The image of St. Petersburg is an integral part of Russian art, in particular, in watercolor painting. This article is devoted to the analysis of the work of Russian watercolor artists, identifying the specifics and characteristic features of the image of the city on the Neva in their work. The object of the study is watercolors by Russian artists, the subject is expressive means, techniques and methods through which the image of St. Petersburg is embodied. On the example (...) of watercolor works by E.P. Gau, I.A. Vladimirova, A.S. Vedernikov, A.P. Ostroumova-Lebedeva, P.P. Grigoryants, G.P. Fitingof, A. Ermolaev, V.V. Proshkin, K. Kuzema, V. Kolbasov, O. Litvinenko, etc. the historical transformation of the artistic image of St. Petersburg, its conditionality by cultural and historical factors and the nature of the life of the inhabitants of the city is shown. The study concluded that the image of St. Petersburg is important for Russian artists, as well as a significant variety of its creative interpretations. Each watercolor work demonstrates the subjective attitude of artists to St. Petersburg, thanks to which real urban landscapes acquire spirituality and unique expressiveness. The complex historical fate of this cultural and artistic center of Russia, which was once a magnificent capital, experienced revolutionary events and went through military destruction, determined the versatility of creative approaches to the embodiment of the city, as a result of various turns of history, it lost, then regained its greatness, beauty and attractiveness. Petersburg in watercolors is invariably filled with vitality, lyrical feelings and the love of artists. (shrink)

Strating out with simple studies of leaves, fruit and flowers, the author looks at the materials and basic techniques needed for natural watercolour painting, and suggests some simple exercises for creating realistic form and effective composition. He moves on to demonstrate how to paint a wide range of natural subjects by cleverly breaking them down into their substructures, then illustrating the gradual development of the image so you both understand and see exactly how the finished watercolour has been built up. (...) With fully annotated sketches, working illustrations and step-by-step demonstrations he explores all kinds of indoor and outdoor subjects. Detailed information on special techniques and suitable palettes is also provided throughout. (shrink)

After 1604, Chinese art through Chinese goods rapidly and widely penetrated into European society and had a profound impact on European art and aesthetics.During the century of the popularity of everything Chinese in Europe, it was Chinese goods represented by porcelain and flowing silk that were most directly related to people's lives. From the second half of the XVII century to the second half of the XVIII century, European culture and art experienced a boom in Oriental art. (...) A number of innovative artists began to change their traditional interests and methods of painting, creating many masterpieces with a Chinese flavor. Thus, a new page was opened in the history of Eastern and Western painting. China and Europe, two advanced human civilizations.It took quite a long time before the fog of myths and legends that enveloped China and Europe, the two highest civilizations of mankind, dissipated, until the true nature of China was revealed in the XVIII century. This work is divided into the following three parts: The emergence of Chinoiserie; Rococo and Watteau painting; The decline of Chinoiserie. Documentary studies, comparative analysis and case studies are used to study the phenomenon of China's popularity, which has engulfed Europe as a direct consequence of the spread of Chinese culture in the West. (shrink)

This work is devoted to the terracotta army of Qin Shihuang and its reflection in the works of modern Chinese masters of watercolor. The article consists of three parts. The first part analyzes the genesis and history of Qin Shihuang's clay army. In the second, the terracotta army is regarded as a cultural and artistic symbol of China, which stimulated humanitarian contacts between Russia and China and contributed to mutual understanding between the two peoples. In the third part, through (...) the prism of the artistic experience and creative process of three watercolor artists, the current state of research of watercolor creativity on the theme of the terracotta army is analyzed. The author's special contribution to the development of the problem is to determine the connection between the ancient cultural heritage of China and the nature of its interpretation in the works of modern watercolor artists. The novelty of the study can be recognized as the introduction into the scientific circulation of Russian art history of the names of Chinese artists and their paintings dedicated to the terracotta army of Emperor Qin Shihuang. Within the framework of the work, an appeal is made to the issue of Chinese-Russian cultural cooperation, the development of which is realized through touching this most representative monument of antiquity. Through the art criticism analysis of watercolor paintings by Chinese masters — Huang Zhongyang, Lin Shaolin, Zuo Xinmin — approaches to the reflection of this historical monument in the works of modern masters are determined, the connection between ancient and modern, traditional and innovative in their paintings is established. (shrink)

Manuscripts and notes by Michel Foucault on the visual arts recently deposited at the Bibliothèque Nationale reveal a reliance on canonical oil paintings by the ‘old masters’; a respect for the primary sources in the history of European art; an understanding of the necessity of research in both literary and visual sources, particularly self-portraits; and a sense of the value that a certain philosophical milieu – beginning with Sade and Nietzsche and expanding to his near contemporaries, Bataille, Blanchot, and (...) Klossowski – could offer to an understanding of paintings. The essay argues that Pierre Klossowski’s monumental drawing La Nef des fous (1990) provides an essential key for understanding the place of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of the same title in History of Madness and the centrality of theories of similitude to Foucault’s thinking about visuality ca. 1960–74. The later significance of the figure of the artist for Foucault can be traced to these earlier writings on painting and madness. (shrink)

This article deals with the Chinese ink painting tradition, as a paradigm in which art and life are coupled and intertwined. In fact, in Chinese classical aesthetics, art and life do not produce a dramatic tension, but are inscribed in a common process of naturalness or spontaneity. The painter has to learn how the breath, or vital energy, that flows in every single image-phenomenon, can be enlivened by the brush strokes. Moreover, the paper builds a dialogue between the European (...) and the Chinese main patterns. Showing alternately the continuity or the discontinuity between art and life, both traditions of thought display the possibility to learn a sort of “art of living”, through – and not despite – the dynamic de-coincidence that appears in the folds of human experience. (shrink)

