Art

Art

Art in Ancient World

To the Egyptians the art is the representation of divinity, the pharaohs the afterlife and beyond. Egyptian art is characterized by its size, its hieratic and serenity. Only the spiritual life is worthy of representation. This is what is called classical period of art, and history of mankind. It is the human being who deserves to be represented. For the Greeks the art seeks the ideal man, flawless, and the Romans the real man, the portrait, which highlights the virtues of the individual person. Look for the perfection of the human body for what archetypes are used in perfect balance (Amiet, 1981). The classical world that identified art with the beauty and the ideal is the Greek world, not the Roman, who found in the portrait, the actual person and not ideal, its canon of beauty.

However, the concept of beauty is something that changes over time, society and culture. This identification of beauty as an imitation of reality, as an abstraction from concrete reality to show the essence of man and nature has much to do with the myth of Plato's cave, according to which what we see is only a distorted reflection of a perfect idea. So, to classical Greece what art should reflect the concrete reality is not reality but idealized in their perfect forms. Perfection that was being prepared in the canon: the relationship between section and height, and the ratio of all parties, the proportions of man. It is therefore a cultural choice and not universal.

They had this ideal or Egyptian or Mesopotamian or Persian, or Chinese, or Indians, or pre-Columbian peoples, and the Romans only in part (Amiet, 1981). The validity of that ideal in our Western world today is due more to its revival during the Renaissance that cultural continuity, broken, largely ...