A musician can write the notes of a melody or compose the music of a symphony without using any words to define what he is feeling. The flow of the music in symphonies and other classical pieces is usually enough to symbolize the feelings of the artist. ...
Here Botticelli passionately tries to recapture the former glory of Rome, because the classical myths had become popular among educated laymen. To these men, the mythology of the Greeks and Romans represented something more than captivating stories; they were convinced these classical legends must have contained some profound and mysterious truth. ... Simply as a side note: Venus was conceived when the Titan Cronus castrated his father, the god Uranus, the severed genitals falling into the sea and fertilizing it. ...
An interesting and ironic note can be made concerning the new charter: after everything, men still managed everything (the Lady Managers still had to obtain authority from the male board of directors). ... The Academy's primary instruction when it was first incorporated was the study of casts of classical statues in the Louvre (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts). It continued educating its students in a classical manner and drawing from the live nude model was introduced around 1812, followed in succeeding decades by figure modeling and portrait classes. ...
Introduction I have chosen 19th century art and the Aesthetic Movement to consider What is an aesthetic? I chose this period because the aesthetic movement of the 19th century celebrated beauty for its own sake, not just in painting but also in furniture, textiles, ceramics, fashion and architecture. Beauty in the Victorian period was very much linked to lifestyle. It was also the period where photography first started to be widely used. Charles Baudelaire sums up the idea of beauty and aesthetics for me, he said: All beauties contain, like all possible phenomena, something eternal and somet...
Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin wrote the essayThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction? in 1936. In his essay he discusses art mainly before the 20th century, and specifically, theaura? of that art. Aura, as Mr. Benjamin describes it, is simply uniq...
Then the sea becomes violent, in a pendular and unstable ebb-flow: there's "pebbles which the waves draw back and fling and bring the eternal note of sadness in " (10, 14). ... While classical sensibility thrives on moral problems, modern sensibility thrives on metaphysical problems; it is committed to the view that humans are unescapably problematic, not merely because we live in a time of uncertainty when traditional beliefs and absolute standards disintegrated, but because it comes to be considered good, proper that men should live in discomfort. ...