Hélène Cixous has written a substantial body of writings about art. This article borrows Derrida's conception of the countersignature to explore the relationship she envisages in them between the plastic arts and writing. It argues that the works to which Cixous is drawn, many of which involve copying words, are driven by the desire to capture what is essentially uncapturable in the artist's idiom. Recognizing in them a displacement of her own concerns, Cixous suggests in these texts that all art (...) speaks a common language in so far as it represents the same attempt to pass beyond its own limits, visual or verbal. Writing and painting are thus as much translations of each other as one language is of another. In particular, their status as translations or copies profoundly troubles the possibility of determining the signatory of the text. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 74-89, March 2021.

Up to now, China's painting has not completely shaken off the influence of the spirit of European philosophy or a fundamental change in the way of viewing. The spirit of the unity of subject and object in ancient China philosophy influenced the formation and development of China's paintings. Since China Art Institute introduced figurative expressionism, a new art, into the contemporary art education system of China, it has shown its unique value in professional theory and practical skills. It not (...) only provides new opportunities for reforming contemporary art education in China but also adds a new development direction for contemporary oil painting art in China. This article attempts to reveal the existence and artistic concept of violence in contemporary Chinese oil painting through the description and analysis of painting images and artists' emotional expression, combined with interviews with artists. Based on the development of contemporary Chinese society, the rise of new literary and artistic trends, and the influence of western painting, this paper analyses the historical causes of violence in contemporary Chinese oil painting, and examines the value of contemporary Chinese oil painting in terms of aesthetics and sociology. Therefore, establishing cultural core values is still the indispensable spiritual power of contemporary artists' artistic creation. (shrink)

Lipsius’ De constantia, 17th Century Still Life Painting and the Use of Constancy Today. The present article revisits the main ideas from Justus Lipsius’ De constantia in the light of the present ongoing pandemic. Through his interest for the Stoics, Lipsius was able to contribute to a more general and European interest towards this topic, reviving the Stoic philosophy under the name of Neostoicism. The influence of his ideas can be seen in some art production, especially the one that (...) is connected to the places where Lipsius lived and it is a testimony to their popularity and the various ways of transmitting them. Even if the Stoic ideal remains an ideal, the Neostoicism of Justus Lipsius is meaningful in as much as any philosophy that deals with crises because it can help us view the text from both its relevancy and our recent general experience. The isolation, the anxiety, the uneasiness and fear are emotions that have been more or less present in our lives during this pandemic and they require a solution. Constancy is the solution that Justus Lipsius proposes. (shrink)

This article argues that paintings have a nonconceptual content unlike that of mechanically produced images. The first part of the article outlines an information-theory approach modelled on the camera and based on the idea that pictures convey information about what they depict. Picture structure is conceived of as contentful by virtue of a supposed causal link with what is depicted and as nonconceptual because it is independent of observers’ understanding. The second part introduces an embodied depiction approach based on Merleau-Ponty’s (...) view of style and the act of painting. It is argued that because of bodily mediation the nonconceptual content of paintings cannot be assimilated to the information-theory approach; painted configurations are contentful by virtue of being the product of intelligent activity, but are nonconceptual because they differ from concepts in their representational function. (shrink)

Abstract:When major waterfalls in Norway became possible to develop around 1900, a major step was achieved. The step was a major international technological leap paralleled with changes of established attitudes towards grand, and until then, useless nature. Taking the until-then-useless waterfall Rjukanfossen in Telemark into use was a convergence of grand nature, large technological installations, big business and strong emotions. Transforming this waterfall was a large undertaking and was considered to deserve artistic treatment. In 1907–1908 the Norwegian illustrator and painter (...) Theodor Kittelsen produced a series of five watercolors of the waterfall's transformation. They were hung up at the industrial company's representational villa in Notodden. Within traditional landscape painting, water, and especially cascading water, was a standard element. However, Kittelsen's paintings introduced new versions of nature and nature use. This waterfall was totally transformed by being put into service as part of a Norwegian fairy tale. Dragons, elves, and old men in the mountain appear in the waterfall as part of the transformation. The story the paintings tell did not fit well into the context of Norwegian national romanticism, where the Telemark region throughout the 1800s had been associated with “the nation's inner spirit.” The article will trace the production of these paintings, and the subjects depicted in them. It will analyse the nature versions the meeting between the company manager and the artist entailed. How did these paintings use Norwegian fairy tale images to depict a new version of controlled nature? The paintings did not simply thematize mastery over nature or grief over the loss of a waterfall, but a whole range of emotions like ambivalence, insecurity, envy and pride. They both confirmed and challenged the iconic status of major waterfalls in Norway. (shrink)

This study delves into the porcelain calligraphy and painting of the Ming and Qing dynasties, aiming to uncover the spiritual and cultural narratives encapsulated in these artistic expressions. During these eras, marked by the zenith of Chinese porcelain artistry, the incorporation of religious motifs was not merely decorative but a profound reflection of the prevailing religious beliefs, cultural norms, and aesthetic inclinations of the time. This paper conducts a deep analysis of the religious elements manifested in Ming and Qing dynasty (...) porcelain artworks, exploring how these elements articulate religious devotion, mirror cultural practices, and influence artistic transformations. Through detailed appreciation and interpretation of three exemplary cases—Yongle blue and white entwined flowers, Jiajing blue and white road Fu Yunhe large plate, and a blue and white seawater river cliff pattern three-legged furnace—this study reveals how these works serve as conduits for spiritual reflection and cultural transmission. Each piece not only embodies the religious and philosophical zeitgeist of its era but also highlights the dynamic interplay between art and societal evolution, thus underscoring the multifaceted roles ancient religious art plays in perpetuating cultural heritage, enchanting viewers with its artistic allure, and reflecting broader social transformations. (shrink)

