Aesthetics of the Renaissance briefly the most important thing. Aesthetics of the Early Renaissance as the Aesthetics of Early Humanism

Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation

Belgorod State Technological Academy

Building materials

Department of Philosophy

"Aesthetics of the Renaissance"

Completed by: student of the SZ-21 group

Kutnyak V.N.

Checked:

Belgorod 2002

Introduction

Due to the transitional nature of the Renaissance, the chronological framework of this historical period quite difficult to install. Based on the features (humanism, anthropocentrism, modification of the Christian tradition, the revival of antiquity), then the chronology will look like this: Proto-Renaissance (late XIII - XIV centuries), Early Renaissance (XV century), High Renaissance (late XV - first three decades of the XVI c), Late Renaissance (middle and second half of the 16th century).

The chronological boundaries of the development of Renaissance art in different countries do not quite coincide. Due to historical circumstances, the Renaissance in the northern countries of Europe is late compared to the Italian one. And yet, the art of this era, with all the variety of private forms, has the most important common feature - the desire for a true reflection of reality. This feature in the last century, the first historian of the Renaissance, Jacob Burckhard, defined as "the discovery of the world of mankind."

The term "Renaissance" (Renaissance) appeared in the 16th century. Even Giordano Vasari, a painter and the first historiographer of Italian art, the author of the famous "Biographies" of the most famous painters, sculptors and architects (1550), wrote about the "revival" of Italian art. This concept arose on the basis of a historical concept that was widespread at that time, according to which the Middle Ages was a period of hopeless barbarism and ignorance that followed the death of a brilliant civilization of classical culture. The historians of that time believed that art, once flourishing in the ancient world, was first revived in their time to a new life. If France is the most indicative country for studying the Western European Middle Ages, then in the Renaissance, Italy can serve as such a country. Moreover, in Italy the term "Renaissance" had its original meaning - the revival of the traditions of ancient culture, and in other countries the Renaissance developed as a direct continuation of the Gothic culture in the direction of strengthening the worldly beginning, marked by the formation of humanism and the growth of self-consciousness of the individual.

The aesthetics of the Renaissance is connected with the grandiose revolution that takes place in this era in all areas of public life: in the economy, ideology, culture, science and philosophy. By this time, the flourishing of urban culture, the great geographical discoveries, which immensely expanded the horizons of man, the transition from craft to manufactory.

The revolutionary development of the productive forces, the disintegration of feudal class and guild relations that fettered production, lead to the liberation of the individual, create the conditions for his free and universal development. Undoubtedly, all this could not but affect the nature of the worldview.

In the Renaissance, there is a process of radical breaking of the medieval system of views on the world and the formation of a new, humanistic ideology.

Humanistic thought puts man at the center of the universe, speaks of the unlimited possibilities for the development of the human personality. The idea of the dignity of the human person, deeply developed by the great thinkers of the Renaissance, firmly entered the philosophical and aesthetic consciousness of the Renaissance. Outstanding artists of the time drew their optimism and enthusiasm from her.

Hence the fullness of the development of the personality, the comprehensiveness and universality of the characters of the figures of the Renaissance that strikes us. “It was,” F. Engels wrote, “the greatest progressive upheaval of all experienced by mankind up to that time, an era that needed titans and which gave birth to titans in terms of the power of thought, passion and character, in terms of versatility and learning.”

During this period, a complex process of formation of a realistic worldview takes place, a new attitude to nature, religion, and the artistic heritage of the ancient world is being developed. Of course, it would be wrong to believe that the culture of the Renaissance finally overcomes the religious worldview and breaks with religion: a negative attitude towards religion is often combined with a revival of interest in religion and various mystical ideas. But at the same time, it is obvious that in the Renaissance there is an increase in the secular principle in culture and art, secularization and even aestheticization of religion, which was recognized only to the extent that it became an object of art.

Researchers of the culture and art of the Renaissance have convincingly shown what a complex breakdown of the medieval picture of the world is taking place in art. The rejection of "Gothic naturalism", of the creative method of the Middle Ages, which was based on canons and geometric schemes, leads to the creation of a new artistic method based on the exact reproduction of living nature, the restoration of confidence in sensory experience and human perception, the fusion of vision and understanding.

The main theme of Renaissance art is man, man in harmony of his spiritual and physical powers. Art glorifies the dignity of the human person, the infinite ability of man to cognize the world. Faith in man, in the possibility of a harmonious and all-round development of personality is a distinctive feature of the art of this time.

The study of the artistic culture of the Renaissance began a long time ago, among its researchers there are well-known names of J. Burkhardt, G. Wölfflin, M. Dvorak, L. Venturi, E. Panofsky and others.

As in the history of art, three main periods can be distinguished in the development of the aesthetic thought of the Renaissance, corresponding to the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. The aesthetic thought of the Italian humanists, who turned to the study of the ancient heritage and reformed the system of upbringing and education, is associated with the 14th century, the aesthetic theories of Nicholas of Cusa, Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola belong to the 15th century, and, finally, in the 16th century A significant contribution to aesthetic theory is made by the philosophers Giordano Bruno, Campanella, Patrici. In addition to this tradition associated with certain philosophical schools, there was also the so-called practical aesthetics, which grew on the basis of the experience of developing certain types of art - music, painting, architecture and poetry.

It should not be thought that the ideas of Renaissance aesthetics developed only in Italy. One can trace how similar aesthetic concepts spread in other European countries, especially in France, Spain, Germany, England. All this indicates that the aesthetics of the Renaissance was a pan-European phenomenon, although, of course, the specific conditions for the development of culture in each of these countries left a characteristic imprint on the development of aesthetic theory.

1. Aesthetics of the early Renaissance as the aesthetics of early humanism

It should be noted that in the Renaissance the term "humanism" had a slightly different meaning than the one that is usually invested in it today. This term arose in connection with the concept of "studia humanitatis", that is, in connection with the study of those disciplines that opposed the scholastic system of education and were connected by their traditions with ancient culture. These included grammar, rhetoric, poetics, history, and moral philosophy (ethics).

Renaissance humanists were those who devoted themselves to the study and teaching of the studia humanitatis. This term had not only professional, but also ideological content: humanists were the bearers and creators of a new system of knowledge, in the center of which was the problem of man, his earthly destiny.

The humanists included representatives of various professions: teachers - Filelfo, Poggio Bracciolini, Vittorino da Feltre, Leonardo Bruni; philosophers - Lorenzo Valla, Pico della Mirandola; writers - Petrarch, Boccaccio; artists - Alberti and others.

The work of Francesc Petrarca (1304-1374) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) represents an early period in the development of Italian humanism, which laid the foundations for a more integral and systematized worldview, which was developed by later thinkers.

Petrarch with extraordinary force revived interest in antiquity, especially in Homer. Thus, he laid the foundation for that revival of ancient antiquity, which was so characteristic of the entire Renaissance. At the same time, Petrarch formulated a new attitude towards art, opposite to that which underlay medieval aesthetics. For Petrarch, art had already ceased to be a simple craft and began to acquire a new, humanistic meaning. In this regard, Petrarch's treatise "Invective against a certain physician" is extremely interesting, representing a polemic with Salutati, who argued that medicine should be recognized as a higher art than poetry. This thought arouses Petrarch's angry protest. "An unheard-of sacrilege," he exclaims, "to subordinate the mistress to a maid, free art to mechanical." Rejecting the approach to poetry as a craft, Petrarch interprets it as a free, creative art. Of no less interest is Petrarch's treatise "Remedies for Healing a Happy and Unhappy Fate", which depicts the struggle between reason and feeling in relation to the sphere of art and pleasure, and, in the end, a feeling close to earthly interests wins.

Another outstanding Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio played an equally important role in substantiating new aesthetic principles. The author of the Decameron devoted a quarter of a century to working on what he considered to be the main work of his life, the theoretical treatise Genealogy of the Pagan Gods.

Of particular interest are the XIV and XV books of this extensive work, written in "defence of poetry" against medieval attacks on it. These books, which gained immense popularity during the Renaissance, marked the beginning of a special genre of "poetry apology".

In essence, we observe here a polemic with medieval aesthetics. Boccaccio opposes accusing poetry and poets of immorality, excess, frivolity, deceit, etc. In contrast to medieval authors who reproached Homer and other ancient writers for depicting frivolous scenes, Boccaccio proves the poet's right to depict any plot.

Also unfair, according to Boccaccio, is the accusation of poets of lies. Poets do not lie, but only "weave fictions", they tell the truth under the cover of deceit or, more precisely, fiction. In this regard, Boccaccio passionately proves the right of poetry to fiction (inventi), the invention of the new. In the chapter "That poets are not false," Boccaccio says bluntly: poets "... are not bound by the obligation to keep the truth in the external form of fiction; on the contrary, if we deprive them of the right to freely apply any kind of fiction, all the benefit of their labor will turn into dust".

Boccaccio calls poetry "divine science". Moreover, sharpening the conflict between poetry and theology, he declares theology itself a kind of poetry, because, like poetry, it refers to fiction and allegories.

In his apology for poetry, Boccaccio argued that its main qualities are passions (furor) and ingenuity (inventio). This attitude to poetry had nothing to do with the craft approach to art, it justified the freedom of the artist, his right to create.

Thus, already in the XIV century, early Italian humanists formed a new attitude towards art as a free occupation, as an activity of imagination and fantasy. All these principles formed the basis of the aesthetic theories of the 15th century.

A significant contribution to the development of the aesthetic worldview of the Renaissance was made by Italian humanist teachers, who created a new system of upbringing and education, oriented towards the ancient world and ancient philosophy.

