.L/Ess than a millennium ago, circa 1300, there began to emerge in Italy, specifically in Tuscany, a new con sciousness of the artist?a development that eventually led to the publication in Florence, 250 years later, of Vasari's Lives. A monumental series of biographies of painters, sculptors, and architects from Cimabue to Michelangelo, organized to dem onstrate the overall progress of art toward perfection, Vasari's book is seen as the foundation of art history, which is part of a broader phenomenon that I wish to call the cult of the artist. The modern fame of the artist as hero in the Western world from the Renaissance masters to Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Pi casso, and Jackson Pollock, among many others, extends far beyond art history as an intellectual discipline or field of study. Such glory is closely tied to the rise of the modern art museum and its blockbuster exhibitions of artists as stars; and it is reflected in celebratory novels, stories, poetry and films about artists, which proliferate in our own day. This aggrandizement of the artist is central to what in the nineteenth century came to be called the religion of art. The el evated status of the artist, or what Vasari called the artificer, is one of the principal, distinguishing features of our own cul ture, since there were no biographies of artists before the mod ern period. In fact, the celebration of the artist is one of the many defining features of modernity or, as it is called, mod ernism. The famous, classical anecdotes about Phidias and Apelles, among other Greek artists preserved by Pliny the El der in his Natural History, are the taproots of the modern ex altation of the artist as hero. Despite the glory of such artists in these pre-biographical fables, artists remained largely anony
{"title":"Dante and the Modern Cult of the Artist","authors":"Paul Barolsky","doi":"10.5325/j.ctv14gp1k4.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/j.ctv14gp1k4.8","url":null,"abstract":".L/Ess than a millennium ago, circa 1300, there began to emerge in Italy, specifically in Tuscany, a new con sciousness of the artist?a development that eventually led to the publication in Florence, 250 years later, of Vasari's Lives. A monumental series of biographies of painters, sculptors, and architects from Cimabue to Michelangelo, organized to dem onstrate the overall progress of art toward perfection, Vasari's book is seen as the foundation of art history, which is part of a broader phenomenon that I wish to call the cult of the artist. The modern fame of the artist as hero in the Western world from the Renaissance masters to Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Pi casso, and Jackson Pollock, among many others, extends far beyond art history as an intellectual discipline or field of study. Such glory is closely tied to the rise of the modern art museum and its blockbuster exhibitions of artists as stars; and it is reflected in celebratory novels, stories, poetry and films about artists, which proliferate in our own day. This aggrandizement of the artist is central to what in the nineteenth century came to be called the religion of art. The el evated status of the artist, or what Vasari called the artificer, is one of the principal, distinguishing features of our own cul ture, since there were no biographies of artists before the mod ern period. In fact, the celebration of the artist is one of the many defining features of modernity or, as it is called, mod ernism. The famous, classical anecdotes about Phidias and Apelles, among other Greek artists preserved by Pliny the El der in his Natural History, are the taproots of the modern ex altation of the artist as hero. Despite the glory of such artists in these pre-biographical fables, artists remained largely anony","PeriodicalId":39571,"journal":{"name":"ARION-A JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND THE CLASSICS","volume":"69 1","pages":"1-16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2004-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74563144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2004-01-01DOI: 10.5040/9781472540430.ch-002
E. Hall
theoretical issues facing the classicist who wants to study the ways in which ancient Greece and Rome have been "re ceived" in performed media. It attempts to identify an intel lectual ancestry for this type of scholarship, above all in schools of aesthetics deriving from German idealism, and thereby to define what it is about performance arts that makes the study of the ways they use Greek and Roman an tiquity different from Reception in non-performed arts. Since this inquiry addresses cultural phenomena extending from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century, it does not engage with the scholarly controversy surrounding the legit imacy of the concept of performance in relation to the an cient world, which knew neither the term nor the category it denotes.1 While acknowledging that performance is a concept with its own (relatively recent) historical specificity, the discussion nevertheless assumes a commonsense defini tion of the word performance as it is used in our own time: to say that something from ancient Greece or Rome has been performed implies an aesthetic phenomenon in which humans have realized an archetypal text, narrative or idea by acting, puppet manipulation, dance, recital, or song; the category Performance Reception therefore excludes individ uals reading a text to themselves, or the visual arts (except, hypothetically, when they are of a type requiring the label performance art).
{"title":"Towards a Theory of Performance Reception","authors":"E. Hall","doi":"10.5040/9781472540430.ch-002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472540430.ch-002","url":null,"abstract":"theoretical issues facing the classicist who wants to study the ways in which ancient Greece and Rome have been \"re ceived\" in performed media. It attempts to identify an intel lectual ancestry for this type of scholarship, above all in schools of aesthetics deriving from German idealism, and thereby to define what it is about performance arts that makes the study of the ways they use Greek and Roman an tiquity different from Reception in non-performed arts. Since this inquiry addresses cultural phenomena extending from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century, it does not engage with the scholarly controversy surrounding the legit imacy of the concept of performance in relation to the an cient world, which knew neither the term nor the category it denotes.1 While acknowledging that performance is a concept with its own (relatively recent) historical specificity, the discussion nevertheless assumes a commonsense defini tion of the word performance as it is used in our own time: to say that something from ancient Greece or Rome has been performed implies an aesthetic phenomenon in which humans have realized an archetypal text, narrative or idea by acting, puppet manipulation, dance, recital, or song; the category Performance Reception therefore excludes individ uals reading a text to themselves, or the visual arts (except, hypothetically, when they are of a type requiring the label performance art).","PeriodicalId":39571,"journal":{"name":"ARION-A JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND THE CLASSICS","volume":"30 1 1","pages":"51-90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2004-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78098517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}