Most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portrait paintings have eyes staring outward at the beholder. A minority of these eyes have slightly elevated pupils in comparison to the iris. These off-centre pupils are not the norm, but they occur regularly in works by skilful European portrait painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This article takes a closer look at selected portrait paintings by Danish artists Jens Juel and Constantin Hansen and argues that the discrepancy between the pupils and the rest (...) of the paintings creates an illusion of movement or presence when looking the paintings in the eye. The discrepancy creates an aesthetic effect corresponding with Merleau-Ponty’s concept of internal discordance. According to Merleau-Ponty, visual art can create the illusion of movement by portraying its parts in different moments. These internal discordances make the painting “move” because the beholder unconsciously creates a fictive link between the parts thereby expanding time in space. The article combines presence theory (Jean-Luc Nancy and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht), phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) and art theory and perception theory (James Elkins, Dominic McIver Lopes and Michael Fried) in order to study the effects and possible reasons for creating pupils out of sync with the rest of the painting. (shrink)

. As a discipline, semiotics has gained recognition in many fields. Cultural background plays an important part in the field of the visual art. Given the rich cultural context of the pictorial hybridization Chinese-European in the early Qing dynasty, the pictorial works can be used in studying semiotics. This article addresses a discourse on some semiotic reflections in painting. It focuses on the application of the theory of the semiotic scientist Charles Peirce that has proven to be suitable for (...) analyzing pictorial works. The model chosen as a subject for investigation is a painting in ink on silk titled “Portrait of Qianlong’s Consort with Yongyan as a Child,” painted using Western techniques in the eighteenth century. The analysis of the portrait offers an appropriate basis to develop some semiotic reflections on this work of art by contributing to aesthetic and artistic awareness. Semiotic structures were employed to develop an understanding of the pictorial forms by turning each element into a tool of communication. The semiotic reading of this work is concerned with the visual art education and sensorial message of the painting. (shrink)

The Age of Enlightenment was characterized by passionate scientific discussions, which involved not only scientists, but also representatives of various social circles. Sciences such as physics and astronomy are becoming a hobby and entertainment, scientific experiments are being conducted at home, friends and acquaintances are invited to conduct them, and amateur scientific courses are being organized. The article highlights how these processes were reflected in the painting of the XVIII century. Science is considered not only as a widespread subject in (...) works of fine art, but also as a force capable of influencing artistic theory and practice. The author also studied the coexistence of scientific, religious and "mythological" thinking, since in this era all these forms remained relevant. A wide range of visual material is used, allowing us to see fascination and even admiration for science as a pan-European trend, to which Russia was also attached. The research methodology involves a combination of a sociological approach, as well as a variety of methods used in art criticism. The need to work with the original tests of the 18th century implied the use of source analysis. Researchers, especially foreign ones, have shown interest in the topic of interaction between art and science, but a full-scale study on this topic has not yet been carried out. Although this article does not pretend to be complete, it nevertheless touches on very significant and little-studied topics. The author managed to show the variety of aspects of reflecting the scientific sphere of the Enlightenment in the mirror of painting. It demonstrates how interest in science placed the painter in the context of constant searches and led to unexpected discoveries and results. For the first time, attention is drawn to the fact that many masters of that time were involved in the dialogue between art and science, much more numerous than it seems at first glance, and understanding scientific issues became a sign of the artist's integration into the European cultural environment, a symptom of his successful socialization. (shrink)

When art develops to a certain extent, it is bound to be mixed with traces of religion, and art influenced by religion occupies an important position in the entire history of art development. Looking at the development history of Chinese and Western painting art, we can find that there are indeed many connections between religion and art. The spiritual transmission of religion is carried out using intuition through painting art, and its vital role is reflected in the long history of (...) human civilization. This paper studies the relationship between the philosophical fusion of the original aesthetics of Chinese and Western religious painting and contemporary painting by studying the development and characteristics of religious painting in China and the West. This paper studies the differences between Chinese and Western religious doctrines and how religious figure painting embodies divinity and secularized humanity in terms of painting methods and forms of expression. The study of the philosophical fusion of the original aesthetics of Chinese and Western religious paintings and its influence on contemporary paintings fills the gap in this aspect. (shrink)

In premodern China, elite painters used imagery not to mirror the world around them, but to evoke unfathomable experience. Considering their art alongside the philosophical traditions that inform it, _The Great Image Has No Form_ explores the “nonobject”—a notion exemplified by paintings that do not seek to represent observable surroundings. François Jullien argues that this nonobjectifying approach stems from the painters’ deeply held belief in a continuum of existence, in which art is not distinct from reality. Contrasting this perspective with (...) the Western notion of art as separate from the world it represents, Jullien investigates the theoretical conditions that allow us to apprehend, isolate, and abstract objects. His comparative method lays bare the assumptions of Chinese and European thought, revitalizing the questions of what painting is, where it comes from, and what it does. Provocative and intellectually vigorous, this sweeping inquiry introduces new ways of thinking about the relationship of art to the ideas in which it is rooted. (shrink)

