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VARIOUS ASPECTS OF ART HISTORY
Masliakova A.
Ph.D. in Art Criticism, Researcher, Galway University https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7118846
Abstract
This research is the product of years of research executed by the author in the field of Art history. Each part of the article reveals various aspects of the issue mentioned above, in particular, the influence of Antiquity on the formation of the aesthetic preferences of artists, the role of the Bauhaus in the development of Modern architecture, the interaction between Art and Nature, the symbolism of a mirror in the context of the Baroque era, as well as the importance of restauration and preservation of the Artworks. The narrative is supplemented by the photographs taken by the author during her trips around Russia and Europe.
Keywords: art history, Bauhaus, mirrors, Borges, restauration.
First of all we are going to concentrate on the theme of Ancient Gods and Heroes. As you know, the influence of Antiquity on the history of Art is difficult to overestimate. Many architectural monuments were inspired by Antique samples (see Fig. 1.). For example, the painting style of the Loggias of Raphael in the Vatican (as well as their copy adorning the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, which was made in the 18th century by the order of the Empress Catherine II) is based on the bizarre, grotesque ornament of the Golden House of Nero, discovered by chance at the end of the 15th century. The aesthetics of "The Belvedere Torso", found in Rome in the 15th century, had a great influence on the work of such prominent artists as Michelangelo and Rubens [1]. Whereas James Stewart's and Nicholas Revett's study "The Antiquities of Athens" largely determined the direction of the development of the British architecture in the late 18th century.
In general, interest in the ideals of the past has had a special attraction and charm. So it is no coincidence that many authors has turned to this topic, starting with Richard Wagner, who developed Germanic mythology in his cycle of four epic operas called "Ring of the Nibelungen", and ending with "The Lord of the Rings" by J.R.R. Tolkien creating his own, unique mythology. Not to mention Woody Allen's movie "Midnight in Paris" emphasizing the fact that every generation finds the past much more attractive than the present.
As a matter of fact, there are a lot of plaster cast collections around the World aiming to develop the aesthetic taste of the audience and awaken people's interest in the works of the outstanding masters of the past, including the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine located at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, the Cast Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Museum in St. Petersburg, the plaster cast reproductions located at the Pushkin Museum, etc.
Fig. 1. Sculptural décor of the Hermitage Museum.
On the one hand, Nature is an integral part of Ancient culture (see Lecture "Art and Nature"), but at the same time, it can destroy the Art objects created by man. Suffice it to recall the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 BC, which killed thousands of inhabitants of the Roman cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabia. But at the same time, due to the unique property of the volcanic ash that coated those cities, they have been preserved in their original state, and we have a unique opportunity to study their culture and Art. Besides, the excavations of Pompeii led to the emergence of the Neo-Pompeian Style, for example, "The Last Day of Pompeii" by Karl Bryullov, the Pompeian Dining Room in the Winter Palace of the Romanovs designed by the architect Alexander Bryullov, the Apartments of the King and Queen in the Munich Residence decorated by Leo von Klenze, etc.
Now we are going to reflect of the issue of Mirrors in Art. It is a well-known fact that for many centuries mirror was a sign of wealth. And it was believed that mirrors of the highest quality could be produced only in Venice. For instance, at the Louvre Museum there is a Mirror of Maria Medici, incrusted with precious stones, which was presented to her by Venetian masters.
Firstly, mirror allows you to see things from an unusual angle adding new meanings and making familiar things look ambiguous. And I find it exceedingly fascinating to take pictures of reflective surfaces, such as glass façades of the buildings, or the expanses of water, for it helps to see the objects, reflected in them, differently giving an opportunity to get closer to understanding the World not as it appears for us, but as it is (see Fig. 3.). Let us mention in this regard "The Ar-nolfini Portrait" by Jan van Eyck, located at the National Gallery in London, depicting a mirror showing two men entering the room; "Las Meninas" by Diego Velazquez, which is rightfully considered the gem of the collection of the Prado Museum, representing a mirror, hanging of the wall, that reflects the figures of the parents of the Infanta Margaret Theresa of Spain, depicted in the foreground, - the King Philip V and his wife Marianna of Austria. Moreover, the conversation that seems to be transpiring between the barmaid and the gentleman, represented in Eduard Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergèr", is revealed to be an optical trick since the man stands outside the painter's field of vi-
sion, to the left, and looks away from the barmaid, rather than standing right in front of her [2]. And similar technique was used by Olafur Eliasson in his installation "Pentagonal Mirror Tunnel" exhibited at the Emma Museum in Espoo in 2017 [3].
