Q. What do the cave paintings of Lascaux have in common with…

…The Tower of Pisa?

A Romanesque campanile on the Arno, built in the twelfth century of white marble, 293 steps to the top. Its oblique orientation, for which it is famous, is 14 feet off the perpendicular.

Ironically, it is this very aberration that produces so dynamic a composition in relation to its surrounding buildings. But is it the formal composition, the relations between diagonal and vertical elements, or the perception of impending disaster that is so arresting? The element of tension is no small factor when one first experiences this building.

The tower, a study in the harmony of heterogenous elements—cylinders, semicircles, and oblongs—is also a study in negative and positive space, light and shade; in addition, it is a fine example of rhythmic animation, contrasting textures, and the hypnotic repetition of elegant arches—multiple miniatures of the leaning tower.

“In the visual arts all content and forms depend on optical, tactile and motor sensations—the first are dominant in painting, the second in sculpture, and the third in architecture.”
Like the paintings on the walls of the caves of Lascaux, the tower of Pisa evokes all three.

Max Raphael, 
The Demands of Art
(Princeton, 1968), 215

…Cézanne’s Apples?

Cézanne’s still life is not three apples poised on a white dish but the effect of three apples on the interested spectator. His brush strokes are formal means of pulsating contrasts.

The colors are not the subject’s but the painter’s; they are complementary effects, the vibrancy of paint, not the imitation of things.
“One must not reproduce it,” said Cézanne, “one must interpret it; by means of what? by means of plastic equivalents and color.”

John Reward,
Paul Cézanne
(New York, 1948), 180

“No one who has a real understanding of the art of painting,” said Roger Fry, “attaches any important to what we call the subject of a picture—what is represented.
To one who feels the language of pictorial form, all depends on how it is represented, nothing on what. Cézanne, who most of us believe to be the greatest artist of modern times, expressed some of his grandest conception in pictures of fruit and crockery on a common kitchen table.”

Fry’s statement about form is as applicable to the paintings of Lascaux as it is to Cézannes apples. The lasting intrigue of the cave paintings is due not only to what they depict but to their astonishing skill and arrangement.

Roger Fry,
The Artist and Psychoanalysis
(London, 1914), 6

Paul Cézanne
Still Life with Apples
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Charles A. Loeser

…The Baptistry of Florence?

One enters the baptistery through what Michelangelo called the “the gates of paradise,” the bronze panels designed by Lorenzo Ghiberti that were the product of a competition won by him and Filippo Brunelleschi.
The building sits serenely in the center of a bustling city, close to Brunelleschi’s dome for the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and Giotto’s campanile.

Simple geometric shapes—rectangles, squares, diamonds, and half circles of dark green marble—embellish every surface, a Euclidian inventory of abstract images. The structure, an octagon covered by a pyramidal roof, with each facet enveloped by three dramatic arches, is a model of the geometer’s art.

One quickly realizes that simplicity and geometry are the language of timelessness and universality.

But it is the toylike quality of the baptistery that is so startling. It seems coincidental that the building i which Dante was baptized, and which is still used to baptize the children of Florence, should underscore Baudelaire’s notion that the toy is the child’s first initiation into art.

Charles Baudelaire,
“The Philosophy of Toys”
in Essays on Dolls
(London, 1994), 18

…Brueghel’s Children’s Games?

It is no revelation that economic, social, and political awareness played a pivotal role in the art of Pieter Brueghel. One wonders if a present-day visitor to the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna could ever see Brueghel’s painting the way a Flemish burgher would have seen it.
But as with the work of all great artists, the language of morality and social awareness is expressed in a language of form that endures.

The texture of Brueghel’s pictures is a complexity of contrasts, movements, and expressions united in a symphony of light and shade, curves, angles, and emotions—the whole gamut of conflicting phenomena.
In Brueghels’ Children’s Games, sturdy buildings serve as visual backdrops for frolicking kids; the passive and the active, simplicity and complexity are in harmony. 
Each compact and stocky little figure seems to have been patiently whittled out of some magic substance. 
And each game, though clearly articulated, seems somehow to be part of one giant ensemble of fun and frolic.