Still life as an independent painting genre in Chinese fine art was formed in the second half of the XX century under the strong influence, first of all, of Western European and Russian, and then American art. This relatively short period of time includes several periods at once, in which one or another influence dominated. However, it was the integration of the ideas and principles of foreign art schools that allowed Chinese masters to develop those features of the artistic (...) and figurative language that determined the features of the genre of still life in the space of modern art. The object of the article is the process of development of Chinese still life in the second half of the twentieth century, the subject is a set of expressive and artistic means used by Chinese artists to create a still life under the influence of foreign artistic trends. This article aims to determine the place and features of the genre of still life in the works of Chinese painters of the second half of the XX century, as well as to characterize the conformity of this genre to the trends of Russian and Soviet, as well as European art. The study concluded that this genre received rapid development in the second half of the XX century, which occurred under continuous foreign artistic influence. The occupation of a strong position in the space of Chinese art by still life and the formation of its original character with national specifics occurred at the end of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This research aims to study art and religious philosophy by analyzing the significance of Aboriginal dot painting, Sichuan opera makeup, Chinese traditional sculpture and Shu embroidery. A particular emphasis is placed upon their crucial importance for understanding the essence of various societies as well as their main spiritual and cultural tenets. The data for this study was gathered using a qualitative approach, targeted toward online museums and cultural websites, focusing on images of artworks to determine the parameters of symbolic elements (...) in terms of culture and religion. Purposeful sampling was used to identify pieces of art that not only have meaningful religious symbolisms but also different cultural backgrounds. Such sampling assures that the study embodies a wide representation of religious semiotics and a better understanding of the interaction between art and spirituality. This study shows that irrespective of culture, one can identify an analogy of how signs and icons work with the message from the divine, which is further preserved from the sacred. These art symbols embody theological metaphors on ethical, aesthetic, and cultural dimensions and express semantic meanings across cultures. Since the data for the study was limited to only online sources and predefined cultural artefacts, it may lack the field intensity of first-hand observation across cultures. Future research should identify multiple data sources and conduct additional cross-cultural comparisons of more cultures and other forms of art. (shrink)

This article aims to elucidate the Chinese literatus Su Shi's painting theory using French philosopher Gilles Deleuze's concepts of “capturing forces” and “becoming.” In the relevant scholarship, Su Shi's esthetic thought has been illustrated as going beyond the truthful representation of forms, thereby capturing the underlying vitality of the targeted objects, which paved the way for what came to be known as “literati painting.” This artistic approach has been thought to express the artist's lofty and virtuous personality through the liveliness (...) of the objects. I fully embrace the “capturing vitality” part of the literature, further fleshing it out not just by closely analyzing some of Su Shi's extant writings on painting but also by assessing them side by side with such European painters as Paul Cézanne and Francis Bacon. However, I find the “expressing personality” counterpart to be rather limited for interpreting Su Shi's esthetic thought and instead suggest the artistic effect of “becoming” as central to his ultimate esthetic aims. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the problem of changing stylistic paradigm in the Persian poetry of XVI-XVII centuries and reflection of this process in self-consciousness of outstanding authors of the period. Parallel with preserving stable norms of traditional poetics literary practice demonstrates flexibility and forms new range of popular poetic strategies. New aesthetic criteria if ideal poetic language, expressed with epithet ‘colourful’, appears alongside with criteria of previous period, expressed with epithet ‘sweet’ and step by step gets leadership. Lyric poetry (...) of three famous authors of the period of formation and golden age of Indian style served the object of analyses. The phenomena of visualization of imagery connected with perfect poetic language illustrated by examples of ‘Poet and Poetry’ motifs located in ‘frame text’ in end of the qhazal. These motifs serve one of the regular contexts of author’s name and show author’s attitude to his creation, including stylistic preferences. Refinement of poetic fantasy being declared basic condition of creating perfect poetry described visually as coiling lasso, poetry itself as flourishing garden, fountain or European house decorated with painting. Such characteristic of word creation has analogies in the works of Baroque style theorist Giambattista Marino. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European CultureDallas G. Denery IIStuart Clark. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xi + 415. Cloth, $75.00.A popular and pervasive historical narrative links the Renaissance development of linear perspective with Europe’s transition from a pre-modern to an early modern society. Erwin Panofsky gave this narrative its definitive (...) form early in the twentieth century and William Ivins boiled it down to a simple idea that served as the title of his most famous book. According to Ivins, single-point perspective, the artistic technique championed by Alberti and perfected in the paintings of Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, allowed for “the rationalization of sight.” In other words, it provided a mathematically and geometrically grounded method for accurately representing the external world. It is a powerful and seductive claim, one that has shaped generations of scholarly work. It is also, Stuart Clark contends in this important new book, patently wrong. Far from exhibiting a renewed or reinvigorated confidence in the accuracy and reliability of vision, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophers, artists, theologians, and doctors worried that sight was susceptible, perhaps permanently so, to all sorts of debilitating derangements, displacements, and delusions.Rather than relate a history of progress, Clark offers a history of exhaustion, failure, and, ultimately, of rejection. Early modern intellectuals inherited a comprehensive theory of vision and cognition from their medieval predecessors known as perspectivist optics. This theory sought to secure the accuracy of human sense perception through regularized causal processes that linked things in the world with our various cognitive faculties. While some fourteenth-century intellectuals, most notably Nicolas of Autrecourt and Nicole Oresme, recognized structural deficiencies in this theory, their critiques were mostly ignored or treated as anomalies. Over the course of the next two and a half centuries, Clark argues, the challenges to this theory multiplied until it collapsed under their weight (20).Clark’s argument is straightforward and, as his evidence mounts, thoroughly convincing. Throughout each of the eight engrossing chapters that form the core of the book, Clark outlines a different threat, a different set of challenges that pointed out problems with the assumption that vision is trustworthy. The range and depth of those challenges are truly amazing. Doctors worried that imbalances in our humoral system, and especially in the black bile that causes melancholy, could render our visual perceptions dubious at best (ch. 2). Theologians, wary of the dangers of witchcraft and eager to prosecute its practitioners, obsessed over the cognitive threats that devils and demons posed to good Christians (ch. 4), while Protestant reformers relegated the entire tradition of Catholic miracles to the counterfeit illusions of the antichrist (ch. 5). For their part, artists believed that perspective undermined vision, depending as it does on the assumption that what we see is always relative, dependent upon our point of view (ch. 3).Clark structures much of his argument around George Hakewill’s 1608 book, The vanitie of the eye, an exposition on the natural, artificial, and demonic sources that forever render visual knowledge suspect. He could just as well have organized it around the opening pages of Descartes’s Meditations, and in many ways Clark’s book serves as a superb rumination on the sources of Descartes’s skeptical arguments. Unlike Etienne Gilson and, more recently, Richard Popkin, both of whom have done so much to open up the scholastic and early modern sources of Descartes’s skeptical thought experiments, Clark does not limit himself to philosophical lineages. Rather, he considers sources of visual skepticism that developed across an entire culture—in natural philosophy, medicine, art, religion, and literature (especially in Shakespeare’s Macbeth). Not only does the sheer volume and variety of such [End Page 103] sources help to explain Descartes’s urgent desire to overturn everything he had learned and begin again from the foundations, but it also contextualizes the specific arguments he employs. None of Descartes’s skeptical arguments were new and most were well known in the Middle Ages. What had changed over the intervening centuries, Clark contends, was how these arguments drew from... (shrink)