Nevertheless, it was during the Baroque époque that mirrors acquired particular importance creating the illusion of a much larger space and reinforcing the effect of surprise which, as you know, was essential for the Baroque aesthetics. Suffice it to mention the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles demonstrating that France could rival the Venetian monopoly on mirror manufacturing, or the Audience Room of the Grand Palace in Peterhof designed to the order of the Emperor Peter I to surpass the grandeur of the Versailles (see Fig. 2.).
On the one hand, mirror could give its owner "superpowers" - for instance, Perseus killed the Gorgon Medusa using a mirror, and in Peter Paul Rubens' painting "Perseus and Andromeda", located at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, one can see the hero holding his shield with the head of Medusa on it. One can even travel with the help of a mirror, as shown in Lewis Carroll's novel "Through the Looking Glass" telling a story of a girl who slipped through a mirror to another world. Besides, a mirror can warn of danger, just like in the movie based on Agatha Christie's story "In a Glass Darkly" telling about a man who "witnessed" a murder of a young girl reflected in a bedroom mirror.
It should be noted that many prominent film directors used mirrors in their films so as to enrich the symbolism of the plot - for instance, the "Mirror Talk" from Jean Luc Godard's move "Breathless" in which the protagonists examine their faces in the mirror while chatting; or Andrei Tarkovsky's film "Mirror" showing Alexei, the main character, looking intently at his reflection in the mirror. Yet, on the other hand, the excessive use of the mirror may lead to a negative effect - let us use as an example "Narcissus" by Caravaggio who, according to Ovid's "Metamorphoses", fell in love with his own impression, and died of his passion, and, after that, ended up in Dante's "Inferno". In this regard one should also mention the fate of the Evil Queen from the "Snow White and Seven Dwarfs" - longing to be "the fairest of them all", she would turn to her Magic Mirror every morning to make sure that her goal was achieved, and that ultimately led to her death.
Fig. 2. The Audience Room of the Grand Palace in Peterhof.
A broken mirror is no less dangerous - for instance, the Snow Queen shattered the glass into thousands of small pieces and made it so that the fragments fell into the eyes of people, as a result of which a person was evil, and hated the beautiful while the fragment was in their eyes. And in the film "The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side", inspired by Agatha Christie's story with the same title, Mrs. Bantry, when recounting to Miss Marple the events that occurred on the day of the
murder, uses the lines from Alfred Tennyson's poem "The Lady of Shalott", in which a curse falls upon the heroine of the poem when the mirror cracks, to describe the look she observed on Marina Gregg's face.
It is possible that the secret of the attractiveness of mirrors will never be completely unraveled. After all, no matter how much we look in the mirror, we see not how others perceive us, but our "mirrored" reflection.
And it is high time we talked about Art and Nature. It is a well-known fact that Art and Nature are closely connected. Many authors, including Vitruvius, agree that a column could be compared to a tree; that is to say, the base of the column corresponds to the stump, the shaft of the column resembles the tree trunk, whereas the capital reminds of the branches of the tree. And I must say that whenever I walk in the forest, or in the park located on Yelagin Island, it seems to me that the trunks of the trees look like giant pillars supporting the invisible "Temple of the World", and their branches are serving as flying buttresses.
Various interior and exterior designs were inspired by Nature - let us mention in this regard the patterns of twelve panels embroidered with glass beads, decorating the Bugle Study in the Chinese Palace in Oranienbaum, which were created to the order of the Empress Catherine II (see Fig. 4.); the woodcarvings of the Voltaire Room in the Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam (in French, the Palace's name means «without care») in which the representations of fruit and foliage are combined with the depictions of monkeys and birds; the Raphael Loggias richly adorned with the representations of squirrels, owls, mice, snakes, etc. (see Fig. 5.). Rococo artists were guided by the whimsical curve of the sea shell in their works, not to mention that the Baroque style itself owes its emergence to a "flawed", "misshapen" pearl. And if one looks closely at the façades of the buildings erected in the style of Art Nouveau - for example, the Lidval Apartment House designed by the architect Fyodor Lidval and adorned with representations of spider webs, lizards, lions, hares, etc., or the Ivan Al-yushinsky Apartment House, created by the architect Alexander Lishnevsky and decorated with the sculptures of cats with raised tails - one may see, that their décor was also created to resemble the diversity of Nature. And one should not forget about "La Mer" ("The Sea") by Claude Debussy, "The Ninth Wave" by Ivan Alvazovsky, "The Cuckoo" by François Couperin, and Arkady Rylov's "Self-Portrait with a Squirrel".
