/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

>>1916273
>Did the Renaissance achieve nothing new by looking back at classical greece and rome?
I think a great deal of the reason for this is also because history is a great quarry of ideas, and many of these ideas bear repeating and can be still depicted with freshness of invention. Certain ideas always ring true and can be depicted in many ways still. Besides, there weren't actual paintings aside from a few frescoes that survived or was discovered by the time of the Renaissance. They had to rely on descriptions of ancient paintings, and modeled the entire mode of western painting after these at first and then trying their own hand at creating paintings based on the liberal arts, particularly poetry. Of course, there are many other factors.

Romanticism was a revival too of some sort of classical past. Not the classical ruins of Rome, but of French medieval poetry and even some more northern poetry in which the forces of Nature are the main themes. Neoclassical too was influenced by these.

>>1916929
>Art has become waaay too cerebral.
I actually think art isn't as cerebral as it could. At least it's a shallow sort of intellect that's in vogue now. I also think that there are certain subtle emotions that can only be reached by the intense intellect (such as the grandeur and sweetness reached by Renaissance poetry), just as there are some understanding that can only be reached through passion (I don't claim know what these are but it's a main theme in (the Romantic) Hawthorne's Marble Faun). Besides this there are many art today that seek first to impress the viewer's passions upon first being seen, such as imposing largeness of scale, confusing bigness with greatness. There's also quite a bit of art today that garner interest through sensationalism alone. Postmodernism may claim to be intellectual but often it turns out to be the bane of wisdom, and is also the opposite of Classicism (which values merit among other things, a concept detestable Postmodernism).