SUMMARYEarly modern artists who did not have access to Roman Antiquity or needed quick access to it could refer to prints after monuments such as those issued by Antoine Lafréry. But Du Choul's Discours sur la castrametation et discipline militaire des Romains [ … ] De la Religion des anciens Romains was also successful among artists, particularly painters. It was in vernacular language and widely available in French, Spanish and Italian; it was affordable and compact in format ; it had (...) plenty of woodcuts; and it focused on the Roman military life, besides the monuments, for which information could also be found in travel guides. The present essay aims to study how Du Choul's volume circulated, with several examples from Spain and Italy. The Discours will be used as a case study of artists as readers, and I will study aspects previously overlooked such as the book's market price in the early modern period, examples of use of copies of the book by artists and, more broadly, the troubles and challenges encountered by these readers when representing subjects from ancient history. (shrink)

Prior to the discovery of linear perspective in the fifteenth century, European artists based their compositions more on imagination than the direct observation of nature. Medieval paintings, therefore, can be thought of as ‘mental projections’ of space rather than optical projections, and were sometimes regarded as ‘primitive’ by historians as they lacked the spatial consistency of later works based on the rules of linear perspective. There are noticeable differences in the way objects are depicted in paintings of the different (...) periods. For example, human figures in pre-linear perspective works often vary greatly in size in ways that are not consistent with the laws of optics. Some art historians have attributed this to ‘hierarchical scaling’ in which larger figures have greater narrative significance. But there are examples of paintings that contradict this explanation. In this paper we will consider an alternative to the hierarchical scaling hypothesis: that medieval artists used relative size to elicit empathy and to reflect the perceptual structure of imagination. This hypothesis was first proposed by the art historian Oskar Wulff, but has largely been dismissed since. We argue that artists of this period, far from being naïve, used sophisticated techniques for directing the attention of the viewer to a particular figure in a painting and encouraging them to ‘see’ the depicted space from that figure’s point of view. We offer some experimental evidence in support of this hypothesis and suggest that the way artists have depicted space in paintings has an important bearing on how we imagine and perceive visual space. (shrink)

Traditional Chinese landscape painting serves as a profound cultural and spiritual expression, reflecting the Chinese people's reverence for nature through symbolic representation, aesthetic philosophy, and artistic craftsmanship. Since its emergence during the Tang Dynasty, landscape painting evolved into a distinct art form characterized by spiritual contemplation and cultural symbolism. Its development through the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties led to the establishment of northern and southern schools, each with its unique techniques and philosophical underpinnings. In modern society, technological advancements (...) and the influence of Western art have posed new challenges and opportunities for landscape painting. This study explores the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of landscape elements in traditional Chinese art while examining innovative techniques that merge classical aesthetics with modern artistic expressions. Through analyzing the works of key landscape painters, the study highlights advancements in thematic representation, stylistic innovation, and symbolic meaning, offering insights into how traditional landscape painting can be revitalized in contemporary art while preserving its cultural and spiritual heritage. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhen encountering something unfamiliar, it is natural to describe and understand it by reference to what is familiar. Commentary on Chinese landscape painting usually relies heavily upon analogies with Western art. James Elkins, concerned to understand the implications of this procedure, asks whether in seeing and writing about this art we ever can escape our Western perspectives. His problem is not just that he himself does not know Chinese. Even bilingual specialists or native Chinese speakers employ this vocabulary, for the (...) vocabulary of contemporary art history, developed in the West, now is the language of academic art history everywhere. We know that we are distorting our descriptions of this Chinese art, even though we don't know how to “get it right.” In the history of European painting from Cimabue to the present, it would be hard to find any Western paintings that could be confused with any art made in China, so the frequent reliance of scholars upon such comparisons seems problematic. Of course, in the near future this situation might change. Perhaps in fifty years, as China becomes more prosperous, art history will become a hybrid discipline. At that point, the situation, which Elkins analyzes, will be reversed. But such a change is a long way in the future. (shrink)

