For Plato beauty was summed up in an object’s suitability and utility for purpose. To Plato it was an ideal.ĭespite the differences in Plato’s and Aristotle’s views of art they did agree that art objects should try to be beautiful and useful. Aesthetics is the study of beauty and the Ancient Greeks held beauty above all. The ancient Greeks were obsessed with aesthetics (from the Greek aisthetikos, meaning ‘of sense perception’). “… painting is just the imitation of all the living things of nature with their colours and designs just as they are in nature.” Beauty and utility The idea of imitation to create realism through the capture of the essence of a form was still very strong in the Renaissance, when Vasari, in his Lives of the Painters, said that: It can be argued that art up to the Greeks had been abstract and formal, while from the Greeks onwards it was based upon realism. The Ancient Greeks were innovators in the field of art and developed many new styles and techniques to achieve that perfectness of balance and proportion and that concept has influenced countless artists ever since. Hence the Greek concept of beauty was based on a pleasing balance and proportion of form. So, now art as imitation involves the use of mathematical ideas such as symmetry, proportion and perspective in the search for the perfect, the timeless and contrasting object. He sums this up in his theory of mimesis the perfection and imitation of nature. To Aristotle art offers unity and the form should be complete in itself. We can conclude that Plato didn’t take the notion of ‘art being created by divine inspiration’ very seriously.Īristotle (384-322 BCE) on the other hand, saw an ‘art’ form as a way of representing the inner significance of something, the ‘essence’. Art is imitation, which was known as mimesis (the representation of nature). Works of art are at best entertainment, and at worst a dangerous delusion. It is a copy of a copy of perfection, and so even more of an illusion than ordinary experience. In book The Republic, Plato says art imitates the objects and events of ordinary life. So the beauty of a flower or a sunset is an imperfect copy of ‘beauty’ and just a pointer to perfection. Plato’s (c429-347 BCE) view of the world was as something always changing − a poor, decaying copy of a perfect, rational, eternal, and changeless original. Did Plato and Aristotle agree in their views? So, for the Ancient Greeks, art and technology were closely entwined, and it could be argued that this was influenced by the theories of Plato and Aristotle. Here in the word techne we see the embryo of what was to become technology. They used the word techne, which translates as ‘skill’, to describe painting or any skilful act. This might be because the Ancient Greeks did not have a concept of art. The difficulty in understanding Ancient Greek art is that the philosophers held a theoretical view of colour and art while the artists were more pragmatic in their production of art. What influenced Ancient Greek art?Īncient Greek art was influenced by the philosophy of the time and that shaped the way they produced art forms. RSC Yusuf Hamied Inspirational Science ProgrammeĪrt developed so much during the Ancient Greek Period that it became the driving influence on art for the following centuries.Introductory maths for higher education.The physics of restoration and conservation.(1910) English–Greek Dictionary: A Vocabulary of the Attic Language, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited. G2397 in Strong, James (1979) Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance to the Bible.(1969) Lexicon to Pindar, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter (2001) A Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, Third edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press ἰδέα in Bailly, Anatole (1935) Le Grand Bailly: Dictionnaire grec-français, Paris: Hachette.“ ἰδέα”, in Liddell & Scott (1889) An Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon, New York: Harper & Brothers.
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