ART HISTORY

Art History

Art History

Introduction

Art is understood as any activity or product made by humans for a purpose aesthetic or communicative, through which they express thoughts, emotions or, in general, a vision of the world, through various resources, such as plastics, language, sound, or mixed. Art is a component of culture, reflecting substrates conception economic and social, and transmission ideas and values inherent in any human culture across space and time. It is considered that the appearance of Homo sapiens first art had a role in ritual, magical or religious (Paleolithic art), but that role changed with the evolution of human beings acquired an aesthetic component and a social, educational, commercial or simply ornamental.

The notion of art continues today subject to scholarly disputes, since its definition is open to multiple interpretations, which vary by culture, time, movement, or society for which the term has a meaning. In this paper, we would be studying the history of different cultures.

Chinese Art Before 1280

Although it is often said that China has the longest unbroken cultural tradition in the world, there are evident changes within that culture in the relative values of the visual arts. Chinese art displays no simple evolution from primitive beginnings to a mature artistic tradition. Indeed, there is at least one clear change of direction. In a very clear analysis, we can find a change from an "object oriented" culture of the early ritualistic societies of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages to the "painting and calligraphy honoring" culture from the Han period (ca. 200 BCE). From then on, although emphases, and fashions change the basic evaluation is unchanged, and the position of calligraphy, and painting as "fine" arts never questioned. This implies a radical change in cultural outlook just before and during the Han dynasty (206 BCE-CE 221) for which there is both literary and archaeological evidence (Watson, 2003).

Before the Han period, society and its culture had been centered on a ritualism stemming from the ruler which controlled all aspects of life. In the earliest periods of the Neolithic settlement (4th millennium to 18th century BCE) aesthetic considerations seem to have been of no substantial importance except in the making of ceramics, particularly those associated with burial rituals. Funerary pots seem to have been the most important works of art produced by these peoples (Stokstad, 2004).

The Bronze Age cult of ruler and state required grand objects and explicit symbolism and the Chinese produced magnificent bronzes which, in their symbolism, come closer to the expressiveness of "fine" art. As ritual fell away in importance toward the end of the Chou dynasty in the 3rd century BCE, the casting of bronzes took its place among other crafts; this change coincided with the development of writing styles and the aesthetic consideration of calligraphy, itself regarded as a parent of the art of painting in China. Almost from the time of its appearance in the last centuries of the Chou dynasty painting regarded as the one true art, with its close relation ...