In Italy, starting from the first decade of the 15th century, one after another, a whole series of treatises on education appeared, written by humanist educators: "On noble morals and free sciences" by Paolo Vergerio, "On the education of children and their good morals" by Matteo Vegio, " On Free Education" by Gianozzo Manetti, "On Scientific and Literary Studies" by Leonardo Bruni, "On the Order of Teaching and Study" by Battisto Guarino, "Treatise on Free Education" by Aeneas Silvia Piccolomini, and others. Eleven Italian treatises on pedagogy have come down to us. In addition, numerous letters of humanists are devoted to the topic of education. All this constitutes a vast heritage of humanistic thought.

2. Aesthetics of the High Renaissance

2.1. Neoplatonism

In the aesthetics of the Renaissance, a prominent place is occupied by the Neoplatonic tradition, which in the Renaissance received a new meaning.

Neoplatonism is not a homogeneous phenomenon in the history of philosophy and aesthetics. AT different periods history, he acted in various forms and performed ideological and cultural-philosophical functions.

Ancient Platonism (Plotinus, Proclus) arose on the basis of the revival of ancient mythology and opposed the Christian religion. In the 6th century arose new type Neoplatonism, developed primarily in the Areopagitics. His goal was an attempt to synthesize the ideas of ancient Neoplatonism with Christianity. Neoplatonism developed in this form throughout the Middle Ages.

In the Renaissance, a completely new type of Neoplatonism arises, which opposed medieval scholasticism and "scholasticized" Aristotelianism.

The first stages in the development of Neoplatonic aesthetics were associated with the name of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464).

It should be noted that aesthetics was not just one of the areas of knowledge that Nicholas of Cusa addressed along with other disciplines. The peculiarity of the aesthetic teaching of Nicholas of Cusa lies in the fact that it was an organic part of his ontology, epistemology, and ethics. This synthesis of aesthetics with epistemology and ontology does not allow us to consider the aesthetic views of Nicholas of Cusa in isolation from his philosophy as a whole, and on the other hand, the aesthetics of Cusa reveals some important aspects of his teaching about the world and knowledge.

Nicholas of Cusa is the last thinker of the Middle Ages and the first philosopher of modern times. Therefore, in his aesthetics, the ideas of the Middle Ages and the new, Renaissance consciousness are peculiarly intertwined. From the Middle Ages, he borrows the "symbolism of numbers", the medieval idea of the unity of micro and macrocosmos, the medieval definition of beauty as the "proportion" and "clarity" of color. However, he significantly rethinks and reinterprets the legacy of medieval aesthetic thought. The idea of the numerical nature of beauty was not for Nicholas of Cusa a mere fantasy game - he sought to confirm this idea with the help of mathematics, logic and empirical knowledge. The idea of the unity of the micro- and macrocosm, in its interpretation, turned into the idea of a high, almost divine destiny of the human personality. Finally, completely new meaning receives in his interpretation the traditional medieval formula about beauty as "proportion" and "clarity".

Nicholas of Cusa develops his concept of the beautiful in his treatise On Beauty. Here he relies mainly on the Areopagitics and on Albert the Great's treatise On Goodness and Beauty, which is one of the commentaries on the Areopagitics. From the "Areopagitic" Nicholas of Cusa borrows the idea of the emanation (emergence) of beauty from the divine mind, of light as a prototype of beauty, etc. All these ideas of Neoplatonic aesthetics are expounded in detail by Nicholas of Cusa, providing them with comments.

The aesthetics of Nicholas of Cusa unfolds in full accordance with his ontology. The basis of being is the following dialectical trinity: complicatio - folding, explicatio - deployment and alternitas - otherness. This corresponds to the following elements - unity, difference and connection - which lie in the structure of everything in the world, including the basis of beauty.

In the treatise "On Beauty", Nicholas of Cusa considers beauty as a unity of three elements that correspond to the dialectical trinity of being. Beauty turns out to be, first of all, an infinite unity of form, which manifests itself in the form of proportion and harmony. Secondly, this unity unfolds and gives rise to the difference between goodness and beauty, and, finally, a connection arises between these two elements: realizing itself, beauty gives rise to something new - love as the final and highest point of beauty.

Nicholas of Cusa interprets this love in the spirit of Neoplatonism as an ascent from the beauty of sensual things to a higher, spiritual beauty. Love, says Nicholas of Cusa, is the ultimate goal of beauty, "our concern should be to ascend from the beauty of sensual things to the beauty of our spirit ...".

Thus, the three elements of beauty correspond to the three stages of the development of being: unity, difference and connection. Unity appears in the form of proportion, difference - in the transition of beauty into goodness, communication is carried out through love.

Such is the teaching of Nicholas of Cusa about beauty. It is quite obvious that this teaching is closely connected with the philosophy and aesthetics of Neoplatonism.

The aesthetics of Neoplatonism significantly influenced not only the theory, but also the practice of art. Studies of the philosophy and art of the Renaissance have shown a close connection between the aesthetics of Neoplatonism and the work of outstanding Italian artists(Raphael, Botticelli, Titian and others). Neoplatonism revealed to the art of the Renaissance the beauty of nature as a reflection of spiritual beauty, aroused interest in human psychology, discovered dramatic collisions of spirit and body, the struggle between feeling and reason. Without the disclosure of these contradictions and collisions, the art of the Renaissance could not have achieved that deepest sense of inner harmony, which is one of the most significant features of the art of this era.

The well-known Italian humanist philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) joined the Platonic Academy. He touches upon the problems of aesthetics in his famous "Speech on the Dignity of Man", written in 1486 as an introduction to the dispute he proposed with the participation of all European philosophers, and in "Comments on the canzone on love by Girolamo Benivieni", read at one of the meetings of the Platonic Academy .

In the Oration on the Dignity of Man, Pico develops the humanist concept of the human person. Man has free will, he is in the center of the universe, and it depends on him whether he rises to the height of a deity or descends to the level of an animal. In the work of Pico della Mirandola, God addresses Adam with the following parting words: “We do not give you, O Adam, neither your place, nor a certain image, nor a special duty, so that you have a place, a person, and a duty of your own free will, according to Your own will and your own decision. The image of other creatures is determined within the limits of the laws we have established. But you, not constrained by any limits, will determine your image according to your own decision, in the power of which I leave you. I place you in the center of the world, so that from there you will be more comfortable to survey everything that is in the world. I did not make you either heavenly or earthly, neither mortal nor immortal, so that you yourself ... formed yourself in the image that you prefer. "

Thus, Pico della Mirandola forms in this work a completely new concept of the human personality. He says that a person himself is a creator, a master of his own image. Humanistic thought puts man at the center of the universe, speaks of the unlimited possibilities for the development of the human personality.

The idea of the dignity of the human person, deeply developed by Pico della Mirandola, firmly entered the philosophical and aesthetic consciousness of the Renaissance. The outstanding artists of the Renaissance drew their optimism and enthusiasm from her; _

A more detailed system of aesthetic views of Pico della Mirandola is contained in Girolamo Benivieni's Commentary on the Love Canzone.

This treatise is closely related to the Neoplatonic tradition. Like most of the writings of the Italian Neoplatonists, it is devoted to Plato's teaching on the nature of love, and love is interpreted in a broad philosophical sense. Pico defines it as "the desire for beauty", thus linking Platonic ethics and cosmology with aesthetics, with the doctrine of beauty and the harmonious structure of the world.

The doctrine of harmony, therefore, occupies a central place in this philosophical treatise. Speaking about the concept of beauty, Pico della Mirandola states the following: "The concept of harmony is associated with the broad and general meaning of the term" beauty ". So, they say that God created the whole world in musical and harmonic composition, but, just like the term" harmony in a broad sense can be used to denote the composition of any creation, but in the proper sense it means only the merging of several voices into a melody, so one can call beauty the proper composition of any thing, although its own meaning refers only to things visible, like harmony to things audible " .

Pico della Mirandola was characterized by a pantheistic understanding of harmony, which he interpreted as the unity of the micro- and macrocosm. "... A person in his various properties has a connection and similarity with all parts of the world and for this reason is usually called a microcosm - a small world."

But, speaking in the spirit of the Neoplatonists about the meaning and role of harmony, about its connection with beauty, with the structure of nature and the cosmos, Mirandola to a certain extent departs from Ficino and other Neoplatonists in understanding the essence of harmony. For Ficino, the source of beauty is in God or in the soul of the world, which serve as a prototype for all nature and all things that exist in the world. Mirandola rejects this view. Moreover, he even enters into a direct polemic with Ficino, refuting his opinion about the divine origin of the world soul. In his opinion, the role of the creator god is limited only to the creation of the mind - this "incorporeal and rational" nature. To everything else - to the soul, love, beauty - God no longer has anything to do: "... according to the Platonists,_ says the philosopher, - God did not directly produce any other creation, except for the first mind.

Thus, the concept of God in Pico della Mirandola is closer to the Aristotelian concept of the prime mover than to Platonic idealism.

Therefore, being close to the Platonic Academy, Pico della Mirandola was not a Neoplatonist, his philosophical concept was wider and more diverse than Ficino's Neoplatonism.

2.2. Alberti and the theory of art of the 15th century

In numerous works of Alberti, among which were works on the theory of art, the pedagogical essay "On the Family", the moral and philosophical treatise "On the Peace of the Soul", a significant place is occupied by humanistic views. Like most humanists, Alberti shared an optimistic idea about the limitless possibilities of human knowledge, about the divine destiny of man, about his omnipotence and exceptional position in the world. Alberti's humanistic ideals were reflected in his treatise "On the Family", in which he wrote that nature "created man in part heavenly and divine, in part the most beautiful among the whole mortal world ... she gave him mind, understanding, memory and reason - properties divine and at the same time necessary in order to distinguish and understand what should be avoided and what should be striven for in order to better preserve ourselves. This idea, in many respects anticipating the idea of Pico della Mirandola's treatise On the Dignity of Man, pervades all of Alberti's work as an artist, scientist and thinker.

Engaged mainly in artistic practice, especially architecture, Alberti, however, paid much attention to the theory of art. In his treatises - "On Painting", "On Architecture", "On Sculpture" - along with specific issues of the theory of painting, sculpture and architecture, general issues of aesthetics were widely reflected.

