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Beauty and Reality in Art
There is a tradeoff in art between beauty and reality: the more reality is embraced, the more the ideal is compromised.
Nature, ambitious and productive, working through the poor medium of the physical, tends toward imperfection. It’s subject to the laws of decay and error that govern mortality. The artist’s idea seems to be superior. It is not based on or constrained by the physical but emanates from some eternal wavelength of the soul. The created will always surpass the organic through a selective juxtaposition of the noblest of each part.
The Architectural Roots of Humanism (2)
Architecture is a powerful force.
It petrifies and lays down once and for all the movement of life. Form places provocations or limits on the use of space. Architecture is not merely a public service to provide an indoor environment for people to live and work. It is a philosophical statement about man.
The major difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is their view of man. These views are reflected in their architecture.
A prominent abbot named Suger (he’s French, so sounds like soo-zhay) of St. Denis spearheaded a new philosophy near the middle of the 12th century, that challenged the Romanesque precedent of self-denial and austerity. This happened through his lux nova dogma and conception of “God is light.”
Gothic architecture was a technical response to a theological idea.
The Architectural Roots of Humanism (1)
Lying quiet in the shadow of the Hellenistic flourish a few centuries before Christ, when Rome appropriated the architecture of the Greek and Etruscan colonies, it was selective in its borrowings and adapted geometry to a new use: the active experience of space through the novelty of the arch.Then there was the dome, and all of the sudden Imperial Rome was heralding its grandeur through large scale, massive, state funded architecture.
Architecturally, the Renaissance was a looking back upon and a scrutinizing of Classical antiquity, with the realization that they had gotten something right.
