved for its distinctly Russian char -acter as well as its rich harmonies and stirring melodies, was brought into the 20th century by Sergei Rachmaninoff, one of the last great champions of the Romantic style of European classical music.

World-renowned composers of the 20th century included Scriabin, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Sviridov. During most of the Soviet Era, music was highly scrutinized and kept within a conser-vative, accessible idiom in conformity with the policy of socialist realism.

Soviet and Russian conservatories have turned out generations of world-renowned soloists. Among the best known are violinists David Oistrakh and Gi-don Kremer; cellist Mstislav Rostropovich; pianists Vladimir Horowitz, Sviatoslav Richter, and Emil Gilels; and vocalists Fyodor Shalyapin, Galina Vish-nevskaya, Anna Netrebko and Dmitry Hvorostovsky.

Ballet. The original purpose of the ballet in Rus-sia was to entertain the imperial court. The first ballet company was the Imperial School of Ballet in St. Pe-tersburg in the 1740s. The Ballet Russe was a ballet company founded in the 1909 by Sergey Diaghilev, an enormously important figure in the Russian bal-let scene. Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes' travels abroad profoundly influ-enced the development of dance worldwide. The headquarters of his ballet company was located in Paris, France. A protégé of Diaghileve, George Bal-anchine, founded the New York City Ballet Company in 1948.

During the early 20th century, Russian ballet dancers Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky rose to fame. Soviet ballet preserved the perfected 19th cen-tury traditions, and the Soviet Union's choreography schools produced one in-ternationally famous star after another, including Maya Plisetskaya, Rudolf Nureyev, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. The Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow and the Mariinsky in Saint Petersburg remain famous throughout the world.

§3. Ukrainian cultureUkrainian culture refers to the culture associated with the country of

Ukraine and sometimes with ethnic Ukrainians across the globe. It contains el-ements of other Eastern European cultures as well as some Western European influences. Within Ukraine, there are a number of other ethnic groups with sizable populations, most notably Russians. Ukrainian customs are heavily in-fluenced by the Eastern Orthodox Church and Pre-Christian Alpine traditions still present in Slavic mythology.

58

Ukraine has a shared culture with neighboring nations, dating back to the 9th century and the Land of Rus. Mutual influence is particularly apparent among the cultures of Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Belarus.

§4. Ukrainian national danceTraditional dances are popular within Ukraine, many of which derive

from rural Cossack villages.One Ukrainian style of dancing is called Kalyna. Both men and women

participate in this type of dancing.The women wear colourful costumes, sometimes featuring a solid-

coloured (usually blue, green, red, or black) tunic and matching apron, and un-der that an open skirt, and below that a white skirt with an embroidered hem that should reach an inch or so below the knee. If they wear a tunic, then under that they wear a long-sleeved richly embroidered white shirt. Traditionally, women wear a type of red leather boots to dance in. They also wear a flower

head piece (vinok), that is a head-band covered with flowers and has long flowing ribbons down the back that flow when they dance, and plain red coral necklaces.

The men wear baggy trousers (usually blue, white, black or red) and a shirt (usually white, but sometimes black) embroidered at the neck and down the stomach. Over the shirt they sometimes will

wear a richly embroidered vest. Around their waist they wear a thick sash with fringed ends. Like the women, they wear boots, but these can be black or white in addition to red.

Kalyna dancing involves partner dancing. One dance, called the pryvitan-nia, is a greeting dance. It is slow and re-spectful, the women bow to the audience and present bread with salt on a cloth and flow-ers. Another, called the hopak is much more lively, and involves many fast-paced move-ments. Hence hopak as a dance is derived from hopak martial art of Cossacks.

Ukrainian music. Ukraine is a multi-ethnic Eastern European state situated north of the Black Sea, previously part of the So-viet Union. Many of its ethnic groups living within Ukraine have their own unique musi-

59

cal traditions and some have developed specific musical traditions in associa-tion with the land in which they live.

Ukraine found itself at the crossroads of Asia and Europe and this is re-flected within the music in a perplexing mix of exotic melismatic singing (singing of a single syllable of text while moving between several different notes in succession) with chordal harmony which does not always easily fit the rules of traditional Western European harmony. The most striking general characteristic of authentic ethnic Ukrainian folk music is the wide use of mi-nor modes or keys which incorporate augmented 2nd intervals. This is an indi-cation that the major-minor system developed in Western European music did not become as entrenched or as sophisticated in Ukraine.

Rhythmically the music rarely uses complex time-signatures, but com-pound meters are encountered, and the music can be extremely complex har-monically.

Harmonically three and even four part harmony had developed and was recorded in the central steppe regions of Ukraine, but was not in popular use in the mountain regions by the late 19th century.

Ritual songs show the greatest tendency to preservation. They are fre-quently in recitative style, essentially monodic, based on notes in the range of a third or a fourth. An example of this style is the theme for the Shchedrivka "Shchedryk" known in the West as "Carol of the Bells".

