In other words, what would be the elements of visual beauty that we could search for in the pictures (paintings or photographs) we hang on our homes' walls for instance, that could help us get in a better alignment of our inner selves with the objective beauty and creative principles of the universe, as revealed in the real and the true.
In terms of beauty in the visual arts, these 2 quotes come to mind:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. (Keats)
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I mean by a picture a beautiful, romantic dream of something that never was, never will be - in a light better than any light that ever shone - in a land no one can define or remember, only desire - and the forms divinely beautiful - and then I wake up, with the waking of Brynhild.” (Burne-Jones)
As well as this verse from Baudelaire's poem "Invitation au Voyage":
"Là tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté, luxe calme et volupté"
(There, all is order and beauty, luxury, peace and sensuality.)
When I read these quotes, I immediately think of Preraphaelite art, which is my idea of beautiful, inspiring and soul-fulfulling.
I had a love at first sight reaction when first encountering Preraphaelite art in my late teens. Over the years, my 'love' has not faded. Not sure how it fits with the idea that as you grow, your appreciation of what is beautiful changes. My appreciation for that art has never changed, maybe because there's something quite objectively beautiful about it? This type or art seems to "talk to" many people, whatever their background and artistic knowledge. As if there was something universal and transcendent about it.
When I look at those paintings I don't 'analyze' them or 'think' about them in any intellectual way. I just sit back and think 'Wow". It's my immediate reaction to something that I instinctively recognize as beautiful. Is it, objectively?
Adjectives coming to mind when looking at such paintings: striking, vivid, awe-inspiring, elegant, refined but not pretentious, conveying meaning and emotions of a purer kind. Pure lines, bright and harmonious colours, and an extraordinary attention to detail. Nothing muddy or opaque or vague. Everything is precise, sharp. It's figurative and often narrative. And you've got to admire the extraordinary skill of those painters.
The themes can be 'negative' like death, loss, melancholy or sadness but the depictions are never gruesome, obscene or dirty.
The creation of this thread has prompted me to search for more information about the Preraphaelites' stance on beauty and truth in art. I found several articles which I find interesting, highlighting the close relationship between preraphaelism and science. (I've copied them below)
I've never looked at it this way but it makes sense. Their paintings may draw from mythology, literature or an ancient mythicized past (often, the Middle-Ages), but they do depict the natural world, and the characters in it, in exquisite details, and truthfully. It's like the reality they depict is a kind of sublimated or 'enhanced' reality.
I think that in terms of honouring the creative principle, truth and beauty, the Preraphaelites come pretty close. This is, of course, my personal view.
After reading those articles, I think I begin to get an idea of why I (and many other people) find that type of art so compelling, timeless and "a joy forever, the lovelines of which always increases and will never pass into nothingness".
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"Art rebels of their day, The Pre-Raphaelites were a collection of artists, writers and critics with
a shared vision for their realist approach to art. Founded in 1848, their name stems from their rejection of the ideas promoted by the Royal Academy, at the time, of painting in the classical style of Raphael. They preferred the earlier Italian Renaissance style of artists from the quattrocento (the Italian name for the 1400s), who in the timeline of art history were – you guessed it – pre-Raphael.
The group weren’t only using art as a tool of expression. They had a lot to say and briefly produced a magazine to convey their ideas. John Holmes is a Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture who wrote The Pre-Raphaelites and Science, a book exploring the relationship the brotherhood had with scientific ways of thinking. He first became interested in this connection after teaching lessons on the Pre-Raphaelites’ short-lived journal,
The Germ (interestingly, a scientific term for its name). Though it only produced four issues, John tells me that each one consistently wrote about the relationship between art and science.
The clues for their interrelationship with science are there if you know where to look. For example,
the idea of speaking ‘truth to nature’ was a principle John Ruskin argued was
an artist’s central purpose. ‘Ruskin was the leading art critic of the 1840s and 1850s, and he became a little bit of a mentor to Pre-Raphaelites,’ says John Holmes. ‘His ideas about truth to nature were similar to [the Pre-Raphaelites], but not exactly the same. They both felt that
art should reflect what the painter sees. You shouldn’t presume that art should copy or imitate the practices of previous artists. Instead,
there was a duty on the artist to look at what he or she saw in front of them and paint it with that truth, that accuracy, that precision.’
