Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The history of art focuses on objects made by humans for any number of spiritual, narrative, philosophical, symbolic, conceptual, documentary, decorative, and even functional and other purposes, but with a primary emphasis on its aesthetic visual form.
The word art comes from the Latin word ars, which, loosely translated, means "arrangement". Art is commonly understood as the act of making works (or artworks) which use the human creative impulse and which have meaning beyond simple description. Art is often distinguished from crafts and recreational hobby activities.
Venus de Milo, at the Louvre. Art history is, briefly, the history of art—or the study of a specific type of objects created in the past. [1]Traditionally, the discipline of art history emphasized painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, ceramics and decorative arts; yet today, art history examines broader aspects of visual culture, including the various visual and conceptual outcomes ...
Art has had a great number of different functions throughout its history, making its purpose difficult to abstract or quantify to any single concept. This does not imply that the purpose of art is "vague", but that it has had many unique, different reasons for being created. Some of these functions of art are provided in the following outline.
In the West, the history of the humanities can be traced to ancient Greece, as the basis of a broad education for citizens. [37] During Roman times, the concept of the seven liberal arts evolved, involving grammar, rhetoric and logic (the trivium), along with arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music (the quadrivium). [38]
The arts are considered various practices or objects done by people with skill, creativity, and imagination across cultures and history, viewed as a group. [1] These activities include painting, sculpture, music, theatre, literature, and more. [2] Art refers to the way of doing or applying human creative skills, typically in visual form. [3] [4]
Cultural history records and interprets past events involving human beings through the social, cultural, and political milieu of or relating to the arts and manners that a group favors. Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) helped found cultural history as a discipline.
In her 1970 book Meaning and Expression: Toward a Sociology of Art, Hanna Deinhard gives one approach: "The point of departure of the sociology of art is the question: How is it possible that works of art, which always originate as products of human activity within a particular time and society and for a particular time, society, or function -- even though they are not necessarily produced as ...