ART AND
HUMANITIES
PROF. RACIDON P. BERNARTE
HU 110
Introduction to Humanities
HUMANITAS
Humanitas signifies the qualities,
feelings and inclinations proper to
mankind. It connotes humane
feelings and the conduct towards
others which depicts gentleness,
consideration and manner.
Humanities, generally mean
ART, literature, music and the
theater—areas in which human
values and individual
expressiveness are celebrated.
ART vs. SCIENCE
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Both art and science require technical skill
Both artist and scientist try to create order out
of the seemingly random and diverse
experiences of the world
Both try to understand and appreciate the
world and to convey their experience to
others
The scientist studies quantitative sense
perceptions in order to discover laws or
concepts that are universally true
The artist selects qualitative perceptions and
arranges them to express personal and
cultural understanding.
Nature and Characteristics of
ART
“Basic human needs stand at the center of the art experience”
Art is a disciplined activity that
may be limited to skill or expanded
to include a distinctive way of
looking at the world
The word ART is derived from the Latin ARS, meaning “skill.” Art is
skill at performing a set of specialized actions.
The term “art” also derived from “arti”,
the craft guilds of the Italian
Renaissance. Arti denoted
craftsmanship, skill, mastery of form,
inventiveness and the associations
that exist between form and ideas
and between techniques and
materials.
Nature and Characteristics of
ART
“ART,”
serves as technical and
creative record of human needs and
achievements.
Art in its broader meaning involves
Skills, Creativity and Imagination.
Art provides the person or people who
produce it and the community that
observes it with an experience that
might be aesthetic, emotional,
intellectual, or a combination of these
qualities
Nature and Characteristics of
ART
“Art has combined practical and aesthetic functions”
In the 18th century in the West, a more
sophisticated public began to
distinguish between art that was purely
aesthetic and art that was also
practical
The FINE ARTS (French beaux arts)—including
literature, music, dance, painting, sculpture,
and architecture—are concerned primarily
with aesthetics
The DECORATIVE OR PRACTICAL ARTS,
such as pottery, metalwork, furniture,
tapestry, and enamel, are often useful arts
and for a time were demoted to the rank of
crafts.
Nature and Characteristics of
ART
The École des Beaux-Arts in Paris taught
only the major visual arts, the term art
was sometimes narrowed to mean only
drawing, painting, architecture, and
sculpture
Since the mid-20th century, greater
appreciation of non-Western and folk
traditions and of individual work in a
mechanized society has tended to blur
the old distinction. Both categories are
becoming valued as art.
Work of Art
A WORK OF ART is a product of an activity
that involves both imagination and skill in
accomplishing it. It creates aesthetic
feelings or experiences which delighted
and satisfy our desire for beautiful things.
WORK OF ART is also the product of the
artist’s unique personality influenced
consciously or unconsciously by factors
such as his environment, traditions,
national traits, religious beliefs, economic
conditions, his ideals or even the climate
and geography
A WORK OF ART represents or reflects the
individual, the character of the period and
the place where it was produced.
Characteristics of a Good Artist
1. The HAND or the SKILLS
2. The MIND or the CREATIVITY
3. The HEART or the IMAGINATION
Grouping the Arts
The arts are generally grouped into MAJOR and MINOR arts. Major arts
include painting, architecture, sculpture, literature, dance and music. Minor
arts include the decorative arts, the popular arts, graphic arts, the plastic arts
and industrial arts.
Major Arts —involves man’s skills which
focused on form, content, and execution.
Minor Arts —lies on the “styling” and
addressed primarily to the sense of sight
and their usefulness.
Grouping the Arts
1. Visual Art
a. Graphic Arts
b. Plastic Arts
Grouping the Arts
2. Performing Arts
Grouping the Arts
3. Literary Arts
English author William Shakespeare ranks as perhaps the most famous writer in the history of English
literature. Shakespeare earned recognition from his late 16th- and early 17th-century contemporaries writing
plays, but may have looked to poetry for enduring fame. His poetic efforts include a series of 154 sonnets, in
which he developed the Shakespearian sonnet as a new poetic form, arranged with three quatrains and a
couplet. Sonnet 18 (recited by an actor) comes from The Sonnets of Shakespeare (printed in 1609).
