CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON METHOD
The historiography of art history has been a potent theme in the discourses of the discipline of the last thirty years. And the approaches and methods in the study of the visual are probably more varied, and more vigorously debated, than in any other area of historical enquiry. This is so much so that the [...]
Understanding of Art
Art engages the understanding in many ways. Thus, confronted with an allegorical painting such as Van Eyk’s The Marriage of Arnolfini, one might want to understand the significance of the objects it depicts. Similarly, confronted with an obscure poem, such as Eliot’s The Waste Land, one might seek to understand what it means. Sometimes, too, [...]
Art criticism
To criticize a work of art is to make a judgment of its overall merit or demerit and to support that judgment by reference to features it possesses. This activity is of great antiquity; we find Aristotle, for example, relating the excellence of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex to the excellence of its plot construction. Criticism became [...]
Definition of Art
Many of the earliest definitions of art were probably intended to emphasize salient or important features for an audience already familiar with the concept, rather than to analyse the essence possessed by all art works and only by them. Indeed, it has been argued that art could not be defined any more rigorously, since no [...]
Erotic art
Erotic art is art with a sexual content, which may be more or less overt. The presence of sexual content, however, is not sufficient for a work of art to be considered erotic. Although there is more than one sense in which a work can be said to be erotic, an erotic work of art [...]
Fontainebleau school-Ecole de Fontainebleau
School of Fontainebleau (Masters of Graphic Art) Term that encompasses work in a wide variety of media, including painting, sculpture, stuccowork and printmaking, produced from the 1530s to the first decade of the 17th century in France. It evokes an unreal and poetic world of elegant, elongated figures, often in mythological settings, as well as [...]
Portraits of rulers
To the ruling elite, portraiture has always had an important function. These individuals were fallible human beings with bodies that aged and died like any others. But they also held highly visible public roles, and, according to ancient ideas of rule, the physical body of the ruler was symbolically overwhelmed by the powerful nature of [...]
Lyceums and Museums
Critics and scholars have long debated the significance, charge, and scope of modern museums, variously considered as temples to the fine arts, monuments to science, repositories of history, showcases for political authority, social institutions marketing an image of cultural hegemony, instruments of nationalist propaganda, and, most broadly and pervasively, as a set of “disciplinary” practices [...]
SOURCES OF THE PICTURESQUE
Eighteenth-century British architectural theory, while always taking heed of artistic developments in France, at the same takes a very different tack. To understand why and how this divergence of ideas came about, it is important to understand the different philosophical basis of Anglo-Saxon thought as well as unique circumstances affecting it, such as its novel [...]
G.W.F. Hegel- Philosophy of Fine Art
After the foregoing introductory remarks it is now time to pass on to the study of our subject itself. But the introduction, where we still are, can in this respect do no more than sketch for our apprehension a conspectus of the entire course of our subsequent scientific studies.
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