A large group of Ukrainian ritual melodies fall within a perfect fourth with the main central tone as the lowest note. Many of the ritual Easter melodies known as Hayivky fall into this category. The tetrachordal system is also found in wedding and harvest songs. Folk dances often have melodies based on two tetrachords fused together.

The pentatonic scale in anhemitonic form is common in spring songs known as Vesnianky.

The bulk of Ukrainian folk songs melodies are based on scales identi-cal to mеdieval modes, but differ in melodic structure. The Mixolydian and Dorian modes are used more often than Ionian and Aeolian modes. This is a feature of traditional paraliturgical Koliadky.

The augmented 2nd interval is found, as well as the raising of the fourth and seventh degree of the scale. It is often used for melodic expression. This melodic manner gives an effect that is described as adding severe tension or sadness in some Ukrainian songs. The phenomena is not found in Russian folk songs and is thought to have been introduced or developed in the 17th century.

Questions1. What are the main features of the art of Soviet period?2. How correlates Ukrainian and Russian arts? 3. Who are the famous Russian and Ukrainian composers?60

NOTIONS

Aesthetics – is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty.Arabesque – is a form of artistic decoration consisting of "surface decorations based on rhythmic linear patterns of scrolling and interlacing foliage, tendrils" or plain lines, often combined with other elements.Balalaika – is a stringed musical instrument of Russian origin, with a charac-teristic triangular body and three strings.Baroque is a period as well as the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music. Buddhism – is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gau-tama, commonly known as the Buddha.Bylina – is a traditional Russian oral epic narrative poem. Byliny singers loosely utilize historical fact greatly embellished with fantasy or hyperbole to create their songs.Catharsis – is a term in dramatic art that describes the "emotional cleansing" sometimes depicted in a play as occurring for one or more of its characters, as well as the same phenomenon as (an intended) part of the audience’s experi-ence.Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.Folklore – consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of that culture, subcul-ture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called folkloristics.Golden ratio – in mathematics and the arts, two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio of the sum of the quantities to the larger quantity is equal to the ratio of the larger quantity to the smaller one.Gothic art – was a Medieval art movement that developed in France out of Romanesque art in the mid-12th century, led by the concurrent development of Gothic architecture.Gusli – is the oldest Russian multi-string plucked instrument. Its exact history is unknown, but it may have derived from a Byzantine form of the Greek kythare, which in turn derived from the ancient lyre.Hedonism – is a school of thought which argues that pleasure is the only in-trinsic good. In very simple terms, a hedonist strives to maximize net pleasure (pleasure minus pain).

61

Hopak, also referred to as Gopak or Cossack dance, – is a Ukrainian dance. It is performed most often as a solitary concert dance by amateur and profes-sional Ukrainian dance ensembles, as well as other performers of folk dances.Kobzar – was an itinerant Ukrainian bard who sang to his own accompani-ment.Metempsychosis – is a philosophical term in the Greek language referring to transmigration of the soul, especially its reincarnation after death. It is a doc-trine popular among a number of Eastern religions such as Hinduism, Bud-dhism, Jainism and Druzism wherein an individual incarnates from one body to another, either human, animal, or plant.Mimesis, "to imitate," from μῖμος (mimos), "imitator, actor" – is a critical and philosophical term that carries a wide range of meanings, which include: imi-tation, representation, mimicry, imitatio, receptivity, nonsensuous similarity, the act of resembling, the act of expression, and the presentation of the self.Modernism – is a set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Mosaic – is the art of creating images with an assemblage of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials. It may be a technique of decorative art, an aspect of interior decoration, or of cultural and spiritual significance as in a cathedral.Postmodernism – is a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the problem of objective truth and inherent suspicion towards global cultural nar-rative or meta-narrative. It involves the belief that many, if not all, apparent realities are only social constructs, as they are subject to change inherent to time and place. It emphasizes the role of language, power relations, and moti-vations; in particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial.Reincarnation – best describes the concept where the soul or spirit, after the death of the body, is believed to return to live in a new human body, or, in some traditions, either as a human being, animal or plant.Renaissance – was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Florence in the Late Middle Ages and later spread-ing to the rest of Europe.Romanticism – was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that origi-nated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution.Yangshao culture – was a Neolithic culture that existed extensively along the central Yellow River in China.

62

Навчальне видання

Естетика. Конспект лекцій з методичними вказівками

Відповідальний за випуск д-р філософських наук, професор В.М. Вандишев

Комп’ютерне верстання А. Ю. Переломова

Підписано до друку 23.09.11. Поз.Формат 60х84/16. Ум. друк. арк. 3,72. Обл.-вид. арк. 5,38. Тираж 30 пр.

Зам. № ___Собівартість видання грн. к.

Видавець і виготовлювачСумський державний університет

вул. Римського-Корсакова, 2, м. Суми, 40007Свідоцтво суб’єкта видавничої справи ДК № 3062 від 17.12.2007

63