A desire to portray things realistically does have a scientific ring to it, but I was curious how much of an active role science played in Pre-Raphaelite thinking. Was it a small part of their ethos or was it central to their work?
‘[Frederic George Stephens] articulated very clearly in The Germ that, first of all,
the artist’s standard of observation had to match that of a scientist,’ says John. ‘Secondly, for Stephens science was something that was very progressive...
His view was that art, too, could progress in its own sphere morally and in its precision, truth and accuracy if it imitated the sciences.’
The art critics in the collective clearly laid out their ideas about the importance of scientific thinking, so if we consider this while viewing Pre-Raphaelite works, they take on new meaning.
Using one of the most popular paintings by John Everett Millais as an example, Ophelia offers insight into the collective’s scientific approach to art. Millais
painted the scene en plein air for months to capture the environment accurately. ‘You’ve got two things going on,’ says John.
‘You’ve got science on the model of natural history – and that’s one of the things that recurs in their painting, particularly the landscape painting of Pre-Raphaelitism – but you’ve also got an active experiment... The experiment is what can art achieve through painting directly onto canvas in the open air, in a particular location over a period of time?’
The artists and even the models went to great lengths for the integrity of these experiments. Elizabeth Siddal, who modelled for Ophelia, became ill after sitting in a cold bath for hours (add: not very nice for poor Lizzie) so that Millais could accurately capture the effect of a woman floating in water.
The Pre-Raphaelites weren’t just exploring natural sciences:
they also had views on psychology, which at the time was deemed a slightly dubious branch of science.
They believed that an artist could gain a better understanding of psychology through their practice than some of the questionable methods employed in this period (e.g. measuring a patient’s head). One way of exploring this was
through the depiction of the dynamics between figures in a painting.
Looking at Millais’ Isabella, one can observe the underlying subtleties between the characters, where we see two brothers on the left displeased with their sister falling in love with a servant, seated to the right. This is a scene from the story Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, and proceeds the brothers murdering their sister’s lover. The artist went through several sketches of this work to land on this final version that
gently communicates the internal thoughts of the players involved; it’s certainly a form of experimentation.
We can see the Pre-Raphaelites were carrying out their own art ‘experiments’ in the name of science, but the relationship with science was reciprocal. There were a number of scientists that valued their thoughts and became allies in their mission. While some of their fellow artists rejected their theories, important scientific figures of the day, like Sir Richard Owen** embraced them.
(** Searched for "Richard Owen" on the forum and found
this: "One of [Thomas Huxley's] early sponsors, and later his greatest opponent was the crown’s most favored zoologist, Richard Owen (1804-1892.) The two would be in a bitter war over fundamental issues of science and evolution for over 40 years. Owen would later call Thomas Huxley a pervert with “some perhaps congenital defect of mind” for denying the Devine will in Nature".)
‘There was a lot of respect for what they were doing,’ says John. ‘Scientists recognised that these were
people that were trying to give art a new and serious programme through practices that the scientists could recognise.’ Through their relationship the scientific community, Pre-Raphaelite members were asked to consult on the building of the new Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and the decoration of the museum was based on
Pre-Raphaelite principles of accuracy and attention to detail.
Source:
Art Matters podcast: the Pre-Raphaelites’ relationship with science | Art UK
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"John Holmes may be said to have achieved the near impossible in finding a little studied aspect of Pre-Raphaelitism and producing a stimulating book covering not only painting and architecture but also poetry and prose, as befits the professor of Victorian literature and culture at Birmingham University.
A living ecosystem: one of the O’Shea brothers’ startlingly vivid carvings of a capital inside the Oxford Museum of Natural History
Tate Britain’s 2012 exhibition made a not wholly convincing attempt to promote the Pre-Raphaelites as the “Victorian avant-garde”. Holmes avoids this temptation, instead outlining what he calls “the Pre-Raphaelite project”, inaugurated in the pages of the Brotherhood’s short-lived magazine The Germ (1850) and linking all aspects of art and literature.