At M. Bernard's I saw several magnificent paintings on porcelain by Monsieur Constantin. In two hundred years, Raphael's frescoes will be known only through Monsieur Constantin.Stendhal, Voyage en France, 1837If we compare the forms that the act of copying has assumed in various civilizations, we cannot fail to notice that a certain number of phenomena are specific to European culture since the Renaissance. Perhaps one of the most singular of these phenomena is the will to create and to possess (...) imperishable reproductions of works that have been singled out, at a given moment, as the brightest jewels of Western art. The history of the fortune of Graeco-Roman sculptures has been masterfully related by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny in Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900, even if it would no doubt be worthwhile to give further consideration to the critical fortune of materials used for reproduction, and particularly to the particular prestige attached to bronze—from the Mantuan works of Antico to the reconstitutions of Greek Urbilder in bronze, instead of the plaster used earlier, which were executed at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as the two Doryphoros that Georg Römer realized from various ancient marble copies of Polyclitus's athlete. But, in fact, it was not only in modern Europe that copies were made in bronze. The production of copies using this alloy was particularly prevalent in imperial China after the rediscovery, in the second half of the eleventh century of our era, of a collection of archaic bronzes from the Shang era. This is why I prefer to call attention to a practice that appears to me, in contrast, to be unique to the Western world: the copying of renowned paintings in materials that are supposed to defy time. (shrink)

From around the year 1900, the ideal of the equivalence of art (form) and nature (animated matter) was challenged when two concurring principles—homogeneous duration and heterogeneous moments—started to manifest themselves in the discrete attempts of artists to integrate being into art. As creative approaches to the perception and representation of nature, these diametrically opposed configurations find expression in the writings of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, mainly between 1889 and 1907. The notion of living forms in permanent transition, informed by (...) evolutionary theory, found its social expression in a growing urban dynamism. Subsequently, the obsolete epistemological Apollonian principle of a central perspective in painting, based on a timeless, static Newtonian space, gave way to the Dionysian ontological principle—radically questioning the unity of being and form in the creative process. Initially, this change was particularly evident in the paintings of Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne. While Monet envisions a homogeneous space of instantaneous time (the separate moment), Cézanne's distinctive Post-Impressionist dynamic representations of continuous becoming can be read as contemporary pictorial counterparts of the Bergsonian concepts of duration, memory, and vital force. Thus, Bergson's psycho-physiological principle of endurance, in which perceptions and memories of distinct physical phenomena interpenetrate multitudinously, gradually becomes a dominant feature in the works of numerous artists who inherit Monet's and, especially, Cézanne's aesthetic notions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European CultureDallas G. Denery IIStuart Clark. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xi + 415. Cloth, $75.00.A popular and pervasive historical narrative links the Renaissance development of linear perspective with Europe’s transition from a pre-modern to an early modern society. Erwin Panofsky gave this narrative its definitive (...) form early in the twentieth century and William Ivins boiled it down to a simple idea that served as the title of his most famous book. According to Ivins, single-point perspective, the artistic technique championed by Alberti and perfected in the paintings of Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, allowed for “the rationalization of sight.” In other words, it provided a mathematically and geometrically grounded method for accurately representing the external world. It is a powerful and seductive claim, one that has shaped generations of scholarly work. It is also, Stuart Clark contends in this important new book, patently wrong. Far from exhibiting a renewed or reinvigorated confidence in the accuracy and reliability of vision, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophers, artists, theologians, and doctors worried that sight was susceptible, perhaps permanently so, to all sorts of debilitating derangements, displacements, and delusions.Rather than relate a history of progress, Clark offers a history of exhaustion, failure, and, ultimately, of rejection. Early modern intellectuals inherited a comprehensive theory of vision and cognition from their medieval predecessors known as perspectivist optics. This theory sought to secure the accuracy of human sense perception through regularized causal processes that linked things in the world with our various cognitive faculties. While some fourteenth-century intellectuals, most notably Nicolas of Autrecourt and Nicole Oresme, recognized structural deficiencies in this theory, their critiques were mostly ignored or treated as anomalies. Over the course of the next two and a half centuries, Clark argues, the challenges to this theory multiplied until it collapsed under their weight (20).Clark’s argument is straightforward and, as his evidence mounts, thoroughly convincing. Throughout each of the eight engrossing chapters that form the core of the book, Clark outlines a different threat, a different set of challenges that pointed out problems with the assumption that vision is trustworthy. The range and depth of those challenges are truly amazing. Doctors worried that imbalances in our humoral system, and especially in the black bile that causes melancholy, could render our visual perceptions dubious at best (ch. 2). Theologians, wary of the dangers of witchcraft and eager to prosecute its practitioners, obsessed over the cognitive threats that devils and demons posed to good Christians (ch. 4), while Protestant reformers relegated the entire tradition of Catholic miracles to the counterfeit illusions of the antichrist (ch. 5). For their part, artists believed that perspective undermined vision, depending as it does on the assumption that what we see is always relative, dependent upon our point of view (ch. 3).Clark structures much of his argument around George Hakewill’s 1608 book, The vanitie of the eye, an exposition on the natural, artificial, and demonic sources that forever render visual knowledge suspect. He could just as well have organized it around the opening pages of Descartes’s Meditations, and in many ways Clark’s book serves as a superb rumination on the sources of Descartes’s skeptical arguments. Unlike Etienne Gilson and, more recently, Richard Popkin, both of whom have done so much to open up the scholastic and early modern sources of Descartes’s skeptical thought experiments, Clark does not limit himself to philosophical lineages. Rather, he considers sources of visual skepticism that developed across an entire culture—in natural philosophy, medicine, art, religion, and literature (especially in Shakespeare’s Macbeth). Not only does the sheer volume and variety of such [End Page 103] sources help to explain Descartes’s urgent desire to overturn everything he had learned and begin again from the foundations, but it also contextualizes the specific arguments he employs. None of Descartes’s skeptical arguments were new and most were well known in the Middle Ages. What had changed over the intervening centuries, Clark contends, was how these arguments drew from... (shrink)

