Resumen de libro: The Story of Art (Gombrich) PDF

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Resumen del libro obligatorio de Visual Culture, obligatorio de leer en el segundo semestre de segundo de la carrera Comunicación audiovisual....

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INTRODUCTION There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists. We shall soon discover that the beauty of a picture does not really lie in the beauty of its subject-matter. We should always ask ourselves whether the artist may not have had his reasons for changing the appearance of what he saw. We should never condemn a work for being incorrectly drawn unless we have made quite sure that we are right and the painter is wrong. There is no greater obstacle to the enjoyment of great works of art than our unwillingness to discard habits and prejudices.

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Caravaggio: a very bold and revolutionary Italian artist who worked around 1600. He was given the task of painting a picture of St. Matthew for the altar of the church in Rome. He painted a picture of St. Matthew with a bald head and bare, dusty feet, awkwardly gripping the huge volume, anxiously wrinkling his brow under the unaccustomed strain of writing. People were scandalized at what they took to be lack of respect.

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Works of art: ¨objects made by human beings for human beings.¨ What may sometimes be a bad habit in real life and is often, therefore, suppressed or concealed, comes into its own in the realm of art. As there are no rules to tell us when a picture or statue is right it is usually impossible to explain in words exactly why we feel that it is a great work of art.

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CHAPTER 1: Strange Beginnings We are not likely to understand the art of the past if we are quite ignorant of the aims it had to serve. ¨Primitives¨: they are closer to the state from which all mankind once emerged. There is no difference between building and image-making as far as usefulness is concerned = pictures as something powerful to use. It is likely that the primitive hunters thought that if they made a picture of their prey, the real animals would also succumb to their power. Games of pretence. Primitive art works on just such pre-established lines, and yet leaves the artist scope to show his mettle. The whole story of art is not a story of progress in technical proficiency, but a story of changing ideas and requirements. Image-making in these early civilizations was not only connected with magic and religion but was also the first form of writing. 1

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Pictures and letters are really blood-relations. CHAPTER 2: Art of Eternity There is a direct tradition which links the art of our own days with the art of the Nile Valley of some five thousand years ago. Some of the early portraits from the pyramid age, the fourth ¨dynasty¨ of the ¨Old Kingdom¨, are among the most beautiful works of Egyptian art. The observation of nature, and the regularity of the whole, are so evenly balanced that they impress us as being lifelike and yet remote and enduring. Combination of geometrical regularity and keen observation of nature.

These works were not intended to be enjoyed; they, in fact, were meant to ¨keep alive¨. It was the artist´s task to preserve everything as clearly and permanently as possible. They drew from memory, according to strict rules which ensured that everything that had to go into the picture would stand out in perfect clarity = ¨map-maker¨. Egyptian art is based on what the artist knew belonged to a person or a scene. The rules which govern all Egyptian art give every individual work the effect of poise and austere harmony. Mesopotamian art: the art of boasting and propaganda was well advanced in these early days. Superstition that there is more in a picture than a mere picture.

CHAPTER 3: The Great Awakening (Greece, Seventh to Fifth Century B.C.) - No one knows exactly who the people were, who ruled in Crete, and whose art was copied on the Greek mainland, particularly in Mycenae. We only know that, around 1000 b.C., warlike tribes from Europe penetrated to the rugged peninsula of Greece and to the shores of Asia Minor, and fought and defeated the former inhabitants. - Only in the songs which tell of these battles does something survive of the splendour and beauty of the art which was destroyed in these protracted wars, for these songs are the Homeric poems, and the new arrivals were Greek tribes. 2

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Gay movement of the Cretan style: their poetry was decorated with simple geometric patterns, and where a scene was to be represented it formed part of this strict design (simplicity and clear arrangement)

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About the year 600 b.C. the Greeks began to imitate these simple structures in stone. The wooden props were turned into columns which supported strong crossbeams of stone. These crossbeams are called architraves, and the whole unit resting on the columns goes under the name of entablature. Athens in Attica became by far the most famous and the most important in the history of art. It was no longer a question of learning a ready-made formula for representing the human body. The Egyptians had based their art on knowledge; the Greeks began to use their eyes. Once the artist began to rely on what he saw, a veritable landslide started.

