Understanding Aesthetics: Art, Philosophy, and Cultural Heritage

Aesthetics, also called the theory of the arts, proposes an explanation of the artistic phenomenon and everything related to it.

The term aesthetics was proposed in 1753 by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten.

Aesthetics considers whether beauty or ugliness are present in things in an objective manner.

Axiology, a branch of philosophy, studies values.

In 1967, Luis Farré proposed the term aesthetic categories, including the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the grotesque, the gracious, the ridiculous, the tragic, and the comic.

The French Impressionists, like Claude Oscar Monet, exemplified these concepts.

Methods in Art Analysis

The methods used in art analysis emerged after and as a consequence of what Immanuel Kant proposes in his Critique of Pure Reason.

Erwin Panofsky developed the study method idealized by Aby Warburg to discover the meaning of works in visual arts, known as iconology.

Semiotics, or semiology, is the science that studies the systems of signs in common or daily life.

Lucio Mendieta y Nuñez (1964) stated that religion left a certain mysticism in the arts.

This cultural heritage can be tangible or intangible, where tangible refers to anything you can touch.

Art Through the Ages: Paleolithic to Neolithic

Paleolithic (2,000,000-10,000 B.C.) -- Mesolithic (10,000-8,000 B.C.) -- Neolithic (8,000-3000 B.C.)

The largest and oldest period is the Paleolithic, divided into three periods:

Lower Paleolithic, Middle Paleolithic, Upper Paleolithic. The latter is where we find the first artistic manifestations.

After a short period called the Mesolithic, the Neolithic era arose with agriculture and livestock, marking the beginning of labor and a major change in the economic system.

Persia is located on the plateau of Iran, between the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates on one side and the Indus on the other.

For the Sumerians, there were two fundamental forces which came from the entire universe: Ea, or spirit of the abyss, and Dakina, land.

Art and Belief Systems

The sculptor was regarded as the one who maintains life.

Buddhism always illustrated Buddhist legends as a form of teaching, introducing daily life topics in which the figures were of great sweetness and Buddha was shown as a man instead of a god.

Hinduism, on the contrary, used colossal art and illustrated its legends with fantastic topics and motives to accentuate the greatness of the Supreme Being.