HKB
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Often appears with: reason and the intellect · poetry and the poets · history and the writing of history · beauty and taste · turks and restrictions on pictures · the passions and the emotions · religious persecution and toleration · rational experience in art · polytheism in art · parody of life · painting as intellectual reasoning · masaccio as master of painting
Usually: argument (4) · reflection (2) · censure (2) · wonder (2) · the stranger's arrival (1) · curiosity (1) · detachment (1) · skepticism (1)
“For since, of the works that are the life and the glory of the craftsmen, the first and step by step the second and the third were lost by reason of time, that consumes all things, and since, for lack of writers at that time, they could not, at least in that way, become known to posterity, their craftsmen as well came to be forgotten.” Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Arc · insight
“as a matter of mere imitation, art cannot maintain a rivalry with nature, and, if it tries, must look like a worm trying to crawl after an elephant.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Arts · wit
“Thus they sought to imitate that which they saw in nature, and no more, and thus their works came to be better planned and better conceived; and this emboldened them to give rules to their perspectives and to foreshorten them in a natural and proper form” Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Arc · insight
“painting is nothing but the counterfeiting of all the things of nature, vividly and simply, with drawing and with colours, even as she produced them for us” Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Arc · insight
He explains Hegelian “art religion”: art uses sensuous immediacy to express spiritual truth, rejects imitation of nature’s externality, and argues art risks polytheism and depends on the artist’s made form.
*sign* of the Idea, is so transfigured by the informing spirit in order to express the Idea, that the figure shows it and it alone:—the shape or form of *Beauty*. § 557. The sensuous externality attaching to the beautiful,—the _form of immediacy* as such,—at the same time *qualifies* what it *embodies_: and the God (of art) has with his spirituality at the same time the stamp upon him of a natural medium or natural …
He claims the real root of the arts is nature and divine intellect, argues it is risky to name the first inventor, and compares art-history memory loss to early poetry being dominated by Homer.
X. And besides this there were found in the same place many small figures in bronze after the same manner, which are in the hands of the said Lord Duke. But since the dates of the works of the Greeks, the Ethiopians, and the Chaldaeans are as doubtful as our own, and perhaps more, and by reason of the greater need of founding our judgment about these works on conjectures, which, however, are not so feeble that they …
Vasari claims Masaccio fully replaced Giotto’s manner with a new natural style, including better foreshortening, lighting and shading, and attempts at closer imitation of nature, while introducing this Second Part’s biographies.
[Footnote 9: *I.e.*, Donatello.] The same advance was made at this time by painting, from which that most excellent Masaccio swept away completely the manner of Giotto in the heads, the draperies, the buildings, the nudes, the colouring, and the foreshortenings, all of which he made new, bringing to light that modern manner which was followed in those times and has been followed up to our own day by all our craftsme…
Vasari argues that great artistic talent produces competitors and that Renaissance painters like Masaccio advanced painting by treating it as lifelike imitation of nature with correct drawing, color, and foreshortening.
PAINTER OF SAN GIOVANNI IN VALDARNO It is the custom of nature, when she makes a man very excellent in any profession, very often not to make him alone, but at the same time, and in the same neighbourhood, to make another to compete with him, to the end that they may assist each other by their talent and emulation; which circumstance, besides the singular advantage enjoyed by the men themselves, who thus compete wit…
Hegel turns to the “end” of artistic beauty and critiques the imitation of nature: mere copying is superfluous, limited by one-sided representation, and can become parody rather than genuine vitality.
THE CONCEPTION OF ARTISTIC BEAUTY. 3. The question then arises, what the interest or the *End* is which man proposes to himself when he reproduces such a content in the form of works of art. This was the third point of view which we set before us with reference to the work of art, and the closer discussion of which will finally make the transition to the actual and true conception of art. If in this aspect we glanc…
It explains Leonardo’s philosophy of art and life: he values scientific, rational experience grounded in nature’s imitation, while using art to express inner character and thought.
at the cost of our toil.... As a day well spent makes sleep {xiii} seem pleasant, so a life well employed makes death pleasant. A life well spent is long." Leonardo's views of aesthetic are all important in his philosophy of life and art. The worker's thoughts on his craft are always of interest. They are doubly so when there is in them no trace of literary self-consciousness to blemish their expression. He recor…