The Nature of Beautiful
and the Nature of Art
  

Keys for a correct understanding of a work of art and suggestions for a thorough investigation of artistic phenomenology’s, in order to acquire a broader and more exhaustive knowledge of the poetics and the ideologies innate in them.

Firmly considering art a human activity ’based on experience, on quality and on particular aptitudes, on talent and on individual ingeniousness, any critical estimations of artistic works must necessarily take account of their development through various periods, of their complexity with special reference to their own stylistic expression, to the time when they were created, to their place of origin. However it is not sufficient to pass judgment on a work of art simply explaining its origin or the essence of its various stylistic forms; we need to try to understand art as an aspect of human and social life and, particularly, to study the influence of art on man and on society, on the artistic awareness and culture education, on the contacts, on the civil and social conflicts that art represents, reproduces or is ahead of. The birth, the development and the decadency of the social institutions of art are defined by the kinds of organization and by the social groups, which influence artistic creations. It is not an easy task at all, but such an approach can make possible methodologies for a wider interpretation of a work of art with a precise reference to human personality.

Art gives rise to and establishes new forms of behavior especially if it is considered from the point of view of propaganda, of the distribution, of the process of communication and of the means of expression. Therefore it is unthinkable to study a work of art by trying to ascertain "what is being said, who says it, to whom and what the effects are." In fact art is a form of Man’s activity which is intended as a confirmation or exaltation of his creative skill and of his capacity of expression, therefore he modifies himself and the natural environment according to a dramatic, ironical etc. connection which goes with the individual or social needs of a logical or moral nature. Through the qualities of a work of art, criticism should find essential the definition and realization of the nature and originality of an artist, with a constant reference to the general concepts of imitation, simulation and the singular artifices of the technical and stylistic particularities. Then the investigation and study of the aesthetical qualities of a work of art will allow us to understand exhaustively the processes of transformation and transfiguration of reality or of a certain ideas developed by an artist. The elaboration of philosophical concepts and of Man’s thought follows the course of the whole history of art, from ancient times to the present day: therefore it is necessary to search for the links among the various classical branches of knowledge in order to interpret artistic movements and the works which characterize them critically and correctly considering them in their connection and in their development in time. Undoubtly it is a required condition to seek the reasons why a work of art becomes a subject of knowledge, a phenomenon, or an idea because any artistic creation can not be considered separately, but should be thought of as a moment and a result of historical - artistic process in whose context we will be able to understand its full meaning. In this way the history of art itself becomes a way of researching and of viewing the world. Among these considerations of a general nature the more strictly aesthetical question can not be left in the background: how we can identify the nature of the beautiful and the nature of art?  In fact since Plato and Aristotle the problem of nature-art relation has taken on specific and fundamental valences. The concept of imitation and the purifying-or rather educational-role of art that was constitutional to ancient Greek philosophy changed into medieval and Renaissance speculation. The Middle Ages emphasized the nature of the subordination of beauty to truth and justified art as an allegory; the Renaissance gave more autonomy to natural beauty but it always considered art as imitation, and the principle of verisimilitude as its it’s fundamental rule. Vico and Kant laid the fundamentals of modem aesthetics. Vico claimed that the autonomy of art is a form of pre-logical, intuitive knowledge, the creative faculty of which is imagination; but the importance of Vico’s aesthetics is linked to two fundamental themes: the relationship of art with myth and the identification between art and language as rules. They were the first to analyze critically these themes, nowadays extremely topical in the artistic phenomenology and in the specify of literary poetics, with special attention to the synergism that exists among art, myth and symbol.

 

These themes include the concept of art as creation, as expression and as communication, which are to be developed by the idealistic and neo-idealistic aesthetics of Benedetto Croce. Kant laid the premise for the affirmation of the subjective moment over the objective one of beauty and therefore for the identification of natural beauty and artistic beauty. According to him, the basis of beauty is the aesthetical feeling which is the feeling of pleasure aroused by the inner harmony between nature and spirit, between the world of necessity and moral need. Then Schiller will entrust art with the task of educating without any constraint and the whole romantic aesthetics, and subsequently Schelling will make of art the supreme degree of knowledge. Idealistic-romantic aesthetics were succeeded by positivism, which conceived aesthetics as a study and production of forms-an aspect already singled out by Hegel-aimed mainly to classify empirically the different arts in their specify, too. In our modem times, not only a philosophical, but even a psychological approach is absolutely inevitable to aim at the definition and classification of the artistic phenomenology and at the identification of their values. When considering a work of art we should identify the connections, the interdisciplinary requests between it and the thought of that particular historical moment, but not only that, as it is possible to contribute to the enlightenment of either a pictorial or literary work by comparing authors of different periods and belonging to trends, as T.S. Eliot established in his essays of poetic criticism. The re-visitation of these disciplines, the following attempt of reconciliation, can certainly give raise to origin new elaborations in order to stem the intellectual waste of the present, probably due just to the frantic pursuit of success. The contribution of art criticism should awake an incentive to art itself, should be a reason for a new vital sap especially in a historical time such as this one, when men witness powerless the ’Faustian’ devastation of nature, and the decadency of post-industrial society.
 