Grouping the Arts
4. Popular Arts
Grouping the Arts
5.Gustatory/Culiraty Art
Grouping the Arts
6.Decorative Arts
Elements of Art
SYMBOLS
These are made up of different shapes used
to depict or symbolize objects. Objects are
simplified so that only the prominent part is
represented.
PICTURES
The use of the art elements gives the difference
of how pictures are being represented.
Conservative artists represent things exactly as
he sees them in nature while a modernist tries to
interpret nature as he feels it.
EMOTIONS
These are expressed by the different elements
which symbolize or suggest feelings: i.e., despair,
mourning, hope, love passion, etc.
Art and Experience
The arts constitute one of the oldest
and most important means of
expression developed by human
beings started from the prehistoric
era. Thus, it is considered as a record
of human experience.
It has been said that art is
experience, because all art
demands experience; but probably it
is clearer to say that al art involves
experience, that there can be no
appreciation of art without
experience.
When we say that art involves experience, we mean by experience
just what we always mean by the word: the actual doing of
something.
Characteristics of Art
Experience
1.
The experience of art is personal and
individual; it depends on what you
are, what you have inside you.
2.
Every artistic experience is
accompanied by some emotion or
emotional reactions
“Do not expect to agree with everyone;
all you can do is to be honest and
straightforward”
“You like it or you do not like it ”
Art and Experience
The paintings of Franco Magnani, a San
Francisco artist, demonstrate his remarkable
memory for his childhood village of Pontito,
Italy. Here, one of his paintings of Pontito, top,
is juxtaposed with an actual photograph of the
village. Magnani left the village in 1958 in his
mid-20s. Eight years later, during a serious
illness, he began dreaming about Pontito in
extraordinarily vivid detail. Soon the images
came to him during the daytime with almost
hallucinatory power. Impulsively, and working
entirely from memory, he began painting and
drawing different scenes of the village.
Although some of his works show nearphotographic
Art and Nature
Art is not nature. Art is made by
human beings. Artists frequently
find their inspiration and subject
matter in nature, and artists do
use nature as a medium, but art
itself not nature.
Art is made by human beings,
and no matter how close it is to
nature, it always shows that it was
made by human beings.
The function of the artist is to help
us understand the nature of
things, to realize the possibilities in
the world, to develop insights or
enlarge imagination by creating
or revealing new subjects.
Criteria in Analyzing Art Work
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What is the work of art about? (the subject)
What is it for? (the function)
What is it made of? (the medium)
How is it put together? (elements and organization)
What is its mood, temper, personality (the style)
Is it good? (judgment)
Criteria in Analyzing Art Work
What makes any work of art great?”
The simplest answer is to say that it is
art which has stood the test of time
and still remains meaningful.
Sincerity—Are the artist’s intentions perfectly honest, or is he striving for
effect either by sentimentality (affected emotion) or sensation (excited
feeling)?
Universality—Does the work of art have only momentary value or does
it embody universal truths which are permanent?
Magnitude—There are few masterpieces which transcend all others in scope
and monumentality.
Criteria in Analyzing Art Work
Craftsmanship—Does the artist understand his craft and is his
workmanship sound? Has he gone beyond the limits of taste? These
questions arise chiefly in judging modern works. Of course subjective,
good taste and poor taste are difficult to define as is a work of art. We
have to rely on a consensus of opinion among thinking people.
Humanism
HUMANISM, in philosophy, attitude
that emphasizes the dignity and
worth of the individual
A basic premise of HUMANISM is that
people are rational beings who possess
within themselves the capacity for truth and
goodness.
