Introduction
The human mind and character always seem to be stimulated by various events and actions, therefore, leading to the adaptations of the different analogies in life. These aspects in life are applied in art and design to furnish and give relevant imaginative direction, so that someone might see the piece of work.
Works of art and design do possess their own virtue and properties, which may be given different interpretations by people as each do portray various form of descriptions with essentially unchanging qualities, but they are subject to substantial number of ‘true’, authoritative and ‘irrefutable’ opinions.
It also states that it can mean what any one wants it to be by giving it no decisive independence or veracity as art can be derived from, dance, painting, photography, sculpture, architecture, music, cinema, drawing, theater, literature and printmaking (Sporre, 2009).
The different disciplines of art can also be used to define humanity with religion and history being a factor, with science and technology embracing the entirety of the human nature and hindering its raw creativity blossoming, an insistence for us to depart from this enslavement and instead use it to complement humanities as Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo did. In this regard, we are going to look at the origin of some two historical art periods and the impact they have made to the world of art (Janaro and Altshuler, 2009).
Firstly, we are going to look at Renaissance, which is a French word that means ‘rebirth’ and is regarded to be the beginning of modern history as it commenced around 14th to the 17th century. Its impact was felt in most of the Northern Italian cities with the passion for art flourishing and its knowledge being spread to the greater Europe and Middle East. This trade not only led to the exchange of goods, but also to the preservation of writings of the ancient Greeks by the Arab scholars.
Together with the ideas exchanged, it served as the basis of the Renaissance as many Christian scholars were leaving Greece for Italy with the fall of the Byzantine empire to the Muslim Turks in 1453. Although the association of Renaissance to Italy is of great importance, it has eclipsed the enhancement of new ideas in northern Europe, the Iberian Peninsula, the Islamic world, Southeast Asia, and Africa as Renaissance was a remarkably international, fluid and mobile incidence (Brotton, 2006).
The Renaissance period saw the Graeco-Roman culture transforming art, politics and the society at large as now Art was acknowledged therefore inspiring human inventions and defining the modern world. Renaissance has also been used to define a point of time in history that Europe was asserting its power and authority in most of the continents.
The 15th and 16th centuries saw the use and development of perception from an experimental technique to play a role in the daily life of every artist’s education with the rise and demand of architectural developments.
The arches of Gothic cathedrals became a landscape with its paintings and buildings with virgin of the rocks by da Vinci and other medieval paintings such as the Wilton Diptych both of which are in the National Gallery in London revolutionized art in the Renaissance era. This period in history also revived and preserved the classical era antiquities with the rediscovery of literature, sculpture and architecture from ancient Greece and Rome.
The origin of modern physics and astronomy also started in this period as Copernicus contended for a heliocentric clarification of the planet movements and this played a big role for Newton’s explanation of gravity 200 years later. In middle ages and Renaissance, theoretical and practical geometry was about measurement by instruments and ‘’by art’’ therefore geometry being relevant to artists who were charged with composing inventions and executing them materially.
The renaissance artists gave us the first remarkable pictures of the world in which we live in and are considered the best and geniuses with depictions in the modern day artist’s work. Renaissance therefore gave birth while preserving the ideas and inventions that marked different moments in history while adjustments being applied to it where necessary.
The second historical period that we are going to look at is Realism which is a period between 1830 to 1870. Derived from the word real, Realism is the actual presentation of objects, actions or social conditions and it can be said to have inspired philosophy, science, art and literature with its impact being felt in major European countries. In France, it saw the union of artists such as the ‘Realists’ coming together to paint nature as it really appears, citing the scenery of nature as their main inspiration for art.
Realism also establishes itself as a way of thought than a movement within a specific genre with its main principles rejecting classicism and romanticism as fallacies of art asit does not focus on individuals of middle and lower classes who have common problems and obstacles which everyone can associate with. Due to this fact, literary writing has a distinction between realism and actual everyday reality, as realist novels do not give the slightest reality of life as its form and representation.
Realism as a form is uninfluenced by classical confluences as it participates in the modern impulse of modernity with a great impact being seen in film and media with reality shows such as Big Brother and Survivor, said to be an experience of ‘real’ visual representations.
This makes realism a relationship between media texts and the viewers. Pier Paolo Pasolini can arguably be said to have inspired modern day cinema with films such as Accattone, The Canterbury Tales, Medea, Salo among many more continue to challenge and still entertain new generations of moviegoers as his work was drawn from art, literature, folklore and music (Maurizio, 1993).
He also did not contaminate the purity of theoretical linguistic unit as he removed it from its canonical sites. All in all, Realism touches on every essence of the human life and environment and it cannot be ignored in our daily lives.
References
Brotton, J. (2006). The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.
Janaro, R. P., & Altshuler, T. C. (2009). The Art of Being Human (9th Ed.). New York: Pearson Education. ISBN-13, 9780205605422.
Maurizio S. V. (1993). A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice. London: University of California Press. ISBN.0520078551, 9780520078550.
Sporre, D. J. (2009). Perceiving The Arts: An Introduction to the Humanities (9th Ed.). New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall. ISBN-13: 978-0136045694.