Beauty of the Beast

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Throughout time, artists have maintained a close relationship with the animal world, which has proved to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration. First, they received inspiration directly from their environment. Next, animals were used in art for their status as domestic friends, symbols of an intimate and familial life, held in particularly high esteem during the Renaissance. Later, in Orientalism, animal art followed the discovery of exotic fauna which appealed to contemporary artists. The animal and its wild beauty are depicted here through works of art from Albrecht Dürer, Pieter Bruegel, Leonardo da Vinci, Katsushika Hokusai, Henri Rousseau, and Paul Klee.

Автор

John Bascom

#Культура и искусство #Изобразительное искусство #Искусствоведение #Знания и навыки

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Featured Artists

Aldrovandi, Ulisse

Amir, Shaykh Muhammad

Arcimboldo, Giuseppe

Audubon, John James

Bonheur, Auguste François

Bonnard, Pierre

Bosch, Hieronymus

Brascassat, Jacques Raymond

Bruegel the Elder, Pieter

Brueghel the Elder, Jan

Brueghel the Younger, Jan

Chagall, Marc

Chardin, Jean-Baptiste Siméon

Courbet, Gustave

Cranach, Lucas

Crane, Walter

Da Vinci, Leonardo

De Luna, Charles

Degas, Edgar

Desportes, François

Dürer, Albrecht

Gauguin, Paul

Generalic, Ivan

Géricault, Théodore

Hicks, Edward

Hiroshige, Utagawa

Hirschfield, Morris

Hokusai, Katsushika

Jacque, Charles-Emile

Kandinsky, Wassily

Klee, Paul

Kuhnert, Friedrich Wilhelm

Manet, Edouard

Mansur

Marc, Franz

Matisse, Henri

Oudry, Jean-Baptiste

Picasso, Pablo

Pirosmani, Niko

Pompon, François

Potter, Paulus

Ranson, Paul

Rembrandt

Remington, Frederic

Robert-Fleury, Joseph Nicolas

Robillard, Hippolite

Rousseau, Henri

Rubens, Peter Paul

Shishkin, Ivan

Steinlen, Théophile

Stubbs, George

Susini, Antonio or Giovanni Francesco

Troyon, Constant

Van Gogh, Vincent

Velázquez, Diego

Warhol, Andy

Simple Notion of Beauty

In defining beauty, we say of it, first, that it is a simple and primary quality. It is uncompounded. No two or three qualities in any method present can compass it with their combined effects. No analysis can resolve it into other perceptions, but there always remains something unresolved and unexplained, which is beauty.

The Three Black Auks (detail)

Anonymous, c. 27,000-19,000 BCE

Cosquer Cave, Calanque de Morgiou

This is proved by the fact that the most successful of these resolutions, while they hit on qualities frequently concomitant with beauty and intimately related to it, are never able to go beyond this companionship and show the identity of those qualities with beauty, whenever and wherever found. Unity and variety are qualities usually, I think always, in some degree present in beautiful objects. But though this presence may show them to be a condition for the existence of beauty, it does not show them to be its synonym or equivalent. In fact, we find that these qualities exist in many things which have no beauty.

Bison Carved in Low Relief

Anonymous, c. 16,000 BCE

Limestone, length: 30 cm

Musée national de la Préhistoire, Les Eyzies-de-Tayac

Their range may include the field under discussion, but it certainly includes much more, and thereby shows that these qualities do not produce the distinguishing and peculiar effects of aesthetics. Thus is it with every combination of qualities into which we seek to analyse beauty. Either phenomena which should be included are left unexplained, or phenomena which do not belong to the department are taken in by the theory.

The Antelopes

Anonymous, c. 1550–1500 BCE

Fresco, 275 × 200 cm

National Museum of Athens, Athens

These analyses, either by doing too much or too little, indicate that the precise thing to be done has not been done by them, and only prove a more or less general companionship, and not an identity of qualities. It is one thing to show that certain things, even, always accompany beauty, and quite another to show that these always and everywhere manifest themselves as beauty, reaching it in its manifold forms, and leaving nowhere any residuum of phenomena to be explained by a new quality.

The Cat Goddess Bastet

Anonymous, 663–609 BCE

Bronze and blue glass, 27.6 × 20 cm

Musée du Louvre, Paris

The idea of beauty has been with patient effort and elaborate argument referred to in association, thus not only making it a derived notion, but one reached through a great variety of pleasurable impressions. It is clear, however, that association has no power to alter original feelings, but only to revive them. Therefore, if beauty is not as an original notion or apprehension entrusted to association, it cannot be given by it since this law of the mind has no creating or transforming, but simply a uniting power. Association can explain the presence of ideas, not their nature.

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