It should immediately be noted that Alberti's aesthetics does not represent some kind of complete and logically integral system. Separate aesthetic statements are scattered throughout Alberti's writings, and quite a lot of work is required to somehow collect and systematize them. In addition, Alberti's aesthetics is not only philosophical discussions about the essence of beauty and art. In Alberti we find a wide and consistent development of the so-called "practical aesthetics", that is, the aesthetics arising from the application of general aesthetic principles to specific questions of art. All this allows us to consider Alberti as one of the largest representatives of the aesthetic thought of the early Renaissance.

The theoretical source of Alberti's aesthetics was mainly the aesthetic thought of antiquity. The ideas on which Alberti draws in his theory of art and aesthetics are many and varied. This is the aesthetics of the Stoics with its demands to imitate nature, with the ideals of expediency, the unity of beauty and utility. From Cicero, in particular, Alberti borrows the distinction between beauty and adornment, developing this idea into a special theory of jewelry. From Vitruvius to Alberti, a comparison of a work of art with the human body and proportions human body. But the main theoretical source of Alberti's aesthetic theory is, of course, the aesthetics of Aristotle with its principle of harmony and measure as the basis of beauty. From Aristotle, Alberti takes the idea of a work of art as a living organism, from him he borrows the idea of the unity of matter and form, purpose and means, the harmony of part and whole. Alberti repeats and develops Aristotle's idea of artistic perfection ("when nothing can be added, subtracted, or changed without making it worse"). This whole complex set of ideas, deeply comprehended and tested in the practice of contemporary art, underlies Alberti's aesthetic theory .

At the center of Alberti's aesthetics is the doctrine of beauty. Alberti speaks about the nature of the beautiful in two books of his treatise "On Architecture" - the sixth and ninth. These arguments, despite their laconic nature, contain a completely new interpretation of the nature of the beautiful.

It should be noted that in the aesthetics of the Middle Ages, the dominant definition of beauty was the formula of beauty as "consonantia etclaritas", that is, the proportion and clarity of light. This formula, originating in early patristics, was dominant until the 14th century, especially in scholastic aesthetics. In accordance with this definition, beauty was understood as a formal unity of "proportion" and "brilliance", mathematically interpreted harmony and clarity of color.

Alberti, although he attached great importance to the mathematical basis of art, does not reduce, as medieval aesthetics does, beauty to mathematical proportion. According to Alberti, the essence of beauty lies in harmony. To designate the concept of harmony, Alberti resorts to the old term "concinnitas", borrowed by him from Cicero.

According to Alberti, there are three elements that make up the beauty of architecture. These are number (numerus), limitation (finitio), and placement (collocatio). But beauty is more than these three formal elements. “There is something more,” says Alberti, “composed of the combination and connection of all these three things, something that miraculously illuminates the whole face of beauty. We will call this harmony (concinnitas), which, without a doubt, is the source of all charm and beauty. the purpose and goal of harmony is to arrange parts, generally speaking, different in nature, by some perfect ratio so that they correspond to one another, creating beauty.And not so much in the whole body as a whole or in its parts, harmony lives, but in itself and in its nature, so that I would call it a partaker of the soul and mind. And there is for her a vast field where she can manifest and bloom: she embraces the whole of human life, permeates the whole nature of things. For everything that nature produces is all in proportion the law of harmony. And nature has no greater concern than that what it produces be completely perfect. This cannot be achieved without harmony, for without it the higher harmony of the parts falls apart.

In this reasoning Alberti should highlight the following points.

First of all, it is obvious that Alberti abandons the medieval understanding of beauty as "the proportion and clarity of color", returning, in fact, to the ancient idea of beauty as a certain harmony. He replaces the two-term formula of beauty "consonantia etclaritas" with a single-term one: beauty is the harmony of parts.

In itself, this harmony is not only the law of art, but also the law of life, it "penetrates the whole nature of things" and "encompasses the whole life of man." Harmony in art is a reflection of the universal harmony of life.

Harmony is the source and condition of perfection; without harmony no perfection is possible either in life or in art.

Harmony consists in the correspondence of parts, and in such a way that nothing can be added or subtracted. Here Alberti follows the ancient definitions of beauty as harmony and proportion. “Beauty,” he says, “is a strict proportionate harmony of all parts, united by what they belong to, such that nothing can be added, subtracted, or changed without making it worse.”

Harmony in art consists of various elements. In music, the elements of harmony are rhythm, melody and composition, in sculpture - measure (dimensio) and border (definitio). Alberti associated his concept of "beauty" with the concept of "decoration" (ornamentum). According to him, the distinction between beauty and decoration should be understood by feeling rather than expressed in words. But still, he draws the following distinction between these concepts: "... decoration is, as it were, a kind of secondary light of beauty, or, so to speak, its addition. Indeed, from what has been said, I believe it is clear that beauty, as something inherent and innate in the body , is poured over the whole body to the extent that it is beautiful; and the decoration is more of the nature of the attached than the innate "(On architecture).

The internal logic of Alberti's thought shows that "decoration" is not something external to the beautiful, but constitutes its organic part. After all, any building, according to Alberti, without decorations will be "erroneous." Strictly speaking, in Alberti "beauty" and "decoration" are two independent types of beauty. Only "beauty" is the internal law of beauty, while "decoration" is added from the outside and in this sense it can be a relative or accidental form of beauty. With the concept of "decoration" Alberti introduced into the understanding of the beautiful moment of relativity, subjective freedom.

Along with the concept of "beauty" and "decoration" Alberti also uses a number of aesthetic concepts, borrowed, as a rule, from ancient aesthetics. He associates the concept of beauty with dignity (dignitas) and grace (venustas), following directly on Cicero, for whom dignity and grace are two kinds of (male and female) beauty. Alberti connects the beauty of a building with "necessity and convenience", developing the Stoic idea of the connection between beauty and usefulness. Alberti also uses the terms "charm" and "attractiveness". All this testifies to the diversity, breadth and flexibility of his aesthetic thinking. The desire to differentiate aesthetic concepts, to the creative application of the principles and concepts of ancient aesthetics to modern artistic practice is a hallmark of Alberti's aesthetic.

It is characteristic how Alberti interprets the concept of "ugly". Beauty is an absolute work of art for him. The ugly acts only as a certain kind of error. Hence the demand that art should not correct, but hide ugly and ugly objects. "Ugly-looking parts of the body and others like them, not particularly graceful, let them hide behind clothes, some kind of branch or hand. The ancients wrote a portrait of Antigonus only on one side of his face, on which an eye was not gouged out. They also say that Pericles the head was long and ugly, and therefore, unlike others, he was portrayed by painters and sculptors in a helmet.

These are the basic philosophical principles of Alberti's aesthetics, which served as the basis for his theory of painting and architecture, which we will talk about a little later.

It should be noted that Alberti's aesthetics was the first significant attempt to create a system that was fundamentally opposed to the aesthetic system of the Middle Ages. Focused on the ancient tradition, coming mainly from Aristotle and Cicero, it was basically realistic in nature, recognized experience and nature as the basis of artistic creativity, and gave a new interpretation to traditional aesthetic categories.

These new aesthetic principles were also reflected in Alberti's treatise On Painting (1435).

It is characteristic that the original treatise "On Painting" was written in Latin, and then, obviously, in order to make this work more accessible not only to scientists, but also to artists who did not know Latin, Alberti rewrites it into Italian.

At the heart of Alberti's work lies the pathos of innovation, it is driven by the interest of the discoverer. Alberti refuses to follow Pliny's descriptive method. “However, we do not need to know here who the first inventors of art or the first painters were, for we are not engaged in retelling all sorts of stories, as Pliny did, but we are rebuilding the art of painting, about which in our age, as far as I know, you will not find anything written." Apparently, Alberti was not familiar with the Treatise on Painting by Cennino Cennini (1390).

As you know, the treatise of Cennini contains many more provisions coming from the medieval tradition. In particular, Cennino requires the painter to "follow patterns." On the contrary, Alberti speaks of the "beauty of fiction". The rejection of traditional schemes, of following patterns is one of the most important features of the art and aesthetics of the Renaissance. “Just as in food and music we like novelty and abundance the more, the more they differ from the old and familiar, for the soul rejoices at every abundance and variety, so we like abundance and variety in a picture.”

Alberti talks about the importance of geometry and mathematics for painting, but he is far from any mathematical speculation in the spirit of the Middle Ages. He immediately stipulates that he writes about mathematics "not as a mathematician, but as a painter." Painting deals only with what is available to the eye, with what has a certain visual image. This reliance on a concrete basis of visual perception is characteristic of Renaissance aesthetics.

Alberti was one of the first to demand the all-round development of the artist's personality. This ideal of a universally educated artist is present in almost all Renaissance art theorists. Ghiberti in his "Comments", following Vitruvius, believes that the artist must be comprehensively educated, must study grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astrology, optics, history, anatomy, etc. We meet a similar thought in Leonardo (for whom painting is not only an art, but also a "science"), in Durer, who requires artists to know mathematics and geometry.

The ideal of the universally educated artist had a great influence on the practice and theory of Renaissance art. Comprehensively educated, versed in the sciences and crafts, knowing many languages, the artist acted as a real prototype of that ideal of "homouniversalis", which the thinkers of that time dreamed of. Perhaps for the first time in history European culture social thought, in search of an ideal, turned to the artist, and not to the philosopher, scientist or politician. And this was not an accident, but was determined, first of all, by the real position of the artist in the cultural system of this era. The artist acted as a mediating link between physical and mental labor. Therefore, in his work, Renaissance thinkers saw a real way to overcome the dualism of theory and practice, knowledge and skill, which was so characteristic of the entire spiritual culture of the Middle Ages. Each person, if not by the nature of his occupation, then by the nature of his interests, had to imitate the artist.