In the end on e experiences the collective joy of children, colors, and forms at play.

Pieter Brueghel
The Children’s Games
Kunsthistoriches Museum
Vienna

…Romanesque Capitals?

These capitals, where ornaments, animal, and rider are treated as isolated fragments in an  imaginary space, share a kinship with children’s art.

To the illiterate the capitals were and are the living text of the Bible—an ageless art that appeals to all ages.

“I learned from perry that art is best derives from artless things.”
This is what one senses experiencing Romanesque art.

The same universal qualities of naiveté and simplicity that characterize the work of all primitive cultures are in he rent in this art.
Even the means of expression by the great painters of our time is related to Romanesque art.

Léger’s equalization of animate and inanimate things in this pen and ink drawing is equivalent to the way the horse, rider, and surrounding ornaments cohere on the Dintorni capital.

Jimmy Carter,
Always a Reckoning
(Times Books, 1995)

Fernand Léger
Pen and ink drawing, 1944
Author’s collection

…The Fountains of the Alhambra?

Geometry, which has always played a significant role in Muslim art, permeates the design of the Patio de los Leones in Grenada, from its twelve silent lion sentinels to its dodecahedron base and basin.

The highly simplified, delicately carved lion details contrast dramatically with the elaborate arches in the background.

The richness of ornamentation in the whole complex, the abundance and variety of tile configurations, the orientation and flow from room to too, area to area, provide a unique architectural experience.

Even water was considered a sculptural elements; it hangs as if frozen in mid-air. The toylike stylization (similar to the Indian tiger on page 25) and simplification of the twelve lions hint at a more than cursory understanding of formal relations among the different components.

The Patio de los Leones, an ode to the geometer’s art, was also the last achievement of Muslim art in the Iberian peninsula.

…The Parthenon?

Ictinus, the architect of the Parthenon, was not the only practitioner who applied the principles of Greek geometry to his structures.
Yet the magnificence of the Parthenon outshines similar buildings of the period.

The beauty of any artifact cannot be attributed solely to its proportions.

What a particular proportion contains, and how it is designed, are more important than the shape of its containment.
Proportional systems are an incentive for some, an inspiration for others, and a crutch for too many.

Diagrams shows one of many constructions of the golden section (1.618) constructed on a right-angle triangle and two contiguous circles.

…African Sculpture?

The exaggerated body and facial features of this sculpture are typical of the art of African sculpture. Furthermore, the artist managed to preserve the spontaneity, imagination, and unselfconscious vision of the child's world.

Its creator understand that emotions can best be expressed visually by overstatement rather than by literal depiction.

Was what attracted Picasso, Braque, and others to African art not what it stood for but what it looked like, its for, much more than its mysterious content? Is this the same impulse that motivates us to adorn our walls with African art?

"Ever work of art," said Coleridge, "must have about it something not understood to obtain its full effect."

African art played more than a passing role in the art of cubism. Freedom of expression, simplicity, imagination, fantasy, spontaneity, and innocence were part of its formal language.

What was ritual and symbolism to one was invention and formalism to the other.

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… Katsura Palace?

Serenity and order crown the splendor of this enchanted summer palace. Coleridge's unity in variety is everywhere. To experience Katsura is to experience perfection…

The variety of patterns made possible simply by moving the shoji (rice-paper screens) is endless — a tribute to the architect's sensitivity and the craftsman's ingenuity.

Here, "form followed function" long before Horation Greenough and Louis Sullivan voice their beliefs. Mondrian's aesthetics were there long before Mondrian.

Master of yin and yang, Katsura Palace is a skillful integration of contrasts and rhythms; horizontal facades, vertical posts, diagonal roofs; dark and light, long and short, wet and dry; water, stones, grass, wood and paper — a haven of tranquility and beauty.

The poetry of Zen is embodied in the gardens and architecture of Katsura. The wild horse of Lascaux, also called the Chinese horse, evokes this Zen-like quality as well.

… A Fisherman's Buoy?

Modest subject matter, modest means, and modest talent do not always prevent an artifact from offering an aesthetic experience to the viewer.

These buoys, clearly the product of loving hands, are made by fishermen or craftsmen who know their job. Their colors, arbitrary or not, may have come from paint cans lying around a boat yard.