The term humanism is most often used to
describe a literary and cultural movement
that spread through western Europe in the
14th and 15th centuries.
The Start of Humanism
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The humanist movement started in Italy, where the late medieval Italian
writers Dante, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Francesco Petrarch contributed
greatly to the discovery and preservation of classical works.
Humanist ideals were forcefully expressed by another Italian scholar, Pico
della Mirandola, in his Oration on the dignity of man.
The movement was further stimulated by the influx of Byzantine scholars who
came to Italy after the fall of Constantinople (present-day İstanbul) to the
Ottomans in 1453 and also by the establishment of the Platonic Academy in
Florence.
In Italy humanism developed principally in the fields of literature and art, in
central Europe, where it was introduced chiefly by the German scholars
Johann Reuchlin and Melanchthon, the movement extended into the fields of
theology and education, and was a major underlying cause of the
Reformation.
The Start of Humanism
One of the most influential scholars in
the development of humanism in
France was the Dutch cleric
Desiderius Erasmus, who also played
an important part in introducing the
movement into England.
HUMANISM originated in the study of
classical culture, and it took its name
from one of the era’s earliest and
most crucial concerns: the promotion
of a new educational curriculum that
emphasized a group of subjects
known collectively as the Studia
Humanitatis, or the Humanities.
Humanism—Humanities
The word “humanities” generally refers
to art, literature, music, architecture,
dance and theatre—areas in which human
subjectivity is emphasized and individual
expressiveness is dramatized.
The importance of the human being and
his feelings is the main concern of
humanities.
Humanities disciplines included grammar,
rhetoric history, poetry, and ethics. These
subjects were all studied, whenever
possible, in the original classical texts. The
humanities curriculum conflicted directly
with more traditional education that was
based on Scholasticism.
Humanism—Humanities…
The Humanists tended to object to an
educational system that was largely
monopolized by the clergy and oriented to
clerical needs.
The 19th century witnessed a certain loss of
prestige of the Humanities to the sciences
and social sciences because many men
believed that science could procure
everything that man needed or wanted.
However, there has come the important
realization that science is not an unmixed
blessing.
Humanities
Humanities is derived from the Latin word
“HUMANUS” meaning human, refined and
cultured. It is based on the philosophical view of
humanism which stresses the dictum of
Protagoras, a Greek philosopher, that “man is
the measure of all things,”
The Humanities are the records of man’s
experiences, his values, his sentiments, his
ideals, and his goals. The humanities are
ultimately expressions of man’s feelings and
thoughts.
The humanities are important in the
development in the complete social being,
ready to take on his responsibilities in this
rapidly changing world and enjoy life.
Humanities….
The humanities are the stories, the ideas
and the words that help us make sense of
our lives and our world. The humanities
introduce us to people we have never met,
places we have never visited and the
ideas that may have never crossed our
minds.
..... If a man is to live like a human being, his heart and mind must be nourished.
And the best spiritual nourishment comes from the Humanities.
The Discipline of Humanities
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History, Anthropology, and Archeology—study human social, political
and cultural development.
Literature, Languages, and Linguistics—explore how we
communicate with other and how our ideas and thoughts on the
human experience are expressed and interpreted.
Philosophy, Ethics, and Comparative Religion—consider ideas about
the meaning of life and the reasons for our thoughts and actions.
Jurisprudence—examines the values and principles which inform our
laws.
Historical, Critical and Theoretical Approaches to the Arts—reflect
upon and analyze the creative process.
ART and HUMANITIES
The aesthetic experiences we derive
from the arts influence us to change our
ways. They may transform us into highly
cultured, dignified and respectable
human beings.
The arts may beautify our humanity.
Arts are called humanities because
they bring out the good and the noble
in people.
Through arts we come to know the
changing image of man as he journeys
across historical time, as he searches
for the reality and strives to achieve the
ideals that create meaning for life.
ART and HUMANITIES
The End
Thank you!
racidon@hotmail.com
humanities_07@yahoo.com