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Kriophoros statuette and marble statue of Kouros -

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Painters made the discovery of foreshortening: artists dared for the first time in all history to paint a foot as seen from in front. It meant that the artist no longer aimed at including everything in the picture in its most clearly visible form, but took account of the angle from which he saw an object. Of all Greek originals which have come down to us, the sculptures from the Parthenon reflect this new freedom perhaps in the most wonderful way.

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To us, the colour and texture of fine marble is something so wonderful that we would never want to cover it with paint, but the Greeks even painted their temples with strong contrasting colours such as red and blue.

Chapter 4: The Realm of Beauty (Greece and the Greek World, Fourth Century B.C. to First Century A.D.) - Towards the end of the fifth century, artists had become fully conscious of their power and mastery, and so had the public. - In architecture, various styles began to be used side by side. The Parthenon had been built in the Doric style, but in the later buildings of the Acropolis the forms of the so-called Ionic style were introduced.

The Parthenon (Doric style) and the Temple of Athena (Ionic style) -

The great temple statues of the fourth century earned their reputation more by virtue of their beauty as works of art. People discussed pictures and statues as they discussed poems and plays; they praised their beauty or criticized their form and style.

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Praxiteles: the greatest artist of that century. His most celebrated work, whose praise was sung in many poems, represented the goddess of Love, the youthful Aphrodite, stepping into her bath.

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It was possible to create convincing human types by creating beauty by making a general and schematic figure more and more lifelike until the marble´s surface seems to live and breathe, but would this method ever lead to the representation of real individual human beings? Greek statues´ faces never seem to betray any definite feeling. By the time of Alexander the Great, towards the end of the fourth century, the heads of the statues usually look much more animated and alive than the beautiful faces of earlier works. We usually refer to this art of the later period not as Greek art, but as Hellenistic art, because that is the name usually given to the empires founded by Alexander´s successors on eastern soil. By the period of Hellenism, art had largely lost its old connexion with magic and religion. Artists became interested in the problems of their craft for its own sake, and the problem of how to represent such a dramatic contest with all its movement, its expression and its tension, was just the type of task which would test an artist´s mettle. The rights or wrongs of Laocoon´s fate may not have occurred to the sculptor at all. Laocoön marble sculpture, attributed to Agesander, Athenodorus, and Polydorus. Laocoön offended Apollo by breaking his oath of celibacy and begetting children or by having sexual intercourse with his wife in Apollo’ sanctuary. He and twin sons were crushed to death by two great sea serpents sent by Apollo on the altar of Poseidon.

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Pompeii was a summer resort for rich Romans, and was buried beneath the ashes of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Even Hellenistic artists did not know what we call the laws of perspective. CHAPTER 5: World Conquerors (Romans, Buddhists, Jews, and Christians, First to Fourth Century A.D.) Art changed, to some extent, when Rome became mistress of the world. The most outstanding achievement of the Romans was probably in civil engineering. The feature of the Colosseum which is new is the use of arches in architecture. The Romans became great experts in the art of vaulting by various technical devices.

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Pont du Gard and Colosseum -

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It was typical of the Romans to take from Greek architecture what they liked, and to apply it to their own needs. There is nothing petty in Roman portraits: somehow the artists succeeded in being lifelike without being trivial. The Romans were a matter-of-fact people, and cared less for fancy goods. Yet their pictorial methods of telling the deeds of a hero proved of great value to the religions which came into contact with their far-flung empire.

Portrait of the emperor Caracalla -

During the centuries after Christ, Hellenistic and Roman art completely displaced the arts of the Oriental empires, even in their own strongholds.