From first looking at The Germ, somewhat neglected by scholars, Holmes finds a rich seam in the relationship between art and science, recognising that the young Pre-Raphaelites had been born into a self-consciously modern, scientific age. Rarely read essays by Frederic Stephens and John Lucas Tupper, an anatomical illustrator, together with the poem Newton by Walter Deverell, are all seen to contribute to the overarching idea that
adherence to fact and close study of the natural world assisted the moral purpose of art, a principle also promoted by Ruskin, who provided early public support for paintings shown at the Royal Academy. New thought about the relevance of deep scientific observation allows interesting discussion of familiar images such as Millais’s Ophelia (1851-52), Holman Hunt’s Hireling Shepherd (1851) and Dyce’s Pegwell Bay (1858-60).
The concept of science is expanded to include many subjects, including fundamentals such as chemistry and geology as well as anatomy, astronomy, geography and natural history (through the study of nature and landscape), and even psychology (as demonstrated in William Michael Rossetti’s little-known poem Mrs Holmes Grey).
The Pre-Raphaelites’ religious paintings can also be seen to have been influenced: although Christina Rossetti considered that science “existed under suffrance”, her brother William Michael could express in an essay of 1857, “The Externals of Sacred Art”,
“every reason to believe that science could help to reach towards a fuller and truer understanding of the foundations of faith”.
Natural theology, no longer in currency but much discussed in the mid-19th century, is considered in one chapter through its antithesis with scientific naturalism, as part of the Darwinian debate.
Architecture attracts Holmes’s chief attention, and there is no escaping the feeling that the book has developed out of stimulating new research on the genesis, construction and decoration in the 1850s and 1860s of the Oxford Museum, here called “the greatest single work of Pre-Raphaelite art”. This is not entirely a novel idea: at the 1862 International Exhibition the work of William Morris’s newly founded firm had been seen to embody a kind of “practical Pre-Raphaelitism”, but there has been little follow-up to this in modern scholarship.
Careful and intriguing analysis of the written sources and the visible evidence underpins the significance of the museum—
Henry Acland, its co-founder with Ruskin, reconciling Darwinism with his belief in God as a divine artist, and the O’Shea brothers’ astonishing carvings shown to be not merely decorative but offering “a living ecosystem”.
The Victorian artist group explored the connections between art and scientific observation to enhance art’s moral purpose
www.theartnewspaper.com
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"To rage against the tyranny of academic refinement, the PRB (Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) proposed to follow
John Ruskin’s call to go to nature and rejoice in its truth. Hunt later recounted that “the first principle of Pre-Raphaelitism was to eschew all that was conventional in contemporary art.” Rossetti’s brother William, also a founding member, summarized their artistic intent as follows:
"
1, To have genuine ideas to express; 2, to study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them; 3, to sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote; and 4, and most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues."
(…)
The PRB’s application of their youthful ideals resulted in compositions such as Millais’s Mariana. The artist constructed
a veritable world of details and textures, clearly demonstrating his skill as a painter, yet that was not his sole intent. Such exacting detail showed his ability to “study nature attentively” and to create a work that compelled the same of his viewer. Throughout the composition, Millais has left provocative visual puzzles for the viewer.
There are other interesting themes and pockets of research in this judiciously illustrated study (half of the 150 plates are in colour), all benefiting from Yale’s impeccable editing and design. It concludes by reiterating that “the Pre-Raphaelite project… had brought a new rigour and intellectual independence to the arts”. While this may not convince every reader, it still stands as an original and useful addition to the literature."
Source:
Truth & Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters | famsf-digital-stories
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"Although Pre-Raphaelitism confessed a dedication to the natural world and reality,
the subjects and themes of many Pre-Raphaelite works indicate a continued fascination with the medieval past. The short-lived Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood opposed what they conceived of as the 'trivialities' of the academic art establishment and
aimed to create a moral, truthful art (Wood 10). As the name suggests, the Pre-Raphaelite goal was
to return to the historic past in order to create a new modern art. In effect, by returning to Northern Renaissance and Medieval art, the Pre-Raphaelites sought to recreate art history through revitalizing an art-that-never-was.
The Pre-Raphaelites were essentially interested in
establishing a moral truthfulness in art and literature. In aspiring to a photographic realism and fidelity to nature in both painting and poetry, the Pre-Raphaelites embraced Ruskin's advice to
"go to nature in all singleness of heart... rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing; believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth." (Wood 10). The Pre-Raphaelites believed that
by representing nature as realistically as possible, they could create a moral beauty and truer art. At the same time, this adherence to every natural detail borders on the unreal; the human eye is unable to conceive of every fact and detail, the human brain unable to process this wealth of information. Ruskin attacks precisely this inability of his contemporaries to embrace all the real truths and moral beauty in Modern Painters (Hough 9), which was read by and influenced nearly all the founding Pre-Raphaelites.