It is no coincidence that in the Renaissance, especially in the 16th century, the genre of "life stories" of artists arose, which at that time gained immense popularity. A typical example of this genre is Vasari's Lives of the Artists, one of the first attempts to explore the biographies, individual manner and style of Italian Renaissance artists. Along with this, numerous autobiographies of artists appear, in particular Lorenzo Ghiberti, Benvenuto Cellini, Baccio Bandinelli and others. All this testified to the growth of the artist's self-awareness, his separation from the craft environment. In this huge and extremely interesting biographical literature there is an idea about the "genius" of the artist, about his natural talent (ingenio) and the features of his individual manner of creativity. The aesthetics of romanticism of the 19th century, having created a romantic cult of genius, in fact, revived and developed the concept of "genius", which first appeared in the aesthetics of the Renaissance.

In creating a new theory of fine art, theorists and artists of the Renaissance relied mainly on ancient tradition. Treatises on architecture by Lorenzo Ghiberti, Andrea Palladio, Antonio Filarete, Francesco di George Martini, Barbaro most often relied on Vitruvius, in particular on his idea of the unity of "usefulness, beauty and strength". However, commenting on Vitruvius and other ancient authors, in particular Aristotle, Pliny and Cicero, Renaissance theorists tried to apply the ancient theory to modern artistic practice, to expand and diversify the system of aesthetic concepts borrowed from antiquity. Benedetto Varchi introduces the concept of grace into his reasoning about the goals of painting, Vasari evaluates the merits of artists using the concepts of grace and manners.

The concept of proportion also receives a broader interpretation. In the 15th century, all artists, without exception, recognize adherence to proportions as an unshakable law of artistic creativity. Without knowledge of proportions, the artist is unable to create anything perfect. This universal recognition of proportions was most clearly reflected in the work of the mathematician Luca Pacioli "On the Divine Proportion".

It is no coincidence that Pacioli introduces the term "divine" into the title of his treatise. He is absolutely convinced of the divine origin of proportions and therefore begins his treatise, in fact, with the traditional theological justification of proportions. There was nothing new in this approach, it largely came from the medieval tradition. However, after this, Pacioli leaves theology and moves on to practice, from recognizing the "divineness" of proportions, he comes to asserting their utility and practical necessity. “Both the tailor and the shoemaker use geometry without knowing what it is. Likewise, masons, carpenters, blacksmiths and other artisans use measure and proportion without knowing it, because, as they sometimes say, everything consists of quantity, weight and measures. But what about modern buildings, ordered in their own way and corresponding to various models? They seem attractive when they are small (that is, in the project), but then, in the structure, they cannot withstand the weight, and will they last for millennia? - rather They call themselves architects, but I have never seen in their hands an outstanding book by our most famous architect and great mathematician Vitruvius, who wrote the treatise On Architecture.

Luca Pacioli's work combines Neo-Pythagorean and Neo-Platonic tendencies. In particular, Luca Pacioli uses the famous fragment from Plato's "Timaeus" that the world elements are based on certain stereometric formations. Citing this place, he writes: "... our holy proportion, being a formal phenomenon, gives - according to Plato in his Timaeus - the sky the figure of a body. And likewise, each of the other elements is given its own form, in no way coinciding with forms of other bodies; thus, fire has a pyramidal figure called a tetrahedron, earth has a cubic figure called a hexahedron, air has a figure called an octahedron, and water has an icosahedron. All these five correct bodies are, according to Pacioli, "the decoration of the universe", and, in fact, underlie all things.

The rules for constructing various polyhedra are illustrated in Luca Pacioli's treatise with drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, which gave Pacioli's ideas even greater concreteness and artistic expressiveness. It should be noted the enormous popularity of Luca Pacioli's treatise, its great influence on the practice and theory of Renaissance art.

In particular, we feel this influence in the aesthetics of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who was connected with Pacioli by friendship and was well acquainted with his writings.

The aesthetic views of Leonardo were not systematized by him. They are made up of numerous disparate and fragmentary notes contained in letters, notebooks, and sketches. And, nevertheless, despite the fragmentation and fragmentation, all these statements give a fairly complete picture of the originality of Leonardo's views on issues of art and aesthetics.

Aesthetics of Leonardo is closely connected with his ideas about the world and nature. Leonardo looks at nature through the eyes of a natural scientist, for whom the iron law of necessity and the universal connection of things is revealed behind the play of chance. "Necessity is nature's mentor and nurse. Necessity is nature's theme and inventor, and a bridle, and an eternal law." Man, according to Leonardo, is also included in the universal connection of phenomena in the world. "We create our life, we are the death of others. In a dead thing, an unconscious life remains, which, once again falling into the stomach of the living, regains sentient and rational life."

Human knowledge must follow the dictates of nature. It is experiential in nature. Only experience is the basis of truth. "Experience does not err, only our judgments err...". Therefore, the basis of our knowledge is the sensations and evidence of the senses. Among the human senses, vision is the most important.

The world that Leonardo speaks of is the visible, visible world, the world of the eye. Connected with this is the constant glorification of sight as the highest of the human senses. The eye is "the window of the human body, through which the soul contemplates the beauty of the world and enjoys it...". Vision, according to Leonardo, is not passive contemplation. It is the source of all sciences and arts. "Do you not see that the eye embraces the beauty of the whole world? He is the head of astrology; he creates cosmography; he advises all human arts and corrects them; he moves man to various parts of the world; he is the sovereign of the mathematical sciences, his sciences are the most reliable; he measured the height and magnitude of the stars, he found the elements and their places, he gave birth to architecture and perspective, he gave rise to divine painting."

Thus, Leonardo puts visual cognition in the first place, recognizing the priority of vision over hearing. In this regard, he also builds a classification of art, in which painting occupies the first place, and after it - music and poetry. "Music," says Leonardo, "cannot be called otherwise than the sister of painting, since it is the object of hearing, the second sense after the eye...". As for poetry, painting is more valuable than it, since it "serves a better and nobler feeling than poetry."

Recognizing the high importance of painting, Leonardo calls it a science. "Painting is a science and the legitimate daughter of nature." At the same time, painting differs from science, because it appeals not only to reason, but also to fantasy. It is thanks to fantasy that painting can not only imitate nature, but also compete and argue with it. It creates even that which does not exist.

Speaking about the nature and purpose of painting, Leonardo likens the painter to a mirror. Such a comparison does not mean that the painter should be the same dispassionate copyist of the surrounding world as a mirror: "The painter, senselessly copying; guided by practice and the judgment of the eye, is like a mirror that imitates in itself all the objects opposed to it, without having knowledge of them." The artist is like a mirror in its ability to universally reflect the world. To be a mirror in this sense means to be able to reflect the appearance and qualities of all objects of nature. "The mind of a painter should be like a mirror, which always turns into the color of the object that it has as an object, and is filled with as many images as there are objects opposed to it ... You cannot be a good painter if you are not a universal master in imitating with his art all the qualities of the forms produced by nature ... ".

According to Leonardo, the mirror should be a teacher for the artist, it should serve him as a criterion for the artistry of his works. If you want to see if your picture as a whole corresponds to an object drawn from nature, then take a mirror, reflect a living object in it and compare the reflected object with your picture and, properly, consider whether both similarities agree with each other object. The mirror and the picture show images of objects surrounded by shadow and light. If you know how to combine them well with each other, your picture will also seem like a natural thing, visible in a large mirror. "

Each type of art is characterized by the originality of harmony. Leonardo talks about harmony in painting, music, poetry. In music, for example, harmony is built "by the combination of its proportional parts, created at the same time and forced to be born and die in one or more harmonic rhythms; these rhythms embrace the proportionality of the individual members from which this harmony is composed, only general outline embraces individual members, from which is generated human beauty"Harmony in painting consists of a proportional combination of figures, colors, a variety of movements and positions. Leonardo paid much attention to the expressiveness of various postures, movements, facial expressions, illustrating his judgments with various drawings.

In understanding the beautiful, Leonardo proceeded from the fact that the beautiful is something more significant and meaningful than external beauty. Beauty in art presupposes the presence of not only beauty, but also the whole range of aesthetic values: beautiful and ugly, sublime and base. According to Leonardo, the expressiveness and significance of these qualities increase from mutual contrast. Beauty and ugliness seem more powerful side by side.

A true artist is able to create not only beautiful, but also ugly or funny images. “If the painter wants to see beautiful things that inspire him with love, then it is in his power to give birth to them, and if he wants to see ugly things that frighten, or clownish and funny, or truly pitiful, then he is the ruler and god over them.” The principle of contrast was widely developed by Leonardo in relation to painting. So, when depicting historical plots, Leonardo advised artists to "mix direct opposites in the neighborhood in order to strengthen one another in comparison, and the more they are closer, that is, ugly next to the beautiful, big to small, old to young, strong to weak, and so should be diversified as much as possible and as close as possible [one from the other]." In the aesthetic statements of Leonardo da Vinci, studies of proportions occupy a large place. In his opinion, proportions are of relative importance, they change depending on the figure or the conditions of perception: “The measures of a person change in each member of the body, since it bends more or less, and is visible from different points of view; they decrease or increase in it so much more or less on one side by how much they increase or decrease on the opposite side. These proportions change with age, so they are different in children than in adults. "In a man in his first infancy, the width of the shoulders is equal to the length of the face and the space from the shoulder to the elbow, if the arm is bent. But when a man has reached his maximum height, then each of the above-mentioned intervals doubles its length, with the exception of the length of the face." In addition, the proportions change according to the movement of the body parts. The length of the outstretched arm is not equal to the length of the bent arm. "The arm increases and decreases from its full extension to its flexion to an eighth of its length." The proportions also change depending on the position of the body, postures, etc.

Leonardo did not systematize his many notes on art and aesthetics, but his judgments in this area play a big role, including for understanding his own work.