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Even in far-distant India, the Roman way of telling a story, and of glorifying a hero, was adopted by artists who set themselves the task of illustrating the story of a peaceful conquest, the story of Buddha.

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Another religion that learned to represent its sacred stories for the instruction of believers was the Jewish religion. The Jewish colonies in eastern towns took to decorating the walls of their synagogues with stories from the Old Testament. Its 6

Visual Culture - 2021 Martina Lovo main purpose was to remind the faithful of one of the examples of God's mercy and power.

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¨Moses Provides Water¨ and ¨Song of Deliverance¨ The rise of Christianity: the end of the ancient world. CHAPTER 6: A Parting of Ways (Rome and Byzantium, Fifth to Thirteenth Century a.D.) In the year A.D. 311, the Emperor Constantine established Christian Church as a power in the State. Churches were not modelled on pagan temples, but on the type of large assembly halls which had been known in classical times under the name of ´basilicas´, which means roughly ´royal halls´. There must be no statues in the House of God. Ideas about paintings differed a good deal: some thought them useful because they helped to remind the congregation of the teachings they had received, and kept the memory of these sacred episodes alive (¨Painting can do for the illiterate what writing does for those who can read¨, Pope Gregory the Great) Christian art of the Middle Ages became a curious mixture of primitive and sophisticated methods. The power of observation of nature, which we saw awakening in Greece about 500b.C., was put to sleep again about a.d. 500. Eastern, Greek-speaking parts of the Roman Empire (Byzantium or Constantinople): they refused to accept the lead of the Latin Pope. In 745 they gained the upper hand and all religious art was forbidden in the Eastern Church. By asking the artist who painted sacred images to keep strictly to the ancient models, the Byzantine Church helped to preserve the ideas and achievements of Greek art in the types used for drapery, faces or gestures.

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The stress on tradition, and the necessity of keeping to certain permitted ways of representing Christ or the Holy Virgin, made it difficult for Byzantine artists to develop their personal gifts. As we look at the mosaics done by these Greek artists in the Balkans and in Italy in the Middle Ages, we see that this Oriental empire had in fact succeeded in reviving something of the grandeur and majesty of ancient Oriental art, and in using it for the glorification of Christ and His power.

¨Christ as Ruler of the Universe, the Virgin and Child, and Saints¨ and ¨The Miracle of the Loaves and the Fishes¨ CHAPTER 8: Western Art in the Melting Pot (Europe, Sixth to Eleventh Century A.D.) - Dark Ages: the period after the collapse of the Roman Empire. It lasted almost five hundred years. - Conflict of different art styles. - The various Teutonic tribes, the Goths, the Vandals, the Saxons, the Danes and the Vikings were considered barbarians by those who valued Greek and Roman achievements in literature and art. - They loved complicated patterns which included the twisted bodies of dragons, or birds mysteriously interlaced. - The ideas of Teutonic tribes about art resembled the ideas of primitive tribes elsewhere: they too thought of images as a means of working magic and exorcizing evil spirits. 8

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Viking longships on the Bayeux Tapestry and Viking Longships Tapestries -

The monks and missionaries of Celtic Ireland and Saxon England tried to apply the traditions of these northern craftsmen to the tasks of Christian art. Way in which human figures were represented by these artists in the illuminated manuscripts of England and Ireland: they do not look like human figures but rather like strange patterns made of human forms.

Luke the Evangelist (Irish Gospels) and The Legacy of St. Patrick -

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Without this influence, Western art might have developed on similar lines to those of the art of Byzantium. Thanks to the clash of the two traditions, the classical tradition and the taste of the native artists, something entirely new began to grow up in Western Europe. The Egyptians had largely drawn what they knew to exist, the Greeks what they saw; in the Middle Ages the artist also learned to express in his picture what he felt. They wanted to convey to their brothers in the faith the content and the message of the sacred story.