It is the effect that matters.

The arrangement and juxtaposition of objects is not accidental; in fact, it is the contrast of the casual and the careful that is meaningful in the end.

That this marine still life may be reminiscent of Giorgio Morandi's contemplative, yet disarmingly simple compositions is coincidental but not surprising.

What they share are the virtues of economy, simplicity, and modesty of means.

This is a useful object lesson for designers who believe that mundane subject matter, like soap or soup, is a hinderance to creativity.

… A Gorgan Pitcher?

The decor of this Gorgan pitcher defines its personality; sensitivity, subtlety, and simplicity determine its form.

The swelling blue stripes embellishing the belly of the vessel accentuate its profile and, like blue veins, impart life to an otherwise lifeless object.

Decoration, often given a pejorative gloss is the essence of this object. Without decoration, the pitcher would appear less interesting, almost naked, to the viewer.

Form fixes the appearance of things, what things look like. Matter is what is shares with other objects.

Grace, dignity, passion, and pleasure signal the presence and suffuse the atmosphere of anything worthy of the accolade art; a persuasive poster, a painting, an elegant room, a Gothic cathedral, or a simple utensil.

"Art changes our whole attitude to life, not merely our understanding of it but also our evaluation of it, in fact, all our perspective."

…Tipu's Tiger

… A Photograph of Nature?

A work of art is a dialogue, a picture filtered through the mind and then transformed. Lyrical understanding of the subject, trained observation, special feeling for patina, an eye for revealing detail, and poetic content comprise what Walker Evans describes as the photographer's magic.

A work of nature is not a work of art. Hegel referred to natural beauty as "the prose of the world." The photo of this cactus is artistic only to the extent that the photographer has selected and interpreted the subject.

The quality of a picture is measured not by how much it adheres to nature but how far it departs from it.

When one encounters a beautiful landscape, suggested André Malreaux, one is possibly experience that landscape as the work of a great painter like Constable, or Monet, or…

"Artistic beauty stands higher than nature, for the beauty of art is beauty that is born — born again, that is — of the mind, and by as much as the mind and its products are higher than nature and its appearances, by so much is the beauty of art higher than the beauty of nature."

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A. The cave paintings of Lascaux, as well as the exhibits on pages 3 to 27, are objects of aesthetic experience, irrespective of time, place, purpose, style, or genre.

Aesthetics is the standard by which a work of art is judged. It is essentially the study of the successive or simultaneous interaction of form and content.

How skillfully these components are fused will determine the aesthetic quality of the work in question.

There are two parts to this hypothesis. One relates to the artist, who, unlike the spectator, is intensely involved — intuitively, emotionally, and perceptually; the other, to the object, which possesses a plastic unity that differentiates it from the ordinary artifact.

"It is at least arguable that the purely formal element in art does not change; that the same canons of harmony and proportion are present in primitive art, in Greek art, in Gothic art, in Renaissance art, and in the art [ and design, traditional or trivial ] of the present day."

To this one may add the canons of: order, unity, variety, contrast, grace, symmetry, asymmetry, rhythm, rhyme, regularity, movement, interval, coherence, dissonance, balance, tension, space, scale, weight, texture, line, mass, shape, light, shade, color, ad infinitum. These are among the tools of form — by design, by chance, bye improvisation.

The endless conflicts between the spiritual and material, between ends and means, form and content, form and function, form and facture, form and purpose, form meaning, form and idea, form and expression, form and illusion, form and habit, form and scale, form and style need to be resolved.

It is the merging of these conflicts that determines the aesthetic quality of a painting, a design, a building, a sculpture, or a printed piece.

A work of art, then, is the resolution of conflicting relations. It is a unity of opposites, a series of steps reflecting Hagel's dialectics: thesis, the subject; antithesis, the conflict; and synthesis, the resolution.

Whatever one's belief, art is commentary, art is revelation, art is the culmination of the creative process. It is a by-product, not a goal, a point of view about a particular object that rises above and it's topical source.

It is not just a facsimile but an opinion expressed visually in a distinctive way.

Art is reality enhanced.