The article analyzes the ideological foundations of the emergence and evolution of landscape in Chinese painting as an independent genre from the III to the XVIII century, before the rapid integration of Western European artistic traditions. Landscape painting is considered as an expression of the state of mind of Chinese artists, the prevailing philosophical ideas, in particular Taoism, the embodiment of literary images associated with the natural origin. Despite the attention of the scientific community to the development of images (...) of nature in the art of ancient and modern China, there are few studies devoted to the causes and justification of certain processes that influenced the formation of the genre. The purpose of the study is to analyze the reasons for the appearance of images and motifs in the landscapes of Chinese artists in connection with the philosophical ideas of that time, cultural connotations in poetry and the principles of landscape art. The tasks include determining the most typical range of scenes and images in landscapes created from the III to XVIII centuries. The material is the work of Chinese artists who lived since the reign of the Wei Dynasty, during the heyday of landscapes in the era of the Tang Dynasty and up to the XVIII century. Of interest is the study of the mechanism of influence on the formation of figurative systems in Chinese landscape painting that developed in parallel poetry and landscape art. (shrink)

The glamour and misery of mankind are at the heart of this book, but it also addresses the tradition and the renewal of the human image. Significant photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries engage in a sometimes surprising dialogue with Masters of European painting from the late Middle Ages to the 19th century.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spirit Stones of China: The Ian and Susan Wilson Collection of Chinese Stones, Paintings, and Related Scholars' ObjectsGraham ParkesSpirit Stones of China: The Ian and Susan Wilson Collection of Chinese Stones, Paintings, and Related Scholars' Objects. Edited by Stephen Little. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago in association with University of California Press, 1999. Pp. 112.Let me introduce Spirit Stones of China: The Ian and Susan Wilson Collection (...) of Chinese Stones, Paintings, and Related Scholars' Objects (edited by Stephen Little) with this quotation:The purest essence of the energy of the heaven-earth world coalesces into rock. It emerges, bearing the soil. Its formations are wonderful and fantastic. Some with cavernous cliffs, revealing their interior; some with peaks and summits in sharp-edged layers.... Within the size of a fist can be assembled the beauty of a thousand cliffs. Rocks large enough to be set up in great courtyards, small enough to be set upon a stand. Like gazing upon the peaks of Song Shan, or facing the entire range of the Meng mountains; sitting quietly, your imagination purified.... The Sage [Confucius] once said, "the humane man loves mountains," and the love of stones has the same meaning. Thus, longevity through quietude is achieved through this love.This passage articulates the very different understanding of stone—as "essential energy" rather than mere matter—that underlies the traditional Chinese passion for rock collecting and appreciating, for which even the terms "petromania" and "litholatry" seem too weak. It comes from the preface to the earliest surviving Chinese manual on the topic, Du Wan's Stone Compendium of Cloudy Forest, compiled in the early twelfth century, and is quoted by Stephen Little in his erudite and informative introduction to this magnificent catalog for a unique collection of "spirit" or "strange stones" (guai shi) and other scholars' articles. This essay nicely complements and amplifies ideas set forth some fifteen years ago by John Hay, in his now classic introduction to the catalog Kernels of Energy, Bones of Earth: The Rock in Chinese Art (New York: China House Gallery, China Institute in America, 1985).Most cultures appear to begin with a natural reverence for stone in its natural state—one thinks of the Druids, the Indian tradition, the Polynesians, Native Americans, and Australian aboriginal culture—and many seem to retain that reverence as they develop. Indeed, when seen in a global perspective, the general lack of interest in (or respect for) rock in its unhewn state that characterizes the European and Anglo-American traditions seems idiosyncratic. But Chinese culture definitely has the longest and most enthusiastic tradition of collecting stones and arranging rocks in gardens: "strange stones" figure among articles of tribute offered to the mythical emperor Yu (mid-second millennium B.C.E.), and the emperor Wu Di (second century B.C.E.) is recorded as having had rocks arranged in the gardens of his palace. [End Page 306]Stephen Little's essay gives an eloquent account of the development of the practice of stone collecting in China, delineating its relationships with poetry and painting and other arts and practices, and containing numerous translations of passages from primary sources otherwise inaccessible to the non-reader of Chinese. Most of the rocks in the catalog are of the well-known Lingbi (sonorous) and Ying types, but other kinds are represented, too. The editor also supplies a context for appreciating the paintings, scrolls, and other articles from scholars' desks that are in the catalog: brush rests, inkstones, brush holders, and so forth. The sixty-six items from the collection are represented in excellent black-and-white photographs.The book is beautifully designed and produced—and is indeed a work of art in itself with its handsome, dark blue Chinese-style case. All in all, this a stylish and informative contribution to the growing literature on a philosophically fascinating topic. [End Page 307]Graham Parkes University of Hawai'iCopyright © 2001 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