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CHAPTER 9: The Church Militant (The Twelfth Century) The Normans who landed in England during the Saxon period brought with them a developed style of building. The church was often the only stone building anywhere in the neighbourhood; it was the only considerable structure for miles around. In the earliest Norman or Romanesque basilicas, classical columns carrying straight ¨entablatures¨ had been used. In Romanesque and Norman churches we generally find round arches resting on massive piers = impression of massive strength.

Powerful and almost defiant piles of stone erected by the Church in lands of peasants and warriors who had only recently been converted from their heathen way of life which seem to express the very idea of the Church Militant: the idea that here on earth it is the task of the Church to fight the powers of darkness till the hour of triumph dawns on doomsday. It was in France that Romanesque churches began to be decorated with sculptures. We must not expect such sculptures to look as natural, graceful and light as classical works.

Saint Trophime, Arles. The twelfth century is the century of the Crusades. Many artists tried to imitate and emulate the majestic sacred images of the Eastern Church. Painting was indeed on the way to becoming a form of writing in pictures; but this return to more simplified methods of representation gave the artist of the Middle Ages a new freedom to experiment with more complex forms of composition.

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CHAPTER 10: The Church Triumphant (The Thirteenth Century) -

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A new idea was born in northern France, which made Norman and Romanesque churches look clumsy and obsolete: Gothic style (second half of the twelfth century) They believed it was possible to build a church of an entirely new kind: a building of stone and glass such as the world had never seen before. ¨If I wanted to reach higher I should have to make the arch steeper¨ = pointed arch. The heavy stones of the vaulting press not only downwards but also sideways, much like a bow which has been drawn. -

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Builders had to introduce their ¨flying buttresses¨ to keep the high nave in shape from outside, across the roofs of the aisles.

A Gothic church seems to be suspended between these slender structures of stones. Doric temple: standing inside, we are made to understand the complex interplay of thrust and pull that holds the lofty vault in its place. The new cathedrals gave the faithful a glimpse of a different world. The walls of these buildings were formed of stained glass that shone like precious stone. The pillars, ribs and tracery were glistening with gold.

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The Gothic artists wanted to understand the ancient formula for draped bodies, which had been handed down to them. They regained the lost classical art of letting the structure of the body show under the folds of the drapery. The most frequent task of the northern painters of that time was the illumination of manuscripts: although they respected the traditional forms in which a sacred story was to be told, they took pride in making it more moving and more lifelike. Italian painters were even slower than Italian sculptors in responding to the new spirit of the Gothic masters. Italian craftsmen looked to Constantinople rather than to Paris for inspiration and guidance. In the thirteenth century Italian churches were still decorated with solemn mosaics in the ¨Greek manner¨. Painter Giotto di Bondone (1266-1337): he broke the spell of Byzantine conservatism into a new world and translated the likelife figures of Gothic sculpture into painting. - He rediscovered the art of creating the illusion of depth on a flat surface. - He shows us so convincingly how each figure reflects the grief of the tragic scene. - From his day onwards the history of art, first in Italy and then in other countries also, is the history of the great artists.

Kiss of Judas, The Lamentation and The Massacre of the Innocents

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CHAPTER 11: Courtiers and Burghers (The Fourteenth Century) We can get a vivid idea of what life in the fourteenth century was like if we remember the works of Chaucer, with his knight and squires, friars and artisans. This was no longer the world of the Crusades. The taste was rather for the refined than for the grand. Churches were no longer the main tasks of the architects.

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Ducal Palace of Venice: one of the most celebrated and characteristic buildings of this kind. It shows that this later development of the Gothic style, for all its delight in ornament and tracery, could yet achieve its own effect of grandeur. The power and prosperity of cities were at their height. The most characteristic works of sculpture are those smaller works of precious metal or ivory. They were not meant to proclaim a truth in a solemn aloofness, but to excite love and t...