Interestingly enough, despite the fact that the depictions of Nature can be found in the Artworks of different époques, starting with the frescoes decorating the Knossos Palace on Crete and ending with Claude Monet's "Impression. Sunrise", the "emancipation" of a landscape in the European Art occurred rather late, in the 19th century. And although even Peter Paul Rubens created landscapes (for instance, "Landscape with a Rainbow", or "Landscape with Stone Carriers" located at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg), only during the Romanticism landscape comes to the fore (for example, Caspar David Friedrich's "The Lonely Tree"
located at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, or his "Ruins of the Oybin (Dreamer)" exhibited at the General Staff Building in St. Petersburg; J.M.W. Turner's "Fishermen at Sea" and "Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps" presented at the Tate Gallery in London, etc.).
And when we move towards the 20th-21st centuries, the interpretations of Nature in Art becomes more and more original - "Fallingwater" designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who, following the tradition of the Greek theatre in which Nature not only served as scenery, but also was an essential component of the performance, made the sounds of the waterfall an integral part of his architectural project; the Building of the Didrichsen Museum in Helsinki designed by Viljo Revell who had a vision of the surface reflecting the architecture and the surrounding Nature; the Sächsische Aufbaubank Building in Leipzig with mushroom-shaped columns designed by the ACME London; Fujiko Nakaya's fog sculptures dancing with the wind [4]; Sten Are Sandbeck's installation "While We Are Waiting", showing birch boards with eyes, peering into the faces of the visitors, and contemplating the issues of experience and expectations, which was presented at the Amos Rex Museum in Helsinki during the exhibition called "Subterranean" [5]; Olivier Messiaen's "Catalogue of Birds" for, as we all know, he was a devoted ornithologist, and "Birdsong: a Musical Field Guide" by Alexander Liebermann, who, following the footsteps of his predecessor, creates the transcriptions of various birds and uses those tunes in his creativity [6], etc.
Without any doubt, the ability to understand Art and appreciate the diversity of Nate could not only broaden the horizons of a person, but also contribute to the improvement of their psychological state. And it is no surprise that Art Therapy, Music Therapy, and Landscape Therapy are extremely popular nowadays. And yet, it seems to me that is not only important to communicate with the Artworks and Nature, but also to develop the ability to see the Beauty in "mundane" things, for which the advocates of the ready-made movement, such as Marcel Duchamp ("Bicycle Wheel", "Fountain"), Man Ray ("The Gift"), Pablo Picasso ("Bull's Head"), etc., were aiming. In other words, the windmills located in different parts of the World and transforming the wind energy into electricity are no less impressive than Alexander Calder's kinetic sculptures in which the movement is produced by exploiting the natural movement of air in space. And, as the old saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Fig. 4. The Bugle Cabinet in the Chinese Palace in Oranienbaum.
Fig. 5. The copy of the Raphael Loggias, the Hermitage Museum.
Fig. 6. Viipuri Library, the glass wall.
Fig. 7. Viipuri Library, barrel skylights.
As for the connection between Avant-Garde and the Bauhaus, needless to say that Russian Avant-Garde (1850-1930) played a significant part in the development of the Art of the 20th-21st centuries. Suffice it to mention that "Malevich's Tektonik" - a design project for a fourteen-level hotel in London created by the inimitable Zaha Hadid, who, by the way, was the first woman to be awarded the Pritzker Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for architecture, - was inspired by the Russian Suprematist movement [7].