3. Aesthetics of the late Renaissance

3.1. Natural philosophy

A new period in the development of Renaissance aesthetics is the 16th century. During this period, art reaches its greatest maturity and completeness. High Renaissance, which then gives way to a new artistic style - mannerism.

In the field of philosophy, the 16th century is the time of the creation of major philosophical and natural philosophical systems, represented by the names of Giordano Bruno, Campanella, Patrici, Montaigne. As Max Dvorak notes, until the 16th century, “there were no philosophers of European significance in the Renaissance. In what grandeur ... the Cinquecento era appears before us! remember Giordano Bruno and Jacob Boehme". It was during this period that the final formation of the main genres of fine art, such as landscape, genre painting, still life, historical painting, and portrait, took place.

The greatest philosophers of this time do not bypass the problems of aesthetics. Indicative in this respect is the natural philosophy of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600).

Researchers of Bruno's philosophy note that there is a poetic moment in his philosophical writings. Indeed, his philosophical dialogues bear little resemblance to academic treatises. In them we find too much pathos, mood, figurative comparisons, allegories. By this alone, one can judge that aesthetics is organically woven into the system of Bruno's philosophical thinking. But the aesthetic moment is inherent not only in the style, but also in the content of Bruno's philosophy.

Bruno's aesthetic views are developed on the basis of pantheism, that is, on the basis of a philosophical doctrine based on the absolute identity of nature and God and, in fact, dissolving God in nature. God, according to Bruno, is not outside and not above nature, but inside it itself, in the material things themselves. "God is the infinite in the infinite; he is everywhere and everywhere, not outside and above, but as the most present ...". That is why beauty cannot be an attribute of God, since God is an absolute unity. Beauty is multifaceted.

Pantheistically interpreting nature, Bruno finds in it a living and spiritual beginning, a desire for development, for perfection. In this sense, it is not lower, and even in certain respects higher than art. "Art during creation reasons, thinks. Nature acts without reasoning, immediately. Art acts on someone else's matter, nature - on its own. Art is outside matter, nature is inside matter, moreover: it itself is matter."

Nature, according to Bruno, has an unconscious artistic instinct. In this sense of the word, she "is herself an inner master, a living art, amazing ability... calling to reality its own, and not someone else's matter. She does not reason, hesitating and pondering, but easily creates everything from herself, just as fire burns and burns, as light diffuses everywhere without difficulty. It does not deviate when moving, but - constant, unified, calm - measures everything, applies and distributes. For the painter and the musician who think are unskillful, which means that they have only just begun to learn. Farther and eternally, nature does its thing ... ".

This glorification of the creative potentials of nature is one of the best pages of the philosophical aesthetics of the Renaissance - here the materialistic understanding of beauty and the philosophy of creativity was born.

An important aesthetic point is also contained in the concept of "heroic enthusiasm" as a way of philosophical knowledge, which Bruno substantiated. The Platonic origins of this concept are obvious, they come from the idea of "cognizing madness" formulated by Plato in his Phaedrus. According to Bruno, philosophical knowledge requires a special spiritual uplift, arousal of feelings and thoughts. But this is not a mystical ecstasy, and not a blind intoxication that deprives a person of reason. "The enthusiasm that we talk about in these sayings and which we see in action is not oblivion, but remembrance; not inattention to ourselves, but love and dreams of the beautiful and good, with the help of which we transform ourselves and get the opportunity to become more perfect and become like them. This is not soaring under the rule of the laws of unworthy fate in the snares of bestial passions, but a reasonable impulse that follows the mental perception of good and beautiful ... ".

Enthusiasm in Bruno's interpretation is love for the beautiful and the good. Like neoplatonic love, it reveals spiritual and bodily beauty. But in contrast to the Neoplatonists, who taught that the beauty of the body is just one of the lower rungs on the ladder of beauty leading to the beauty of the soul, Bruno emphasizes bodily beauty: “A noble passion loves the body or bodily beauty, since the latter is the manifestation of the beauty of the spirit. And even what makes me love the body is a certain spirituality that is visible in it and we call beauty; and it does not consist in larger and smaller sizes, not in certain colors and shapes, but in a certain harmony and coherence of members and colors. ". Thus, in Bruno, spiritual and bodily beauty are inseparable: spiritual beauty is known only through the beauty of the body, and the beauty of the body always evokes a certain spirituality in the one who knows it. This dialectic of ideal and material beauty is one of the most remarkable features of the teachings of J. Bruno.

Bruno's doctrine of the coincidence of opposites, which comes from the philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa, also has a dialectical character. “Whoever wants to know the greatest secrets of nature,” writes Bruno, “let him consider and observe the minima and maxima of contradictions and opposites. Deep magic lies in the ability to deduce the opposite, having previously found the point of unification.”

A significant place in the problems of aesthetics is occupied in the writings of the famous Italian philosopher, one of the founders of utopian socialism, Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639).

Campanella entered the history of science, primarily as the author of the famous utopia "City of the Sun". At the same time, he made a significant contribution to Italian natural philosophical thought. He owns important philosophical works: "Philosophy Proven by Sensations", "Real Philosophy", "Rational Philosophy", "Metaphysics". A significant place in these works is occupied by questions of aesthetics. So, in "Metaphysics" there is a special chapter - "On the Beautiful". In addition, Campanella owns a small essay "Poetics", dedicated to the analysis of poetic creativity.

Aesthetic views Campanellas are distinguished by their originality. First of all, Campanella sharply opposes the scholastic tradition, both in the field of philosophy and aesthetics. He criticizes all authorities in the field of philosophy, rejecting equally both the "myths of Plato" and the "fictions" of Aristotle. In the field of aesthetics, this criticism characteristic of Campanella is manifested, first of all, in the refutation of the traditional doctrine of the harmony of the spheres, in the assertion that this harmony does not agree with the data of sensory knowledge. "In vain Plato and Pythagoras represent the harmony of the world like our music - they are mad in this, like someone who would attribute our sensations of taste and smell to the universe. If there is harmony in the sky and among the angels, then it has other bases and consonances than the fifth , quart or octave".

At the heart of the aesthetic teachings of Campanella is hylozoism - the doctrine of the universal animation of nature. Feelings are embedded in matter itself, otherwise, according to Campanella, the world would immediately "turn into chaos." That is why the main property of all being is the desire for self-preservation. In humans, this desire is associated with pleasure. "Pleasure is a feeling of self-preservation, while suffering is a feeling of evil and destruction." The sense of beauty is also associated with a sense of self-preservation, a sense of fullness of life and health. "When we see people healthy, full of life, free, well-dressed, we rejoice, because we experience a feeling of happiness and the preservation of our nature."

The original concept of beauty is developed by Campanella in the essay "On the Beautiful". Here he does not follow any of the leading aesthetic trends of the Renaissance - Aristotelianism or Neoplatonism.

Refusing to look at beauty as harmony or proportion, Campanella revives Socrates' idea that beauty is a certain kind of expediency. The beautiful, according to Campanella, arises as the correspondence of an object to its purpose, its function. “Everything that is good for using a thing is called beautiful if it shows signs of such use. A sword is called beautiful that bends and does not remain bent, and one that cuts and stabs and has a length sufficient to inflict wounds. But if it is so long and heavy that it cannot be moved, it is called ugly. A sickle is said to be beautiful that is fit for cutting, therefore it is more beautiful when it is of iron and not of gold. In the same way, a mirror is beautiful when it reflects the true appearance, not when it's golden"

Thus, the beauty of Campanella is functional. It lies not in a beautiful appearance, but in internal expediency. That is why beauty is relative. What is beautiful in one respect is ugly in another. “So the doctor calls that rhubarb beautiful that is suitable for purification, and ugly that which is not suitable. eye, for it speaks of damage to the eye and of illness"

All these arguments largely repeat the provisions of ancient dialectics. Using the tradition coming from Socrates, Campanella develops the dialectical concept of beauty. This concept does not reject the ugly in art, but includes it as a correlative moment of beauty.

Beautiful and ugly are relative terms. Campanella expresses a typical Renaissance view, believing that the ugly is not contained in the essence of being itself, in nature itself. “Just as there is no essential evil, but every thing is by its nature good, although for others it is evil, for example, as heat is for cold, so there is no essential ugliness in the world, but only in relation to those to whom it indicates evil. Therefore, the enemy appears ugly to his enemy, and beautiful to his friend.In nature, however, there is evil as a defect and a certain violation of purity, which attracts things that come from the idea to non-existence; and, as said, ugliness in essences is a sign of this lack. and breaches of cleanliness.

Thus, the ugly appears in Campanella as just a certain defect, a certain violation of the usual order of things. The purpose of art is, therefore, to correct the deficiency of nature. This is the art of imitation. “Art, after all,” says Campanella, “is an imitation of nature. The hell described in Dante’s poem is called more beautiful than the paradise described there, because, imitating, he showed more art in one case than in another, although in reality heaven is beautiful, but hell is terrible.

In general, Campanella's aesthetics contains principles that sometimes go beyond the boundaries of Renaissance aesthetics; the connection of beauty with utility, with the social feelings of a person, the assertion of the relativity of beauty - all these provisions testify to the maturation of new aesthetic principles in the aesthetics of the Renaissance.

3.2. Crisis of humanism

The crisis of humanistic ideals in Italy was most clearly reflected in the work of Torquato Tasso (1544-1595). This crisis was also reflected in the work of Shakespeare and Cervantes. To Hamlet, the world already appears to be "a garden overgrown with weeds." He says: "The whole world is a prison with many locks, dungeons and dungeons, and Denmark is one of the worst." In Macbeth, life is also interpreted pessimistically:

So burn it out, fagot!

What is life? A fleeting shadow, buffoon,

Furiously noisy on the stage

And an hour later forgotten by everyone; story

In the mouth of a fool, rich in words

And the ringing of phrases, but poor in meaning.

