Evolution of Western Aesthetics: From Ancient Greece to Modern Art
Beauty in Greece
Greeks sought the loss of subjectivity through drugs, believing thought and creativity flowed better. They pursued beauty based on natural reality but with a subjective, idealized vision reflecting the harmony of body and soul, equating beauty with goodness. There were two types of artists: poets, who used creative, elevated language, and artisans, considered mimetic but defective copies of reality. Greeks prioritized painting and the stage. They believed music didn’t imitate nature but was highly organized, like mathematics, and considered a major art. Spectators were part of an educated elite, required to have intelligence to understand the spectacle. The ideal of beauty was harmonic and balanced, in tune with the universe.
Aesthetic in Rome
For centuries (I, II, III AD), paganism prevailed, marked by chaos, betrayals, and sects. Rome turned to Christianity in the third century AD. Creativity was linked to mystery; artworks were accepted only if they concealed a secret. Romans considered an object art if it had a teleological and symbolic explanation. They believed studying symbols and codes could predict the future. These symbols were later adopted by Jews, who used a mathematical encryption code called Kabbalah. Artists were considered initiates. Pagan artists belonged to cults, while unofficial artists existed. Spectators were secretive, receiving art in hidden places, admiring creations but keeping their codes and secrets.
Romanesque/Gothic Aesthetic
Romanesque aesthetics were philosophically and aesthetically primitive, offering a calming, empty beauty. Simple sculptures depicted pain and darkness, emphasizing suffering. Drawings were linear but smooth, with fantastic elements like angels. Spectators were illiterate, passive, and indoctrinated, learning from polychrome stone and wood. Artists were usually clerics or monks, acting as intermediaries between God and men, officials of beauty. Gothic cathedrals, built by Masons, incorporated pagan symbols and marks despite being medieval structures.
Aesthetic of Humanism (XV)
Everything revolved around the human figure (anthropocentrism). Human reason was valued, and painting, through perspective, created a rational scale with a vanishing point. There was a hatred of war, a Platonic idealization and stylization of reality, depicting it better than it was. Literature emerged, with poets writing freely, producing pastoral novels, heroic deeds, and jarchas.
Renaissance Aesthetics (XVI-XVII)
The Renaissance revived Greek artistic works. Renaissance art copied reality and nature, introducing technology like oil painting for better detail in cathedrals. Perspective was highly developed, using the chiaroscuro technique. Renaissance art resembled ancient Greek art, but artists like Michelangelo were recognized individuals. Art moved to cities, with artists like Da Vinci imposing their egos on their works. Artists needed talent, skill, a liberal education, and knowledge of humanity and nature. They had to be scientists, following natural laws, and mathematicians, understanding proportions and linear perspective. Critics emerged to judge artworks. The bourgeoisie became new viewers and investors in art.
Enlightenment Aesthetics (XVIII)
The British initiated the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, emphasizing reason and opposing superstition. They aimed to eliminate estates through the separation of powers and popular sovereignty, though not direct democracy but representative sovereignty. They had new ideas about man, inventing social structures like prisons and madhouses. A major invention was freedom of thought, with the encyclopedia as a precursor to the internet. Art separated from religion and power, reflecting the artist’s will and focusing on sensible qualities over meaning. Art about the Enlightenment itself emerged. Enlightenment aesthetics focused on physiological issues, man, and aesthetic feeling. Beauty was defined as the perception of relations under a personal view, denying absolute beauty standards. Genius, a gift of nature, was defined as passion within limits. Artists had to be national and serve the new power, the technologists, leading to new forms of censorship. The public included average citizens, leading to both popular and elitist art. Art became a trademark.
Aesthetic of Romanticism
Romanticism emerged in Germany in the late eighteenth century. Romantics believed art should emerge spontaneously from the individual, emphasizing “genius.” Art expressed the artist’s emotions, exalting nature, individualism, feeling, and passion. It embraced the dark, irrational aspects of life as valid. The audience was elitist, wealthy people who adopted the style in their clothing and aspired to a different life. Artists were often wealthy and didn’t need to sell their works to survive.
Aesthetic of the Twentieth Century
New technologies like photography and film changed art’s role by capturing reality. This led to abstract art, expressing the artist’s inner world. Increased literacy reduced the need for graphic art as a knowledge medium. Communism, with its egalitarian society, emerged. Avant-garde movements sought to integrate art into society, enhancing the artist-viewer relationship, with viewers interpreting the work and revealing meanings the artist might not have intended.
Expressionism
Expressionism was a German cultural movement of the early twentieth century, reacting against Impressionism’s positivist naturalism. Expressionists advocated for personal, intuitive art, dominated by the artist’s inner vision, often distorting reality to express subjective feelings rather than objective description.
Impressionism
Impressionism developed in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, focusing on capturing light and fleeting moments, regardless of the identity of the objects depicted. Unlike their predecessors who painted forms, Impressionists painted light.
Cubism
Cubism, led by Picasso, developed between 1907 and 1914 in France, breaking with traditional painting and perspective. It used geometric shapes, fragmented lines, and surfaces, showing multiple perspectives of an object in one plane without depth. Details were eliminated, sometimes representing objects with a single point.
Surrealism
Surrealism emerged in France after Dadaism in the early 1920s, seeking truth through images expressing emotions without logic. It used techniques from photography and film, collage-assemblage, and invented frottage and “exquisite corpse” games.
Dadaism
Dadaism emerged in Switzerland in 1916, opposing reason and Positivism. It revolted against artistic conventions, mocking bourgeois artists and creating anti-art. Dada rejected eternal beauty, principles, logic, and universal concepts, embracing chaos and imperfection.
Futurism
Futurism, an Italian avant-garde movement, broke with tradition and glorified contemporary life, focusing on machines and motion. It used various media to create an art of action, attempting to capture movement through overlapping images, similar to stroboscopic photography.