History of Western Art

The history of Western art relates to the study, recording and discussion of the development of art in its manifestation in the evolution of Western society. This story shows significant differences in the evolution of art in the Eastern world. The studies that were traditionally about art history usually took into account only the evolution of this field of art due to Euro centrism Current in the Western world. This study, however, when considering Western culture as a fundamental element of contemporary life, it is necessary to understand the scope of art around the world, receiving influences and is influenced by other movements. Scholars such as Giulio Carlo Argan, for example, consider contemporary art an offshoot of the European art as science crisis. This story can be considered predominantly restricted to the European context for more than three millennia: the core of Western art remained on the continent until the mid- twentieth century, especially after World War II, when the axis moves from there to the United States (Arts, 2014).

It is the ancient that arise early theorists about the systematic study of the arts and concepts. Although covering a very long period, there stands out the formulation of cosmetic classic, gathering crops Greek and Roman. For almost all antiquity, art was closely associated with the formal requirements of religious rituals: the various forms of artistic production (painting, sculpture, architecture), sought to somehow bring the mortal world the values ??of the divine world. This vision of art is especially found in Egyptians and Babylonians. The Greeks and Romans, however, still need to cultivate this, walk into an art with new meanings. Art, for them, a way will become humanism. There was a sense of perspective that only was (briefly) developed by the Greeks, in a concept called foreshortening, but not yet systematized (something that will be done only in the Renaissance). Thus, Egyptian painting, for example, was characterized by proposing a reality in his paintings that depicted not only as two-dimensional symbolic: the characters of greater importance, as the pharaohs, were represented on a much larger scale than the other figures (Liu et.al, 2014).

The Greeks are responsible for concept art that permeates virtually all Western production for more than 2000 years. The Greek word for art is TEKNE, which also means art or craft. This concept is associated with the idea of mimesis, which considers that in the real ...