Shakespeare is already clearly aware of the hostile nature of the emerging capitalist relations to art and beauty. He understands that in the conditions of chaos of egoistic wills, there is almost no room left for the unrestricted development of the human personality. The end of the Renaissance utopia about the unlimited perfection of man in a comic form was proclaimed by Cervantes. The last books of Rabelais' novel "Gargantua and Pantagruel" are also imbued with pessimism. Thus, what the theorists of the art of the Renaissance did not notice, practices reflected with great force in their work. However, Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Cervantes still remained faithful exponents of the great principles of humanism, although they saw how they collapse in the world of bourgeois prose.

The ideals of humanism have undergone a significant metamorphosis in the art of the Baroque. In the works of many artists of this style, the character of a person no longer emphasizes the harmonic principle and civic pathos, and his titanism is now opposed by those features that characterize a person as a weak being, under the rule of incomprehensible supernatural forces.

Baroque art reflects the intensification of Catholic reaction. This is reflected in the themes of the works, which now often depict martyrs for the Christian faith, various kinds of ecstatic states, scenes of suicide, people who reject worldly temptations and accept martyrdom. Sometimes hedonistic motives appear in Baroque art, but they are combined with motives of repentance, and, as a rule, the ascetic doctrine prevails here.

The stylistic means also correspond to the new ideological complex. AT fine arts straight lines, joyful colors, clear plastic forms, harmony and proportionality (which is typical of the Renaissance) are replaced in the Baroque by intricate, winding lines, massive dynamics of forms, dark and gloomy tones, vague and exciting chiaroscuro, sharp contrasts, dissonances. The same picture is observed in verbal art. Poetry becomes pretentious and mannered: they write poems in the form of a glass, a cross, a rhombus; invent cutesy, pompous metaphors.

Baroque art is a controversial phenomenon. Within its framework, significant works of art. However, it did not put forward prominent theorists, and the influence of art itself was not as strong as that of the Renaissance art or the art of classicism. But it would be a mistake to underestimate his influence on the formation of realistic art in subsequent periods in the development of world art. Some features of the Baroque are being revived in contemporary modernist art.

Conclusion

Durer expresses a similar thought: "It is impossible for an artist to draw a beautiful figure from one person. For there is no such beautiful person on earth who could not be even more beautiful."

In this understanding of beauty by humanists, a feature of the realistic concept of the Renaissance is revealed. No matter how high their opinion of man and nature, nevertheless, as is clear from Alberti's statement, they are not inclined to declare the first nature that comes across to be the canon of perfection. Interest in the unique originality of the individual, which manifested itself in the heyday of portraiture, is combined among Renaissance artists with the desire to discard "deviations in one direction or another" and take the "average value" as the norm, which means nothing more than an orientation towards the general, typical. The aesthetics of the Renaissance is, first of all, the aesthetics of the ideal. However, for humanists, the ideal is something that is not opposed to reality itself. They do not doubt the reality of the heroic principle, the reality of the beautiful. Therefore, their desire for idealization in no way contradicts the principles of artistic truth. After all, the very ideas of humanists about the limitless possibilities of the harmonious development of man could not at that time be considered only a utopia. Therefore, we believe in the heroes of Rabelais, no matter how he idealizes their exploits; Michelangelo's "David" also seems convincing to us. Fantasy itself appears here not as something opposed to truth.

The fantasy of the Renaissance has deep foundations in the very worldview of the humanists. Its source is rooted in the idealization of new trends in historical development, in a sharply critical attitude towards the Middle Ages, which was often portrayed in a satirical way. As a result, the departure from plausibility is not in conflict with the correct understanding of the main features of the era by the artists and their ability to fully depict these features. Considering the problem of artistic truth, the theorists of the Renaissance spontaneously ran into the dialectic of the general and the individual in relation to the artistic image. As noted above, humanists are looking for a balance between the ideal and reality, truth and fantasy. Their search for the right relationship between the individual and the general is directed along the same line. This problem is most sharply posed by Albert in his treatise On the Statue. “With sculptors, if I interpret it correctly,” he wrote, “the ways of grasping similarity are directed along two channels, namely: on the one hand, the image they create should, in the final analysis, be as similar as possible to a living being, in this case on a person, and it does not matter at all whether they reproduce the image of Socrates, Plato, or some other famous person - they consider it quite sufficient if they achieve that their work is similar to a person in general, even the most unknown one; on the other hand, one must try to reproduce and depict not only a person in general, but the face and whole bodily appearance of this particular person, for example, Caesar, or Cato, or any other famous person, just like that, in this position - sitting on a tribunal or making a speech in Further, Alberti points out the rules by which the indicated goals can be achieved. Alberti does not resolve this antinomy, he deviates towards solving purely technical problems. But the very identification of the dialectic of the artistic image is a great merit of the humanist.

The dialectical interpretation of the image (dialectic here appears in its original form) is due to the fact that the very process of cognition is also interpreted dialectically by humanists. Humanists do not yet oppose feelings and reason. And although they are waging a struggle with the Middle Ages under the banner of reason, the latter does not appear in them in a one-sided, mathematically rational form and is not yet opposed to sensuality.

The world for them has not yet lost its multicoloredness, has not turned into the abstract sensibility of a geometer, the mind has also not acquired a one-sided development, but appears in the form of complex, sometimes even semi-fantastic thinking, while not devoid of the ability in naive simplicity to guess the real dialectics of the real world (compare for example, the dialectical conjectures of Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, etc.). All this affected both the nature of realism and the aesthetic concepts of Renaissance thinkers.

The aesthetics of the Renaissance is not an absolutely homogeneous phenomenon. There were different currents that often clashed with each other. The culture of the Renaissance itself went through a number of stages. Aesthetic ideas, concepts and theories changed accordingly. This requires a special study. But for all the complexity and inconsistency of the aesthetics of the Renaissance, it was still a realistic aesthetics, closely connected with artistic practice, aimed at reality, objective.

The ideas of humanism are the spiritual basis for the flourishing of Renaissance art. The art of the Renaissance is imbued with the ideals of humanism; it created the image of a beautiful, harmoniously developed person. The Italian humanists demanded freedom for man. But freedom, in the understanding of the Italian Renaissance, had in mind an individual. Humanism proved that a person in his feelings, in his thoughts, in his beliefs is not subject to any guardianship, that there should not be willpower over him, preventing him from feeling and thinking as he wants. In modern science there is no unambiguous understanding of the nature, structure and chronological framework of Renaissance humanism. But, of course, humanism should be considered as the main ideological content of the Renaissance culture, inseparable from the entire course of the historical development of Italy in the era of the beginning of the disintegration of feudal and the emergence of capitalist relations. Humanism was a progressive ideological movement that contributed to the establishment of a means of culture, relying primarily on the ancient heritage. Italian humanism went through a series of stages: formation in the 14th century, a bright heyday of the next century, internal restructuring and gradual declines in the 16th century. Evolution Italian Renaissance was closely connected with the development of philosophy, political ideology, science, and other forms of social consciousness and, in turn, had a powerful impact on artistic culture Renaissance.

Revived on an ancient basis, humanitarian knowledge, including ethics, rhetoric, philology, history, turned out to be the main area in the formation and development of humanism, the ideological core of which was the doctrine of man, his place and role in nature and society. This doctrine developed mainly in ethics and was enriched in various areas of the Renaissance culture. Humanistic ethics brought to the fore the problem of man's earthly destiny, the achievement of happiness through his own efforts. Humanists approached the issues of social ethics in a new way, in the solution of which they relied on ideas about the power of man's creative abilities and will, about his wide possibilities for building happiness on earth. They considered the harmony of the interests of the individual and society to be an important prerequisite for success, they put forward the ideal of the free development of the individual and the improvement of the social organism and political orders, which is inextricably linked with it. This gave a pronounced character to many ethical ideas and teachings of the Italian humanists.

Many problems developed in humanistic ethics acquire new meaning and special relevance in our era, when moral incentives human activity perform an increasingly important social function.

Used Books

1. History of aesthetic thought. In 6 volumes. T.2. Medieval East. Europe 15th-16th centuries. / Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR; sector of aesthetics. - M.: Art, 1985. - 456 p.

2. Ovsyannikov M.F. History of aesthetic thought: Proc. allowance. - 2nd ed., revised. and additional - M .: Higher. school, 1984. - 336 p.

3. Kondrashev V.A., Chichina E.A. Ethics. Aesthetics. - Rostov n / D .: Publishing House "Phoenix", 1998. - 512 p.

4. Krivtsun O.A. Aesthetics: Textbook. - 2nd ed., add. – M.: Aspect press, 2001. – 447 p.

5. Aesthetics. Dictionary. - M.: Politizdat, 1989

The aesthetics of the Renaissance (Renaissance), which seemed to be well studied, in the second half of the 20th century. raises questions again.

Common chronology and periodization of the Renaissance - XIV-XVI centuries. However, in different countries the onset of the Renaissance did not go on simultaneously, for example, in Italy and Germany (Northern Renaissance), we see a completely different situation. For some countries, researchers consider it possible to talk about the XIV-XV centuries. like the late Middle Ages.

The ideological essence of the Renaissance itself and the aesthetics of this period are also ambiguous. Sometimes it is defined as a return to antiquity. However, it should be remembered that with a sufficiently large number of "rediscovered" monuments of antiquity, there was no systematic idea of it at that time. If there was an orientation towards antiquity, then rather towards its image, which was created for themselves by the figures of the Renaissance culture.

