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The Ideas Of Beauty And Art In Antiquity And The Middle Ages

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The first two chapters of “Theories of Art: From Plato to Winckelmann” by Moshe Barasch chronologically describe the ideas of beauty and art in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Each thinker offered new insight, building off the ones before him. From this, humanity’s train of thought could be realized. As I walked through the thoughts of Antiquity to the Middle Ages, I observed a development in the way people understood and defined Beauty—a movement from the objective to the subjective to a relationship between the two. These shifts in viewpoint show the development towards, what I believe to be, a more complete understanding of Beauty, which has both external and internal qualities.

For Barasch, Antiquity is the first era to bring up ideas about beauty and art. Thinkers of this time valued logic and reason, mostly viewing nature objectively. In other words, they often explained reality as if it were separate from themselves. Antiquity is also the time of the Ancient Greeks with their ideal human forms becoming manifest in their sculptures.

Combining both Antiquity’s logical mindset and its sculptural development towards the ideal, Polyclitus wrote a treatise, the Canon, for the working artist looking to achieve beauty in his works. Rather than instructions for creating a specific human form, it contained pages of mathematical proportions of the human body*. It was Polyclitus’ understanding that Beauty was symmetrical, harmonious proportions. For me, his definition of Beauty

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