Here,
at the edges of a heightened realism exists the realm of fantasy. The project of fantasy remains closely related to the boundaries of conventional reality. The fantastical should, and does, elicit wonder by means of elements of the supernatural or the impossible (Mathews 2). However,
in order to apprehend impossibility, one must first understand the boundaries of the possible. In his study on fantasy, Eric S. Rabkin contends that
only after the ground rules of reality have been established can the fantastic be achieved (4). The fantastic is, in actual fact, merely a step away from reality and exists in this distance from reality.
Indeed, the later Pre-Raphaelites
reconciled their quest to represent realistic nature and moral realism in a fantastical romanticism. Thus while the members of the PRB such as Millais painted highly realistic and historically accurate scenes that drew from biblical or at most Shakespearean subjects, the aesthetics of the later movement
looked to chivalric themes and Arthurian tales. From paintings such as Hunt's The Lady of Shalott to Millais's Ophelia, the heightened color palette, sharp lines and medieval garb of the ladies indicate an interest in the historical past that exemplifies the fascination in pseudo-medievalized semi-mythological worlds explored by other Pre-Raphaelites and their followers. In his study on literary fantasy,
Rabkin argues that the roots of this widespread Pre-Raphaelite fascination with the medieval lay in the movement's attempt to "reverse history" and to "restore 'Nature' to English painting ... [through a] romanticized medieval style that they saw as recalling the harmonious age before the Renaissance emergence of Raphael." (199).
The
almost obsessive detail and rich colors of these works create fantastical beauty and indicate sublime meaning. For instance, in The Lady of Shalott , Hunt directs the viewer's gaze to the cracked mirror behind the cursed lady. A frieze on the right hand side of this mirror shows the infant Christ with the Virgin and opposes the opposite mural of Hercules completing the Eleventh labor in the act of stealing the golden apples of the Hesperides.
These paired images of Christian and pagan salvation add a deeper morality to the doomed Arthurian tableaux in the foreground. By means of the creation of a heightened reality and natural symbolism, the Pre-Raphaelites aimed to engage the modern imagination and consciousness."
(.…)
Both Morris's poetry and literature reflect this romantic realism. The Defense of Guenevere and other Poems was vilified by Victorian literary critics precisely because of Morris's connection with the Pre-Raphaelites. The Athenaeum, a contemporary literary quarterly, trumpeted the prevailing sentiment that Morris poems were a collection of "Pre-Raphaelite Minstrelsy" and "A curiosity which shows how far affection may lead an earnest man toward the fog-land of art." (Litzenberg 423). Morris's close connections to Pre-Raphaelitism continued to be hailed or vilified in literary circles as, as The Literary World , another Victorian literary periodical, claimed in 1896, Morris was "the most distinguished figure" of the Pre-Raphaelite school (Litzenberg 422).
The basis for critics of The Defense of Guenevere and other Poems such as The Athenaeum lay in the poetry's pseudo-medieval settings and Arthurian romanticisms. This was seen to be "affection" and too far removed from reality to engage or affect the audience. In fact, the aesthetics sought to engage through alienation.
By distancing the audience from conventional reality, truth could be viewed objectively. Moreover, the pseudo-historicity of such fantastic worlds introduced the possibility of symbolism and associations beyond what was immediately apparent "
(…)
According to Ruskin,
the acceptance of fantasy creates a more powerful reality precisely because this utilizes human rationality and represents a choice rather than coercion. In this manner, the Pre-Raphaelite pursuit of a higher truth necessarily requires the element of fantasy that requires the viewer to engage in the work and choose to believe."
Source:
Defining Pre-Raphaelite Realism
Some depict art as a triangular continuum, where realism and iconography are balanced by abstraction, which imo just takes concepts and tries to deconstruct them as much as possible to test the boundaries between our concepts and objects. These types of artwork may be good in the study of human perception and cognition, but it imo certainly doesn't belong on anybody's wall, since the point of art is to convey concepts, and good art does that easily.