Also ambiguous are the assessments of the Renaissance, which for a long time was considered as the long-awaited era of liberation from the "gloomy Middle Ages". However, according to many modern researchers, the gloominess of the Middle Ages is largely exaggerated, and the inner harmony of the Renaissance is not as unconditional as it might seem from a superficial presentation. P. A. Florensky developed the theory of two types of cultures - "Renaissance" and "Medieval", where the priority, of course, is given to the second. D. S. Merezhkovsky in his philosophical and historical novels depicts the culture of the times of Leonardo da Vinci with obvious rejection. Finally, A.F. Losev, a classic of Russian philosophy, in his monograph "Aesthetics of the Renaissance" points to a number of negative features of this era. In addition, it is the Renaissance that belongs to some phenomena that are often "written off" to the Middle Ages, for example, rampant superstitions and "witch hunts". It should not be forgotten that the very phrase "Middle Ages" appeared precisely in the Renaissance and testified that the new era was conceived as the apotheosis of culture, and the previous one as a kind of failure.

What are the main features of the aesthetics of the Renaissance? In general, they can be represented as follows, having stipulated in advance the inevitable amendments to the region (country) and period (early, high, late Renaissance).

1. Humanism. It is wrong to understand humanism in the context of the Renaissance as "philanthropy". The word itself came into wide use, thanks to a complex of humanitarian disciplines, the need to study which was insisted on by the figures of that era.
2. Anthropocentrism. A person in the worldview and, accordingly, the aesthetics of the Renaissance moves to the center of the world, although atheism was not a phenomenon characteristic of the Renaissance. Rather, we are faced with optimistic illusions about man, which allow us to "close" him as close as possible to God.
3. Shifting emphasis on the body, matter beautifully seen in the art of the Renaissance. But "rehabilitatio carnis" - justification (rehabilitation) of the flesh - quickly turned into "rebellio carnis" revolt of the flesh.
4. Hedonism - the attitude towards enjoyment follows easily from the previous feature.
5. Theurgism - ideas about the artist as an independent creator, who actually begins to compete with God.
6. Titanism - closely associated with theurgism, implies an exceptional creative wealth of the individual, when the artist is able to equally successfully manifest himself in various fields of activity.
7. Elitism. Since the humanistic ideal of educating a man-titan, a man-demiurge rather quickly demonstrated its limited feasibility, the formation of an elite of refined, educated, in every sense modern people with a characteristic contempt for the backward mass began. Even in such a famous work as The Decameron by G. Boccaccio, the heroes are initially removed from the city in which the epidemic is raging, not just to save lives, but for a pleasant pastime, which requires a careful selection of companions capable of supporting graceful (however, completely and next to not so elegant) conversations. The secluded circle of acquaintances is a symbol of the Renaissance elitism.
8. Dominated in art Renaissance realism. Despite the growing interest in art and the aesthetic penetration of the Renaissance worldview, we see few monuments of philosophical aesthetics proper. As a rule, the texts of Renaissance authors are initially, rather, works on the theory of art. Finally, for some philosophers of the Renaissance period, the aesthetic theme was not the main one, although they touched on it.

The late Renaissance shows signs of a crisis, primarily associated with anthropocentric ideas. Speaking figuratively, by erecting a pedestal for man, the Renaissance figures discovered that man was not worthy of being erected on it. Hence the more restrained, skeptical, even disappointingly bitter character of the art of the late Renaissance. It is characteristic that during this period the interest of artists in depicting everyday scenes with elements of the ugly is growing. That is why it is dangerous to choose, as is sometimes done, some work of the Renaissance as its symbol. "La Gioconda" by Leonardo can be considered such a symbol, along with Durer's engraving depicting a bathhouse where old women wash, and "Gargantua and Pantagruel" by F. Rabelais also belongs to the Renaissance, like the skeptical and sad "Don Quixote" by S. Cervantes and the ruthless poem " Ship of Fools" by S. Brant (it is clear that, creating a poetic encyclopedia of all kinds human stupidity, Brant could hardly have been inspired by the absolutized idea of the self-sufficiency of a man-demiurge and a titan; the author acts rather as a representative of a small "enlightened" elite). The famous fresco "The Last Judgment" by B. Michelangelo depicts an angry Christ and the hurling of sinners into hell. On the one hand, this is an illustration of the Church's doctrine of the Last Judgment, on the other hand, an expression of disappointment and hostility towards a person who "did not justify the hopes" of theorists and figures of the Renaissance.

Nicholas of Cusa (real name - Krebs, a stable nickname, which is usually for the Middle Ages, given by the place of birth - Cuza on the Moselle), a prominent church figure (cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church) really cannot be limited only to the framework of the Renaissance and Renaissance aesthetics. In his views, elements of the Renaissance proper, medieval and anticipating the philosophy of later periods were originally combined. Nicholas of Cusa gravitated towards Neoplatonism, which means that all the main features of this philosophy are present in his aesthetics.

The aesthetic views of Cusanz stemmed from his Neoplatonic attitudes in philosophy in general. He retained the concept of the beautiful developed in the Middle Ages as implying proportionality, a number of ideas of the "metaphysics of light", etc. The philosopher's doctrine of three aspects of beauty is most famous:

- the radiance of the form;
- proportions of parts;
- gathering everything together.

The latter becomes clear from the general context of the philosophy of Cusan, who developed (with the involvement of mathematics and natural philosophy) the philosophy of the whole. The contradictions that exist in the created world are resolved, according to Nicholas of Cusa, in God. Beauty gives the difference between beauty and goodness, beauty gives rise to love, which, in turn, turns out to be the highest completion of beauty. It is not superfluous to recall that the Kuzanets understood love quite traditionally, in the Christian-Platonic spirit, - it is an ascent from the visible to the invisible. Such transformations, leading to the maximum manifestation of beauty, can be characterized as dialectical. Here we see something similar to Georg Hegel's "dialectical triangle" (see below). Beauty, being one, can give rise to diversity, which ultimately serves the same unity. In the ideas of Kuzan about beauty as a property of any created thing, being in general (aesthetic ontologism), undoubtedly the influence of the aesthetics of the mature Middle Ages, in particular Thomas Aquinas. What is ugly is simply not being - in Aquinas we find very similar ideas.

The Renaissance element of the aesthetics of Nicholas of Cusa is the doctrine of creativity, when the artist acts as a creator, to a large extent free and autonomous. However, the general religious nature of Cusan's aesthetics does not allow this view to be taken to the limit, as happened with many authors of this period (Fig. 11).

The main features of the culture and aesthetics of the Renaissance The era of the Renaissance, which stretched over three centuries (XIV, XV, XVI centuries) cannot be understood as a literal revival of ancient aesthetics or ancient culture as a whole. In Italy, many ancient monuments remained, the attitude towards which during the Middle Ages was dismissive (many of them served as quarries for the construction of churches, castles and city fortifications), but from the 14th century they began to change, and in the next century they began to not only be noticed, they admired, collected, seriously studied, but in the rest of Europe there were very few such monuments or they were completely absent, and, meanwhile, the Renaissance was not a local, but a pan-European phenomenon. In different countries, its chronological framework shifted in relation to each other, so the Northern Renaissance (which includes all the countries of Western Europe, except Italy), began a little later and had its own specific moments (in particular, a much greater influence of Gothic), but we are able to to reveal a certain invariant of the Renaissance culture, which, in a modified form, extended not only to the countries of Northern, but also to Eastern Europe.

The culture of the Renaissance is not a simple problem for researchers. It is riddled with contradictions so strong that, depending on the angle of view from which it is viewed, the same historical facts and events can take on completely different colors. Disputes begin with the very first question - about the socio-economic basis of this era: does its culture belong to the feudal-medieval or should it be attributed already to modern European history? In other words, is it right to explain the culture of the Renaissance by the rise medieval cities, especially in Italy, accompanied by the acquisition of political independence, a high level of development of guild craft and the flourishing on this basis of a special urban (handicraft) culture, different from the cultures of the agrarian, clerical and knightly type? Or did the urban civilization that has declared itself grow on a new economic basis - the existing large-scale division of labor, intensive financial transactions, and the formation of the initial legal structures of civil (bourgeois) society? It is possible to reconcile the warring schools of historians who adhere to the first or second point of view only by referring to the transitional nature of the era we are considering, to its ambivalence and incompleteness in all aspects, when the new still coexisted with the old, although it was in sharp contradiction with it. That is why unambiguous characteristics and ratings do not work here.

Consider, in the light of what has been said, some features of this era. The first amazing feature of the Renaissance was manifested in the fact that a politically unstructured, organizationally amorphous, socially heterogeneous European society was able to create a culture that stood out against the historical background of all other cultures and firmly entered the memory of mankind. The Renaissance managed to rework and create a symbiosis of the cultures of antiquity and the Middle Ages. In turn, the Renaissance culture grew on the basis of that historical gap that developed in a situation of weakening medieval clerical power and not yet strengthened absolutism, that is, in a situation of shattered power structures that made room for the deployment of self-consciousness and vigorous activity of the individual.

The concept of humanism and humanists, as carriers of this phenomenon, which has come into use since that time, has acquired a new meaning in comparison with the old one, where it meant simply teachers of the “liberal arts”. Renaissance humanists were representatives of various classes and professions, occupying an unequal position in society. Humanists could be scientists, and people of "free professions", and merchants, and aristocrats (Count Pico della Mirandola), and cardinals (Nicholas of Cusa), and even popes.

Thus, the concept of humanism captures a completely new type of socio-cultural community, for which the class and property belonging of its members is not essential. They are united by the worship of new, time-born values, among which, first of all, anthropocentrism should be noted - the desire to put a person at the center of the universe, to give him the right to free activity that connects the real and transcendent worlds. Further - the ability to appreciate everything that has a sensual character, attention and love for the beauties of nature and the beauty of the body, the rehabilitation of sensual pleasures. Finally, liberation from unquestioning adherence to authorities (both ecclesiastical and philosophical, which ultimately led to the Reformation), a careful collection and loving study of ancient culture in all its manifestations (although it is impossible to reduce the entire Renaissance to this one point!).

