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Theories of Art
| Article
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13803 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1988 |
4,337 Words |
| Author
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Umberto Eco
Umbert Eco, the celebrated Italian novelist (The Name of the
Rose) and philosopher, wrote Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages
two decades ago and it was only recently translated into
English. |
1) The most anonymous chapter in any account of medieval aesthetics must surely be the one about the theory of art. The medieval conception of art was rooted in, and indeed was more or less the same as, the Classical and intellectualist theory of human 'making'; though of course there were many characteristic fluctuations which closer analysis brings to light. Definitions such as ars est recta ratio factibilium, or ars est principium faciendi et cogitandi quae sunt facienda, have no definite paternity; the Medievals just repeated and reformulated them in various fashions. From the Carolingians to Duns Scotus, they took their conception of art from Aristotle and from the whole Greek tradition: from Cicero, from the Stoics, from Marius Victorinus, from Isidore of Seville, from Cassiodorus.
The definitions given above refer to two basic elements: knowledge (ratio, cogitatio) and production (faciendi, factibilium). The theory of art was based upon these. Art was a knowledge of the rules for making things. The rules were given, objective—on this all the Medievals agreed. Cassiodorus, liberal as always in etymology, said that art was so called because it delimits or circumscribes (arctat), and John of Salisbury repeated this derivation some centuries later. But ars was also related to the Greek ar?es, according to both Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville. It was a power, a capacity for making something, and thus a virtus operativa, a power of the practical intellect. Art belonged to the realm of making, not of doing. Doing pertained to morality, and was subject to the regulative virtue of Prudence. There was something of an analogy between art and Prudence, according to the theologians; but Prudence governs the practical judgment in those contingent situations where it seeks and labours for the good, whereas art regulates those operations whose purpose is to beget an end product—operations on physical materials, such as sculpture, or upon mental materials, as in Logic and Rhetoric. Art aimed to produce a goodness of the work (bonum operis). The important thing for the craftsman was that he should make a good sword, for example, and it was not this concern whether it was used for good or evil purposes. Thus, the two principal features of the medieval theory of art were intellectualism and objectivism: art was the science (ars sine scientia nihil est) of constructing objects according to their own laws. Art was not expression, but construction, an operation aiming at a certain result.
It meant construction, whether it was of a ship or of a building, a painting or a hammer. The word artifex applied alike to blacksmiths, orators, poets, painters, and sheep-shearers. This was another and a well-known feature
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