Art can not absolutely be passive towards these problems.The methodologies of a critical study and research for a correct understanding should be deeply involved in the analysis about the connection among art, nature, reality and anthropology in order to further examine the considerations on philosophical aesthetics, in this way bringing out the difficult relationship of an artist’s style of life in the modem world. It could be a significant contribution to art (and its history) in order to give it the strength to be "the soul of the world and the intelligence to be the meaning of reality"- A science like iconology rightly aims, in a transverse way, to understand and consolidate the connections that exist among the various disciplines. In this way it contributes to keeping art in a position of privilege. As Erwin Panofsky pointed out, iconology is the study of the purpose that belongs to images and to the selected subject in their artistic representation. Therefore we can consider this discipline the study of the historical, social, religious, philosophical, and cultural content, of which subjects and images are direct expression, even if sometimes unrelated to the one who has used those subjects. The role of iconology is, in a certain way, lined up with the iconographic method of Aby Warburg who studies the programmatic, literary and learned aspects of works of art in "contraposition" with formal analysis. It is related to the theory of ’symbolic forms’: it is an analysis which goes beyond the explicit meanings of works of art, beyond their ultimate and essential content, identifying those fundamental principles which reveal the basic line of a nation, a period, social class, a religious or philosophical concept, unconsciously qualified by a personality or abridged in one work. Iconology aims at interpretation those symbolic values sometimes ignored by the artist himself and which may differ, even manifestly, from what he consciously wanted to express. The subject of a symbol can reveal a meaning consciously bestowed by the artist, if this desired significance is at the same time also deliberately hidden; here the iconographical analysis is necessarily transformed into a sort of deciphering. The significances have simply turned from "unconscious" into secret ones. The ideas projected by the artist into his work include the interpretation of the artistic phenomenon itself or, at least, they should not be transcended in the research of the intrinsic, inner significance. Anyway it is required to reveal the philosophical prejudices, which lie behind the visual form. In order not to reduce the value of the interpretation of the single artistic event it is necessary for the approach to be sensible and rational, facing the specific culture in which a particular artistic work is inserted. We need to wonder whether or not the symbolic meaning of a given motif is usual in a certain figurative tradition, whether an iconographical interpretation may be justified with certain texts or if it consistent with the ideas that can be alive in that period and can presumably be known by artists, and to what extent this symbolic interpretation agrees with the historical position and the personal tendencies of each artist and to his particular creative disposition. To achieve this we must try to penetrate the essential sense of a work of art so as to be able to grasp the unit that composes it. This is possible when we manage to grasp and to consider the whole of the moments of its emanation: subject, icon, and formal element. Icnology, as being essentially interdisciplinary and strictly related to general symbolism, has become in this way the best example of the solidarity and complementary of all the interpretations in their mutual, interpretative and analytic task of the various artistic languages, both rational and hype rational, which, in the course of time, have expressed the complicated relationship of Man with Nature and the number of images of Man himself that Nature reflects. Iconology aims at clearly expounding principles, methods, structures and at defining the terminology of certain artistic phenomenology’s contributing to develop its study. As previously stated, the methodological approach to a symbol is not less important to artistic creations than the analyses of its anthropological and technological functions. In fact from the point of view of epistemology the process of symbolizing intervenes on many levels of experience, from the complicated mechanism of our perceptions to the highest degrees of elaboration and arrangement of our way of representing the world.The evolution of linguistics, psychology, history of religions and history of art, the problems of signs, of symbols and myths have in fact been considered in their relationship with the methods and principles of their various interpretations. In this way the study of the history of art can not be separated from any of the other humanistic disciplines, because it is indispensable for a broader and correct comprehension of the various fields of human knowledge and of reality itself. If a symbol represents one of the elements generally common to the various disciplines then the history of art can become not only the history of semiotics but of all those disciplines that in the past shared the field of signs and symbols - semantics, logic, rhetoric, investigation, aesthetics, philosophy, ethnology, psychoanalysis, poetics -. and of some of their subjects named, from time to time, imitation and beauty, education and pleasure, tropes and figures, condensation and movement.Through the study of the history of art, of signs and symbols, we put forward as a possibility the research of a plural and typological thought, which maintains the differences without emphasizing it. A methodological principle where the reading of an artistic text is intended as a description and an interpretation at the same time: a course into space of an artistic personality.The relations between art, literature and philosophy are a continuum: from Ficino and Leonardo to Rilke and Rodine, to Beckett and Bacon, up to the contemporary minimalists. Therefore art criticism must not be a merely structural construction (without art), but a vital, dynamic portrait of a work where the many types, not the many substances, are the subjects because, otherwise, there would be established a factious hierarchy that can not absolutely take place.Precisely in the name of interdisciplinary we should deeply commit ourselves to overcome the ’perception’ of artistic language that distinguishes a creative experience, towards a broader dimension of the imaginative production, able to maintain the irreducible plurality of the ways of sense, by virtue of a research which preserves a work from the particularity of fashions and of temporal restrictions, proposing a reading for inner courses, easily understood by everyone.

©World Of Art magazine