And if Avant-Garde was aiming to break the rules, go beyond the ordinary and expand the limits of possibility, the members of the Bauhaus School (1919-1933) represented another influential tendency of the time, namely, they wanted to create a "total work of Art" (Gesamtkunstwerk) combining aesthetics with everyday function - according to the Bauhaus Manifesto artists and craftsmen were to unite their efforts in order to create the "building of the future" [8, p. 28]. Yet these two seemingly separate movements have something in common, which is no surprise since Wassily Kandin-sky, one of the prominent Avant-Garde artists, worked at the Bauhaus for about ten years (1922-1933). In other words, both trends were striving for the renewal of the Art with the sole difference that the attitude of the Avant-Gardists towards it was more theoretical and radical, whereas the Bauhaus concept was more "down to earth" and practically oriented. Albeit at the beginning, there were attempts to find a certain spiritual basis for the Bauhaus project; one need only note Johannes Itten's educational philosophy making emphasis on the inner-self, o Gertrud Grunow's classes in harmonization based on the belief that a universal equilibrium of color, music, perception and form is anchored in each person and could be discovered through physical and mental exercises [8, p. 69]. And it seems to me that, to some extent, that unites Bauhaus with the creativity of
Alexander Scriabin, one of the most mysterious composers who at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was working on the synthetic Work of Art - "Mysterium" the performance of which was supposed to transform the World and make it a better place. Unfortunately, Scriabin died in 1915 before his work was finished. Interestingly enough, Johannes Itten left Bauhaus a little bit later, in 1922. And from that time on, the importance of the practical component of the Bauhaus activities begins to grow.
There was a transition from an intuitive to a systematic approach, for they had an ambition to create original products to suit industrial requirements [8, p. 95-96]. Hence the slogan - "art and technology, new unity" [8, p. 121]. And the House am Horn, designed especially for the Exhibition of 1923, was a Bauhaus creation from top to bottom representing the first practical attempt of new living in Germany [9]. Moreover, Walter Gropius came up with the idea of the "large -scale building set" implying the use of standardized construction elements, and thus making it possible to assemble a "designer" in different ways and erect various "machines for living" according to their function [8, p. 242]. One may cite as an example the DessauTörten Housing Estate (1926-1928) comprising simple one-storey detached houses with garden created by Walter Gropius especially for workers since during the Weimar Republic there was an acute shortage of affordable housing [10]. By the way, one should distinguish between functionalism and constructivism, that is to say, the first one makes accent on the convenience of space for a person dwelling there, whereas the main goal for second one is creative self-expression of an artist (although later on it would acquire a more utilitarian quality). Suffice it to compare the Törten Housing Estate with Tatlin's Tower which was supposed to decorate the Trinity Square in St. Petersburg.
Fig. 8. Oodi Library, Helsinki.
Traditions of functionalism, laid down by the Bauhaus, have become widespread not only in Europe, but also in America, largely due to the fact that after the closure of the Bauhaus in Berlin in 1933 many teachers who worked there emigrated to the United States. For example, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the last director of the Bauhaus, designer several skyscrapers in Chicago, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, as well as the Building of the Embassy of the German Empire in St. Petersburg. And even the Viipuri Library, created by a Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, has very much in common with the Bauhaus Building in Dessau - it suffices to compare Walter Gropius' "curtain wall", evoking the towering walls of colored glass of the Gothic cathedrals and making the exterior and interior spaces visible simultaneously, with the glass facade-enclosed staircase of the library (see Fig. 6.). Not to mention the fact that not only the exterior, but also the interior décor of the Vii-puri Library was made by Alvar Aalto himself, including the famous stacking stools consisting of only four wooden parts - three legs and a round seat. When inside the library, one cannot help but feel the urge to learn, for everything has been thought out to the smallest detail - the furniture is simple yet comfortable, the space is full of light due to the white color of the walls and the sky-lighted roof (in a way, alluding to the big skylights of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg), and the wave-like, curved forms of the surfaces not only improve the acoustics, but also seem to bring a sense of calm and harmony (see Fig. 7.). And I must say that when exploring the modern buildings in Helsinki, one gets the distinct impression of the continuity of the modern Finnish architecture with the works of Alvar
Aatlo, and through him with the Bauhaus aesthetics itself - let us mention, for example, the Oodi Library with its curved lines, natural materials and barrel-shaped skylights (see Fig. 8.).
As for the restauration and preservation issues, Needless to say that past and present are inseparable from each other, suffice it to look and the Old Mar-iinsky Theatre, created by Alberto Kavos, reflected in the glass façade of the Building of the New Stage of the Mariinsky Theatre designed by Jack Diamond (see Fig. 9.). And I share the opinion of an American Art historian Vincent Scully who in one of his lectures on Modern Architecture says that "the ruin is deeply built into the culture of the Modern Age" for one of the great facts of the 20th century is that "it made more ruins than any other century ever did before" [11]. The importance of preserving Memory of the past is difficult to underestimate, yet when it comes to specific methods for implementing that idea, the plurality of approaches corresponds to the complexity of the stated problem.
