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History of Art

Human has the inborn capabilities to judge a thing for its beauty and acceptability . The human created arts are different from Mother nature’s creations . But what make a human artist !
The thing highly related with humans is that they always want to know everything and try to interpret them . They gather to divide.

Dictionary defines art as : Art is a diverse range of human activities in creating visual, auditory or performing artifacts , expressing the author’s imaginative, conceptual ideas, or technical skill, intended to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power.(Oxford Dictionary).

One primary sense of the definition is closely related to the ancient Latin meaning, which roughly translates to “skill” or “craft,” as associated with words alike “artisan.” English words rented from this meaning include artifact, artificial, artifice, medical arts, and military arts ,etc. There are many other colloquial uses of the word and phrases, all with some kinship to its etymology.
The three classical types of art are painting, sculpture and architecture.(Vasari, Giorgio (18 December 2007). The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.
Greatest philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and Kant, questioned the meaning of the phraseology art. Several dialogues in Plato tackle talk about art: Socrates tried to argue that poetry is inspired by the muses, and is not logical enough. He argued approvingly of this, and other forms of divine madness (drunkenness, eroticism, and dreaming) in the Phaedrus (265a–c), and yet in the Republic wants to outlaw Homer’s great poetic art, and laughter as well. In Ion, Socrates provides no hint of the disapproval of Homer that he expresses in the Republic. The dialogue Ion suggests that Homer’s Iliad works in the ancient Greek world as the Bible does today in the Christian world: as divinely inspired literary art that can provide moral guidance, if only it can be accurately interpreted. With regards to the literary art and the musical arts, Aristotle ,the ancient Greek philosopher and politician,considered epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry and music to be mimetic or imitative art, each varying in imitation by medium, object, and manner.What he tried to argue, for example, music imitates with the media of rhythm and harmony, whereas dance imitates with rhythm alone, and poetry with language. And the forms also differ in their object of imitation.In his masterpiece,Poetics,he recorded, comedy, for instance, is a dramatic imitation of men worse than average; whereas tragedy imitates men slightly better than average. The forms differ in their manner of imitation—through narrative or character, through change or no change, and through drama or no drama. Aristotle said that imitation is natural to mankind and constitutes one of mankind’s advantages over animals. And we find it true ,a child from his early days,learns language through pantomimic . He or she just tries to imitate what goes on in front of them . So never misbehave in front of a child .
Historically, the five primary fine arts were painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry, with performing arts including theatre and dance. Drama has its old association with ancient Greek culture and the worship of Dionysus,the goddess of field, vineyards,death and birth .
Music, theatre,dance, films , as well as literature and other media such as interactive media, are recorded in a broader definition of the arts. Interestingly until the seventeenth century, art referred to any skill or mastery and was not differentiated from crafts or sciences. In modern usage where aesthetic considerations are paramount, the fine arts are separated and distinguished from acquired skills in general, for instance, the decorative or applied arts.The decline of the concept of “fine art” is dated by George Kubler and others to around 1880s, when it “fell out of fashion” as, by about 1900, folk art was also rising to be regarded as significant form of art. At least in circles interested in art theory:
“fine art” was driven out of use by about 1920 by the exponents of industrial design … who opposed a double standard of judgment for works of art and for useful objects”.
This was among theoreticians; it has taken far longer for the art trade and popular nurtured opinion to catch up. However, over the same period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the movements of prices and value in the art market were in the opposite direction, with works from the fine arts much further ahead of those from the decorative arts.
Though the definition of what constitutes art is disputed and has changed time to time, general definitions mention an idea of imaginative or technical skill stemming from human agency and creation. The nature of art and related concepts, such as creativity and interpretation, are explored in a branch of philosophy popularly known as aesthetics.

According to some writers the concept of a distinct category of fine art is an invention of the early modern era in the Western World. Larry Shiner in his The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (2003) locates the invention in the eighteenth century:
“There was a traditional “system of the arts” in the West before the eighteenth century. (Though the other traditional cultures still have a similar system.) In that system, an artist or artisan was a skilled maker or practitioner, a work of art was the useful product of skilled work, and the appreciation of the arts was integrally connected with their role in the rest of life. “Art”, in other words, meant approximately the same thing as the Greek word techne, or in English “skill”, a sense that has survived in phrases alike “the art of war”, “the art of love”, and “the art of medicine.”
Almost that kind of arguments have been made by Paul Oskar Kristeller, Pierre Bourdieu, and Terry Eagleton (e.g. The Ideology of the Aesthetic), though the point of invention is often placed earlier, in the Italian Renaissance time ; Anthony Blunt notes that the term arti di disegno, a similar concept, came out in Italy in the mid- sixteenth century.
In simple terms painting as a fine art denotes the application of paint to a flat surface (as opposed for example to painting a sculpture, or a piece of pottery), typically using several colours. Prehistoric or ancient painting that has survived was applied to natural rock surfaces, and wall painting, especially on wet plaster in the fresco technique was a major form. Portable paintings on wood panel or canvas have been the most significant in the Western world for several centuries, mostly in tempera or oil paintings. Asian painting has more often used papers, with the monochrome ink and wash painting tradition dominant especially in East Asia. Paintings that are intended to go in a book or album are generally called “miniatures”, whether for a Western illuminated manuscript or in Persian miniature and its Turkish equivalent, or Indian paintings of various types. Watercolour is considered as the western version of painting in paper; forms using gouache, chalk and similar mediums without brushes are really forms of drawing.

Drawing is one of the major forms of the visual arts, and painters must have drawing aptitudes. Primary instruments include: graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoals, chalk, pastels, markers, stylus, or various metals like silverpoint ,etc. There are a number of subcategories of drawing, including cartooning and creating comics. Art has its strong association with human and it remained as the part of culture from the old days .

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Content Page of Heart To Art

1. History of Art
2. Periods In Western Art History
3. Indian Art History
4. Important Art Movements
5. Selected Art Works of Abirlal Mukhopadhyay

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