Between invention and imitation of nature

/kloc-in the 5th century, Italian discovered perspective, Flanders spread new painting techniques, Neo-Platonism influenced literature and art, and savonarola's mysticism reached its climax. Various factors have their own characteristics, but they are also rushing, and there is a dual orientation in thinking about beauty, which is regarded as contradiction at present and coherence at present.

Artists are creators of new things and natural imitators. The two are not contradictory.

2. Simulator

The perspective method used in painting is actually a combination of invention and imitation: the reproduction of reality is accurate and based on the observer's subjective point of view. To a certain extent, the observer can accurately reproduce the object and "add" the beauty he gained through observation.

3. Extraordinary beauty

Marsilio Ficino played a key role in the Neo-Platonism movement promoted by Florence. It is a mysterious concept that everything is composed of many harmonious and progressive realms. Within this conceptual framework, Ficino prides himself on three tasks: spreading and modernizing ancient wisdom; In a coherent and possible symbol system, at first glance, it coordinates a lot; Obviously, this system and the Christian symbolic system are in harmony with each other. Beauty thus gave birth to a high symbolic value, which is no longer just proportion and harmony.

This kind of beauty is not a local beauty, but a super-sensory beauty that constitutes the true essence of beauty (although the latter beauty is superior).

4. Venus

Neo-Platonism symbolism especially emphasizes the image of Venus. The fundamental source of this image is Ficino's reinterpretation of myth.

Chapter 8: Ladies and Heroes

1. Ms.

When we compare various portraits of Venus, we will notice that there is a rather complicated exposition centered on female nudity. Venus in Baldung Grien presents a kind of perceptual white with a dark background, which obviously refers to a kind of physical and material beauty. The female body is not perfect (according to classical standards), and this beauty is closer to reality.

Leonardo da Vinci's woman has a particularly elusive face and unpredictable details.

Later, women's faces became more private, intense and semi-self. Compared with women's body form in public, it is difficult to interpret psychologically.

2. Heroes

Renaissance man claimed to be the center of the world, so his portrait should be full of majestic power, and it is best to have a tough taste.

3. The beauty of practicality

This change is undoubtedly the mixed result of religious reform and social customs changes between 16 and 17 centuries. The image of women has gradually changed: women put on their clothes again and become housewives, tutors and bosses.

4. Functional beauty

The world of court life is being dissolved and replaced by the dance of the next century; The disappearance of classical beauty can be seen in the forms of stylism and baroque, or in the realism of Caravaggio and Flanders. Beauty appears in other forms: dreams, fantasies and anxiety.

Chapter 9: From Elegance to Uneasy Beauty

Towards subjective and pluralistic beauty.

During the Renaissance, the so-called "grand theory"-according to this theory, beauty lies in the proportion between parts-reached a very high degree of perfection. But at the same time, some centrifugal forces appeared in the culture and mentality of the Renaissance, moving towards a disturbing, vague and amazing beauty. This is a movement full of kinetic energy. According to the convenience of explanation, we divide it into classicism, affectation, baroque, rococo and other academic categories.

2. Stylistism

The beauty of stylism shows the sadness of the soul of Broken Glass: it is an elegant, educated and cosmopolitan beauty, just like the nobles who appreciate it and entrust painters to create such works (Baroque is more popular and emotional). Stylistism opposes the strict rules of the Renaissance and rejects the unrestrained kinetic energy of Baroque. It seems superficial, but the operator is superficial, studying anatomy and deepening the relationship with the ancients, which transcends the similar trend of the Renaissance: in short, stylism spans and deepens the Renaissance.

For a long time, critics thought that stylism was only a short interlude between Renaissance and Baroque. Now people know that a considerable part of the Renaissance-from the death of Raphael in 1520-is stylism.

3. Knowledge crisis

A general answer can be found in the "narcissistic trauma" brought by Copernicus and its subsequent development of physics and astronomy to the humanistic self. When people find that they have lost their position as the center of the universe, they feel depressed, and the utopian vision of a peaceful and harmonious world cherished by humanism and Renaissance is also fading. Political crisis, economic revolution, the war in the "Iron Age" and the return of diseases and epidemics: all these are concurrent. What makes people even more shocked is that the universe is not tailor-made for human beings, and human beings are neither creation nor master of creation.

Paradoxically, it is the great progress of knowledge that has caused this knowledge crisis: the pursuit of more and more complex beauty is accompanied by Kepler's discovery; Kepler found that the laws of celestial bodies did not follow simple classical harmony, but became more and more complicated.

4. melancholy

The change from stylism to baroque is not a change of painting school, but a manifestation of dramatic life. Closely related to it is a pursuit of expressing beauty in new ways: amazing, surprising and obviously out of proportion.

5. Sharp, sharp and smart ...

Baroque, whose mentality is characterized by the combination of accurate imagination and surprising effect. This combination has different names, or machine interest, or oceanism, and the noblest expression is grecia.

Pursue absoluteness

A set of relations and forms have been created and recreated, replacing natural and objective models: in other words, Baroque beauty transcends good and evil, and its model spreads beauty through ugliness, expresses truth through falsehood, and presents life through death.

However, this does not mean that baroque beauty is immoral or immoral, by no means. The profound moral essence of baroque beauty lies not in observing the rigid norms of religious or political authority in baroque period, but in its overall artistic creation.