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The Classic Period, Renaissance and Decline

With the raise of Christianity, the art aligned with religious themes and served the church, the wealthy and powerful. During the self torturing, masochistic stage of Christianity the art declined to its deepest in the medieval period.

The 15th century rediscovered the beauty of earthly life, giving way to the rebirth of culture. The cultural revolution of the Renaissance transpired into every facet of life leaving rich heritage in architecture, science, art and social renewal.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519), the great Italian Renaissance artist, was a fine graphic artist, painter, architect, scientist and engineer. 

 

Self portrait Leonardo da Vinci	Horseman, da Vinci	Joconde, da Vinci (Mona Lisa)
Ermine - da Vinci	Star of Bethlehem, da Vinci	Projections, da Vinci

The Period of Decline, Late 19th and 20th Centuries

With the advance of technology, associated prosperity and population growth the accumulation of monetary wealth became the driving force of human society. The attraction of fame, wealth and flamboyant life style perverted the artists and art.

Van Gough, a fine painter in his early career, contracted syphilis that impaired his brain in the advance stage. His later works display distorted vision, lacking intellectual cohesion and diminished judgement.

At about the turn of 20th Century the artists of substance tended to fall victims to degenerative venereal disease, others resorted to excessive intake of alcohol and addictive hallucinogenic drugs. The artistic output of the impaired intellect was manifest in the bizarre representation of a mix of real and defective perceptions, imagined and unreal.

The life style related deterioration of mind and its distorted artistic output set a trend, from which the abstract evolved. The abstract trends constitute incohesive associations, patches, blots, lines and geometric shapes of often vivid colours, all meaningless by common perception.

Pablo Picasso was the most prominent representative of the deranged trend. His work of the famous and rich period inspired the least talented and epigones, who inundated the galleries with bizarre colours and shapes of no intellectual meaning.

At the end of his creative life Picasso confessed his "modern" trend was market oriented and served his ambition to become famous and rich to the detriment of art.

     

Pablo Picasso (Self Portrait)

The Italian author Giovanni Papini published an interview with Pablo Picasso in his book Libro Nero.  Here is what Picasso told of his art. "From the moment that art ceases to be food that feeds the best minds, the artist can use his talents to perform all the tricks of the intellectual charlatan. Most people can today no longer expect to receive consolation and exaltation from art. The 'refined,' the rich, the professional 'do-nothings', the distillers of quintessence desire only the peculiar, the sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today's art. I myself, since the advent of Cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that have passed through my mind. The less they understood them, the more they admired me. Through amusing myself with all these absurd farces, I became celebrated, and very rapidly. For a painter, celebrity means sales and consequent affluence. Today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown - a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest."

	Blue Nude, Picasso the artist.
	Man with Golden Helmet, Picasso in his drive for fame and wealth.

© Copyright Agricola2000, 2001

Last revisited: 22 September, 2001

Contact: agricola2000@bigpond.com

© Copyright Agricola2000, 2000, 2001 

Last revisited: 11 October, 2001