LA BELLEZZA AND THE XXTH CENTURY. DESTINY OF AN AESTHETIC CATEGORY
Kipra BORATCHEVA /Bulgaria/
November 1998, Sofia
LA BELLEZZA AND THE XXTH CENTURY.
DESTINY OF AN AESTHETIC CATEGORY
TO VLADIMIR VISSOTSKY
In one of his poems Vladimir Vissotsky, the Russian bard, described the feeling of complete devastation by the following verses: “My heart and my sober-minded head are not at draggers drawn any more…” The everlasting collision of spiritual and material in human indivisible duel nature is one of the main motive impacts in one’s life. During the different periods of art history, that are at the same time stages of human civilization evolution, at one moment Spiritual prevailed, at another Material, but both of them were always present, except in abstract art, of course.
In antiquity, the epoch of top growth of slave-owning system when a slave - a human being was put on a step lower than an animal was, the ideal of beauty was the harmoniously built human body. With the advent of Christianity which represented a new moment in the spiritual evolution of mankind, the category of sublime got very popular in Byzantine aesthetics of the Middle Ages. What did sublime mean? According to Pseudo Dionisius this category expressed the sublimity of human soul, i.e. it expressed the beauty of human soul; thereupon the profound psychological character of Byzantine art. The teaching of Jesus Christ, its principal ideas: equality in rights for all people, equality in rights for all peoples - He declared Himself to be against His own people to be considered as chosen by God, tolerance to sin, remittal of enemies, and the most important - all the people on Earth, men and women, Jews and non-Jews, should love each other with all their heart, all these ideas expressed a new spiritual advance in the end of the epoch of slavery and the beginning of the next social formation which declared Christianity as its religion. Certainly, even nowadays we haven’t converted in reality Christian principles, but, however, in the virtual world of art they were acting particularly hard in the Middle Ages. In contrast to the exclusive importance that the human body had in antiquity, in icon-painting of Eastern Christianity and in Gothic art of Western one primary importance was the head, the face, precisely the eyes as a place of concentration of spiritual energy while the body rested almost weightless.
In the centre of Renaissance aesthetics laid once more the BELEZZA teaching. The Renaissance coincided with the beginning of the next social formation and its typical progress in material sphere. Let’s just remember the fact that the first bank was found in the XI century. The artists turned back to the antique notion of splendid as harmonious proportion. The ideal of BELLEZZA was the woman’s beauty which according to Firenzuola incarnated best the beauty: “The beautiful woman is the most splendid object that a human being could admire, the beauty is the greatest of good things of life that God has granted the mankind with…”
The most outstanding personification of Renaissance woman’s splendid image is in the Sisitine Madonna. On the other hand the tragic selflessness of Raphael’s Madonna lead to another aesthetic category - the tragic in the Late Renaissance Art when the interest in mentality as a struggle of material and spiritual revealed the dramatic collision of spirit and body, of emotion and reason. One of the most tragic works of art - Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini renounced all that the Renaissance art highly appreciated and on the first place the nude beauty, the human body as an expression of superhuman might and energy. Michelangelo renounced the main idol of Renaissance - the belief in the unlimited creative force of man who with the help of art had become equal to God, i.e. of spiritual perfection. Just at that time in the fate of aesthetic category of splendid a cardinal change emerged. For the first time two notions of splendid, two ideals of BELLEZZA appeared - one in the aesthetics of manierism that prepared the later baroque aesthetic and artistic conceptions, the other in the aesthetics of classicism. According to some philosophers the baroque aesthetics ignored completely the notion of splendid and on the place of harmony put disharmony and dissonance. May be it depends on the point of view. To some harmonious was splendid, to others - disharmonious was. To Rubens emotion was splendid, to Poussin it was reason. It is strange that sensual baroque was rather a style of religious art - it came into being as the art of Counter Reformation, while rational classicism was rather a secular art. Further the swarming of styles went on, each with its own notion of splendid, with its own ideal of BELLEZZA: in the XVII c. - baroque and classicism; in the XVIII c. - rococo and classicism; in the XIX c. - romanticism, academic classicism, realism, impressionism; in the XX c. - realism /socialist, etc…/, expressionism, fauvism, cubism, abstract art and plenty of other “isms” more. To all of them the category of splendid had different content. To some BELLEZZA continues to be the harmony of numbers, embodied in the perfect human body, i.e. to them BELLEZZA has been present only in the marked academies. To others the destruction of human body by cubism and its complete absence in abstract art is explained by the prophetic facilities of art to transmit the great dismay in human soul on the brink of the terrible XX c. Not by a mere chance the first abstract artist Vassily Kandinsky was a son of Russian land, the martyr of our century. The evident dehumanization of art, it seems to me, is a consequence of the dread fear of the apocalypse of nuclear disaster man felt. Not by a mere chance our contemporaries are turning back constantly to the works of old masters in which the beauty of human body, of human relations rest a unsurpassed model of splendid. Apparently, the content of this aesthetic category hasn’t changed much. BELLEZZA È SEMPRE LA BELLEZZA!
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This discourse was read at the Conference in occasion of the 50th anniversary of Art History Institute of Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in November 1998.
SUMMARY
A poem of Vladimir Vissotsky got me to reflect upon the destiny of the BELLEZZA aesthetic category. Its different periods corresponded to the different stages of evolution of human civilization. Another thing I was surprised to hit upon was the contrast in antiquity when the ideal of BELLEZZA was the harmoniously built human body and at the same time man-slave was treated worse than an animal was. During the next period of the Middle Ages, the times of feudal society that declared Christianity as its religion, the notion of splendid was the beauty of human soul that reflected in Eastern icon painting and Western gothic art. The Renaissance coincided with the beginning of the next social formation with its typical progress in material sphere and once more we have an ideal of BELLEZZA the harmoniously built human body, this time woman’s beauty. Michelangelo late works renounced the main idol of Renaissance - the belief in the unlimited creative force of man who with the help of art had become equal to God. Since the creation of Michelangelo’s late works that marked the moment, when man realized how far he was off God, i.e. of spiritual perfection, since that time in the fate of aesthetic category of splendid a cardinal change occurred. For the first time two notions of splendid, two ideals of BELLEZZA appeared - one in the aesthetics of manierism, the other in the aesthetic of classicism. Further the swarming of styles went on each with its own notion of splendid, with its own ideal of BELLEZZA: in the XVII c. - baroque and classicism; in the XVIII c. - rococo and classicism; in the XIX c. - romanticism, academic classicism, realism, impressionism; in the XX c. - realism /socialist, etc…/, expressionism, fauvism, cubism, abstract art and many other “isms” more. To all of them the category of splendid had different content. It seems to me the distraction of human body in cubism and its complete absence in abstract art is explained by the prophetic facilities of art to transmit the great dismay in human soul on the brink of the terrible XX century. The fact our contemporaries are turning back constantly to old masters’ art might be explained not only because in their works the beauty of human body, of human relations rests an unsurpassed model splendid, but because also contemporary man has realized that in spite of the everlasting collision of material and spiritual in the duel human nature, this duel nature rests indivisible /indivis/.
P.S. By the way, the emergence of two ideals of BELLEZZA in Beaux-arts in the end of the Renaissance coincided with the transition from the traditional society to the technogenic one. And the transition from the technogenic society of the XVI-XIX c. to our contemporary one is marked by the origin of Abstract art where human body disappears completely, where the only that rests is the SPIRIT / Not very well for the duel indivis human nature, however/.
In the XVI c., in the end of Renaissance epoch, polyphonie emerged in music, i.e. two musical ideals of beauty. С чем я нас и поздравляю!
“P.S.” was added in december 2004.