‘Spirit consonance engendering a sense of life’ (Qi Yun Sheng Dong) as the first law of Chinese painting, originally proposed by Xie He (active 500–535?) in his six laws of painting, has been commonly echoed by numerous later Chinese artists up to this day. Tracing back the meaning of each character of ‘Qi Yun Sheng Dong’ from Pre-Qin up to the Six Dynasties, along with a comparative analysis on the renderings of ‘Qi Yun Sheng Dong’ by experts in Western academia, (...) I establish ‘spirit consonance’ as the rendering of ‘Qi Yun’. By examining texts on painting by significant critics in Chinese art history, and by referring to specific works by painters from the Six Dynasties up to the Yuan Dynasty, I present the merits and demerits of the different interpretations by Western experts, and explore the essence of ‘Qi Yun’. Once the painter successfully captures ‘spirit consonance’ as the essential character or ‘internal reality’ of the object, and transmits it into the work, ‘Qi Yun’ further implies the expressive quality of the work beyond formal representation. Additionally, the fusion of expressive and representative functions also leaves space for further explaining the aesthetic interaction among artist, object, work, and audience. From the Six Dynasties onwards, Chinese painters have practised the expressive pursuit beyond epresentation on the basis of the unification of ‘Qi Yun’ (spirit consonance) and formal representation, although spirit consonance was valued more highly than formal likeness. (shrink)

As two different art categories, literature and painting use temporal words and spatial images respectively to convey information and narrative. In addition to the pursuit of visual decoration, the paintings in books and periodicals in the period of the Republic of China were widely and profoundly influenced by the literature of the same period from the aspects of the style of expression, the theme of content and the creative techniques, thus breaking through the limitations of their own media and achieving (...) narrative effects like literary. The reflection of literary thoughts and trends in theme, the translation of classical novels in content and the use of literary techniques such as metaphor, synaesthesia and “Bixing” in the expression techniques that further highlighted the functional value, aesthetic value, and historical value of the images. In the visual information age, only by maintaining the characteristics of their own media and absorbing the narrative advantages of other artistic media, can images break through the limitation of plane static space and achieve a narrative effect with more artistic appeal and ideological and cultural depth. (shrink)

This volume examines mystical experiences as portrayed in various ways by "authors" such as philosophers, mystics, psychoanalysts, writers, and peasant women. These "mystical authors" have, throughout the ages, attempted to convey the unsayable through writings, paintings, or oral stories. The immediate experience of God is the primary source and ultimate goal of these mystical expressions. This experience is essentially ineffable, yet all mystical authors, either consciously or unconsciously, feel an urge to convey what they have undergone in the moments of (...) rapture. At the same time they are in the role of intermediaries: the goal of their self-expression - either written, painted or oral - is to make others somehow understand or feel what they have experienced, and to lead others toward the spiritual goal of human life. This volume studies the mystical experiences and the way they have been described or portrayed in West-European culture, from Antiquity to the present, from an interdisciplinary perspective, and approaches the concept of "immediate experience" in various ways. (shrink)

Benjamin Buchloh’s two interviews with Gerhard Richter, which bookend this slim volume, are fascinating glimpses into the artist’s interior life, and thus rewarding. Unfortunately, jargon and proli...

A popular and pervasive historical narrative links the Renaissance development of linear perspective with Europe’s transition from a pre-modern to an early modern society. Erwin Panofsky gave this narrative its definitive form early in the twentieth century and William Ivins boiled it down to a simple idea that served as the title of his most famous book. According to Ivins, single-point perspective, the artistic technique championed by Alberti and perfected in the paintings of Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, allowed for (...) “the rationalization of sight.” In other words, it provided a mathematically and geometrically grounded method for accurately representing the external world. It is a powerful and seductive claim, one that has shaped generations of scholarly work. It is also, Stuart Clark contends in this important new book, patently wrong. Far from exhibiting a renewed or reinvigorated confidence in the accuracy and reliability of vision, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophers, artists, theologians, and doctors worried that sight was susceptible, perhaps permanently so, to all sorts of debilitating derangements, displacements, and delusions.Rather than relate a history of progress, Clark offers a history of exhaustion, failure, and, ultimately, of rejection. Early modern intellectuals inherited a comprehensive theory of vision and cognition from their medieval predecessors known as perspectivist. (shrink)

Modern critics often regard Goya's etchings and black paintings as satirical observations on the social and political conditions of his times. In a study of Goya first published in 1950, which seldom receives the attention it merits, the French author and art theorist André Malraux contends that these works have a much deeper significance. The etchings and black paintings, Malraux argues, represent a fundamental challenge to the humanist artistic tradition that began with the Renaissance - a tradition founded on the (...) pursuit of a transcendent world of nobility, harmony and beauty. Following an illness that left him deaf for life, Goya developed an art of a fundamentally different kind - an art, Malraux writes, ruled by ‘the unity of the prison house’ which replaced transcendence with a pervasive feeling of dependence and from which all trace of humanism has been erased. Foreshadowing modern art's abandonment of the Renaissance ideal, the etchings and black paintings are the first announcement of the death of beauty in Western art. (shrink)