If, for example, in the 19th century many people tried to "correct" the works of the "old masters" - suffice it to compare Karl Cherni's edition of J.S. Bach, abounding with dynamic shades, with the urtext (original text), - recently there has been a trend, according to which restorers should not try to make old Artworks look like new ones, but, on the contrary, they ought to strive to preserve their original appearance with all its "imperfections". For example, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin was not rebuild after a bombing raid in 1943, but preserved in its "ruinous" state so that we could both appreciate our past and enjoy the "dilapidated beauty" of that architectural masterpiece.
Richard Rogers created the Lloyd's building preserving the façade of the Neo-Roman structure of 1928 and putting it into the context of the assemblage of elevators and pipes reminding of Alice's adventures in Wonderland [12]. If we look closely at the columns of St. Isaacs Cathedral, we may find out that they bare traces of shell splinters, yet those "defects" do not reduce, but rather increase the aesthetic value of the structure. And, more
often than not, when cleaning the paintings and removing centuries of grime and dust from them, as well as the corrections and glues applied during previous restoration campaigns, they tend to leave certain small areas unrestored so that visitors could see the original version of the Artwork in question, and, at the same time, go "back to the future" and compare it with the later additions.
Fig. 9. The New Stage of the Mariinsky Theatre.
Fig. 10. Karl Bryullov, "Portrait of the Architect Arhioni' (Nizhny Novgorod Art Museum).
Besides, one should not forget that there are a number of Artworks which were left unfinished by their creators for various reasons - Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 8 in B minor consisting only of two movements; W.A. Mozart's "Requiem" completed by Joseph Leopold Eybler and Franz Xaver Sussmayr; Alexander Borodin's opera "Prince Igor" which after his death was edited and finished by Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov; Mikhail Bulgakov's novel "The Master and Margarita" edited by his wife Elena Sergeevna; Michelangelo's "incomplete" statue of "Awakening Slave", trying to break free from its marble prison, located at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts; Karl Bryullov's "Portrait of the Architect Arhioni" in which only the model's face was carefully traced (see Fig. 10.); "Portrait of Sergei Diagilev" by Valentin Serov, exhibited at the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, which was not finished since the artist lost interest in this subject; Tatlin's Tower which was supposed to adorn the Trinity Square in St. Petersburg yet the project was never implemented, etc. And although the idea of completing all the "unfinished" Works of Art might seem rather tempting, I quire agree with Vincent Scully that some Artworks should be preserved in a "ruined state", and since, for example, La Sagrada Familia always was a great ruin and had an enormous appeal "as a never to be finished ruin", it might have been better to leave everything as it was and not to try to complete Antoni Gaudi's project.
Without any doubt, restauration and preservation of Artworks require significant material costs, so it is no surprise that the façades of many historic buildings
Fig. 11. Ceiling of the apartment building designed by Nikolai Rezviy (1912-1913), St. Petersburg, Basil's Island.
in St. Petersburg have been covered in scaffolding for years. And yet, however complicated this issue may seem, I do believe that each person can make a feasible contribution to its solution within their means. For a start, one should not make any alterations to the listed buildings without prior approval from the authorities for it may cause damage or even destruction to those historical structures. Moreover, when it comes to repairing of the interiors of the apartments located in the houses of the late 19th-early 20th centuries (or older), this matter should not be approached lightly either. On the one hand, it might seem easier to cover the old ceiling with a new drywall, not to mention the financial advantages of that procedure. On the other hand, nothing could compare with the original ceiling design for, unlike the latter, it has its own memory - each crack reveals a small piece of the past, and the combination of rough texture of the wooden beams and smooth white moldings creates a layered effect allowing us to explore the history of the past, just like archeologists, yet without leaving our houses (see Fig. 11).
And last but not least we should talk about Jorge Luis Borges' story "The Secret Miracle", written in 1943, which narrates about a Jewish author Jaromir Hladik, living in Prague, who was arrested and sentenced to death. Hladik wrote many books, yet he would like to be remembered as the author of a work called "The Enemies", in which he is trying to prove a theory, according to which the number of experiences, possible to men, is not infinite, and that a single "repetition" would be enough to demonstrate it. [13].
And it should be noted that, from my own perspective, the word "repetition" is key in Borges' story. For the first time, it appears when Borges describes the plot of the above-mentioned verse drama by Hladik, namely, both in the first scene of the first act, and in the third, last act, the clock strikes seven, the sun reverberates in the window panels, and the sounds of Hungarian music are heard. And when the situation repeats itself, it turns out that the drama has never taken place, that everything that happened in the library of the Baron Roemerstadt was just a figment of the sick imagination of the protagonist Jaroslav Kubin, in other words, it is the circular delirium which he unendingly lives and relives. And here one can also draw a parallel between Kubin and Hladik himself, who, while waiting for the date of his execution, tirelessly imagines the circumstances of his impending death trying to exhaust all the variations.
No less interesting is the fact that a similar "repetition method" was used by Luis Bunuel in his film "The Exterminating Angel", created several years later, in 1962. In both cases, the repetition of the events leads to an alternative scenario but in reverse order. That is to say, in Borges' story, Hladik is given an opportunity to finish his drama before the execution since God performs the "secret miracle" for him - He stops the flow of time and grants Hladik a whole year between the command to fire and its implementation. While the
characters of Bunuel's film have to wait a long time for the events to repeat themselves so as to leave the room. However, if Hladik decides to eliminate some rather obvious symbols of the repetition from his drama (the striking of the clock, the music), Borges himself retains them - a year after the scheduled date of Hladik's execution the same drop of rain, that grazed one of his temples, slips down his cheek, he begins a wild cry, a quadruple blast brings him down, and he dies.
The theme of the library, which occurs more than once in the story, is no less significant. In his dream Hladik meets a librarian who has spent his entire life searching for God, which is supposed to be in one of the letters on the pages of one of the many books stored in the Clementine library. As we all know, Borges has referred to this issue before, for example, in the story "Babylonian Library" (1941), he describes the Universe (which others call the library) in which there are no two identical books although all the books consist of identical elements. And, despite the fact that mirrors give the illusion of infinity, the number of books is limited. Many people have spent their entire lives searching for the so-called "Book-Man" - a compendium of all other books stored in the library. For example, a librarian, who met Hladik, went blind without finding what he was looking for, whereas Hladik himself, by a miraculous coincidence, manages to do so, and, as a result, the "secret miracle" happens to him.
Fig. 12. Helsinki University Library.
Let us note in passing that in one of his poems called "El guardián de los libros" ("The Guardian of the Books") Borges underlines the difference between a literate person who lost his vision and a blind man who has never been able to read. The poem narrates of a man
guarding a tower full of books describing the history of his people, yet the worst thing is that he is the only one who managed to survive and he is both blind and illiterate. That is to say, not only can he not read, but he does not even know what are those books about. And if
there is no one to read books, then they lose their significance. And I suppose that the situation described in this story is much more terrible than Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" for although in the latter people are being persuaded to burn all the books, there are some persons who know the books by heart and thus can transmit their knowledge to others.
On the one hand, the idea that the freedom of choice of a person, and, consequently, the possibilities for the development of Art, are limited, at first glance may seem rather pessimistic. However, it should be noted that, despite the fact that the quantity of possible combinations of given elements is not unlimited, their number is so enormous that after many millennia, Art, as well as Humanity itself, has not exhausted its possibilities, and artists do not cease to amaze us. Even the Postmodern era, whose characteristic feature is the appeal to the achievements of previous époques, does not duplicate the masterpieces of the past, but "rediscovers" and refracts them in a new way.
And it seems to me that no matter how important it may seem to acquire the "Book of the Books" that gives its owner unlimited knowledge, the ability to enjoy the process of searching for truth as such is no less important. In other words, one should not try to study everything at once, on the contrary, one should learn to appreciate Art gradually, step by step, and then, perhaps, your own "secret miracle" will happen to you.
All in all, we have considered various aspects of the history of Art, and I sincerely hope that as a result of reading the article, your understanding of Art has become more complete and versatile. Of course, the above paper is only a brief summary of this issue. However, it seems to me especially important to form a clear system of the development of Art, since only when it is in place, interaction with Art becomes truly exciting. In this regard, these lectures will be expanded and supplemented.
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