Let us pay attention to the nature of science of this time. On the one hand, one can admire the scientific discoveries in the field of mathematics, optics, the humanities and natural sciences made in these centuries, ingenious technical inventions, on the other hand, it is too early to talk about a scientific revolution: an experimental base for scientific research has not been created, criteria for verifying scientific ideas that make it possible to distinguish scientific hypotheses from pure fantasies, the mathematical apparatus for designing technical products is not ready. All this will be carried out literally immediately after the threshold of the Renaissance, therefore, it can be argued that the Renaissance prepared the scientific upheaval of the 17th-18th centuries. The very same science and technology of the Renaissance was no less artistic than scientistic or technological in nature. by the most a shining example Such a symbiosis was the activity of Leonardo da Vinci, whose artistic ideas were intertwined with scientific and technical ones, he called painting a science, requiring its serious scientific study, and his technical projects had the brilliance and splendor of artistic solutions.

One could even say that the Renaissance created an atmosphere of total aestheticism. The idea of the coincidence of beauty and truth (the truth of sensory knowledge), which in three centuries will form the basis for the creation of a new philosophical science - aesthetics, was put forward at that time (XV century). The pleasures of sight, the contemplation of beauty - Renaissance "visibilism", or "opticocentrism" is the dominant feature of the era. In this it differs from the Middle Ages that preceded it, where only supersensible phenomena were allowed to be enjoyed - visions, and from the subsequent era - the Baroque, which loved to follow the quivering process of the transformation of the sensual world into higher spiritual spheres. Antiquity alone, with its cult of a separate, plastically isolated body, can be compared with the Renaissance in the spiritual evaluation of visual sensations. But the Renaissance artists took a step forward from the ancient image of the body: on the basis of the developed theory of linear perspective, they managed to organically fit the body into space (antiquity was strong in the transfer of volumes, but was poorly oriented in space).

The love of beauty led the people of the Renaissance to the fact that aesthetic emotions invaded their religious experiences. Leon Batista Alberti, the architect, could call the Florentine Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore "a haven for enjoyment," which was unheard of in earlier times (preachers like Savonarola vehemently protested against such secularization of the church and religious life). The aesthetic principle permeated the life of humanists, their favorite pastime was to imitate the figures of the ancient world, to adopt their style of speech and manners, to dress in Roman togas. Theatricalization of life took place not only in Italy, but also in other countries where the Northern Renaissance took place, less oriented towards antiquity in its aesthetic ideals, and more towards late “flaming” Gothic, oversaturated with decorative motifs. But even there, various forms of life - from court and church, to everyday life situations, war and politics - everything received an aesthetic coloring. In order to become a courtier, at that time it was not enough to have only one knightly prowess, it took mastering the art of fine manners, grace of speech, grace of manners and movements, in a word, aesthetic education, which Castiglione told about in the treatise “The Courtier”. (The aesthetic beginning in life manifested itself not only as beauty, but also as the tragic pathos of church mysteries and the unbridled laughter of folk festivals-carnivals)

The Renaissance worldview manifested itself most strongly in those areas of life where there was a close connection between spiritual activity and practice, where the spiritual state required a plastic embodiment. In this regard, the visual arts, and among them painting, had invaluable advantages over all other artistic pursuits. That is why it is from this time that a new era in the life of the creators of this art, the artists, begins to count. From a medieval master, a member of one or another craft guild, the artist grows into a significant figure, a recognized intellectual, a universal personality. If the objective basis for the emergence of masters of not handicrafts, but “fine arts”, that is, artistic activity, was the gradual release from the constraint of shop regulations, the routine of medieval life, then subjective factors are awareness of oneself as a person, pride in one’s profession, assertion of one’s independence from ruling persons (with whom the artists, however, had to deal all the time, since they were their customers. But they were not allowed to interfere in the creative process!)

Now humanitarian knowledge ("free arts") becomes necessary for the artist to the same extent as for the recognized bearers of the intellectual principle - philosophers and poets. The three greatest figures of the Renaissance - Leonardo da Vinci, Rafael Santi and Michelangelo Buonarotti demonstrated fluency not only in anatomy, composition and perspective - subjects without which it is impossible to achieve mastery in painting, but also in literary and poetic style. An important fact is the appearance of biographies of artists as significant personalities not only of their time, but also colored it with their glory (this is how Vasari interpreted the biographies of the geniuses of the Renaissance), as well as writings about art, real literary works, in which the artists themselves comprehend their activities on a philosophical and aesthetic level, in which they differ greatly from similar opuses of the Middle Ages, which had only a technical and didactic orientation. From this follows the explanation of the comparisons so often made between painting and poetry, and in the dispute between these arts for primacy, priority was given to painting (here the adherents of visuality could also rely on the well-known aphorism of the ancient rhetorician Simonides: "poetry is like painting" - ut pittura poesis). Another revived ancient idea was the principle of competition, rivalry between artists.

From the end of the 20s of the 16th century, the balance of the sensual and the rational, contemplation and practice, the state of unity of the creative individuality with the surrounding world, for which the Renaissance was famous, begins to shift towards self-deepening of the personality, tendencies to move away from the world, which corresponds to an increased expressiveness of art, a kind of playfulness. figurativism, a shift towards formal searches. This is how the phenomenon of mannerism is born, which could not fill the entire horizon of Renaissance culture, but was one of the evidence of the beginning of its crisis. To late XVI centuries in Renaissance painting, sculpture and architecture, the features of the style of the Baroque era following it are beginning to emerge more and more clearly. Thus, it is possible to draw a line under the achievements with which the Renaissance enriched mankind. The most important results of this historical type culture is a person's awareness of himself as a spiritual and bodily individuality, the aesthetic discovery of the world, the genesis of the artistic intelligentsia.

In Marxist aesthetics, an unambiguous interpretation of the Renaissance, given by F. Engels, who called it the greatest progressive upheaval in history, gave rise to titanic characters with unity of thought, feeling and action, as opposed to the limited personalities of bourgeois society, was firmly held in Marxist aesthetics. Other assessments of this era were completely ignored, expressed, in particular, by the Russian philosophers of the Silver Age N. Berdyaev, P. Florensky, V. Ern, for whom the emancipation of the individual from religion and the assertion of individualism that occurred in the Renaissance did not seem to be a progressive moment. in the spiritual development of mankind, but rather the loss of the path. So, Berdyaev believed that the falling away from God led to the self-humiliation of man, the spiritual man stooped to the level of natural man; Florensky believed that this era was not a revival, but the beginning of the degeneration of mankind: the desire of a person to settle in a world without God is not progress, but a spiritual perversion and disintegration of the individual. A peculiar interpretation of the Renaissance personality, somewhat similar to the ideas of the above-mentioned Russian philosophers, was given by A.F. Losev in the capital study “Aesthetics of the Renaissance”. The expression introduced by Losev, “the reverse side of titanism”, was supposed to show that the assertion by the Renaissance man of his independence in thoughts, feelings and will, the comprehensive development of the personality (“universal man”) has the reverse side not of spiritual freedom, but of complete dependence on unbridled passions, extreme individualism, immorality and unscrupulousness. The characteristic types of the Renaissance are Caesar Borgia and Machiavelli. The ideology of Machiavellianism for Losev is a typical Renaissance morality of individualism, freed from any philanthropy. A slightly different, but also ambiguous interpretation of the Renaissance was proposed by V.V. Bibikhin in the book “The New Renaissance”. should not be lost. But the Renaissance was at the same time the initial stage from which the movement of mankind began towards scientism, calculation and calculation of all components of the life world. Bibikhin talks about the flat rationalism of a civilized person, the cultivation of technical skill at the expense of wise empathy for the world, the destruction of the traditional way of life, indifference to nature and other flaws. modern society, a distant predecessor of which was the Renaissance.

In conclusion of the paragraph, we note that the culture of the Renaissance is now considered in the unity of its contradictory sides, and researchers are trying not to focus on any of its diverse faces.

Teaching about beauty. In the XV-XVI centuries, a new direction of thought was formed, which later received the name proper Renaissance philosophy, which, in terms of its problems, first occupies a marginal position in relation to the dominant scholastic thought of that time, and subsequently displaces or transforms scholasticism.

Within the framework of this philosophy, the analytical field of aesthetic problems is growing, where the leading themes are the nature of beauty and the essence of artistic activity, with the main attention being paid to the originality of various types of art.

Ideas about beauty during the Renaissance changed according to the main stages of its evolution. As A.F. Losev convincingly showed, the direction of this whole evolution, in essence, was set by the works Thomas Aquinas(1225 - 1274) - the most influential representative of aesthetics proto-renaissance.

Beauty is characteristic of all that exists, when the Divine idea shines through in material things, - Thomas continues the medieval line of Christianized Neoplatonism. He explains the existence of the ugly by the "lack of proper beauty" - first of all, the integrity and proportionality of the thing. Beauty, therefore, appears in the divine design of the created world.

The decisive contribution of Thomas to the culture of the Renaissance was the orientation towards a more complete assimilation of the philosophy of Aristotle, from whose legacy logic was adopted by scholasticism in the Middle Ages, but writings on physics were rejected. Thomas consistently uses the fundamental Aristotelian categories to describe the world order - matter, form, cause, purpose, and calls the cell of the universe, following Aristotle and in polemic with Plato, an individual who is created by God immediately together with form and matter and who is both acting and target . Thus, the focus of aesthetics is a person in the unity of spirit and body - the bearer of both spiritual and bodily beauty, and the leading principle of the artistic depiction of a person is proclaimed individualizing plastic principle.

Having an example of its application from the Hellenistic era, the Renaissance artist uses it already in the Gothic tradition - the principle of the unity of architecture and sculpture - when building a temple. Therefore, although elements of the Romanesque and Byzantine styles are present in the art of the proto-Renaissance, Gothic remains the dominant trend in it, and beauty is expressed primarily in plastic images.

As A.F. Losev reasonably concludes, “Neoplatonism in Western philosophy of the 13th century. appeared with his Aristotelian complication.

Just as in ancient times Aristotle drew all conclusions from Platonic universalism for individual things and beings, so in the 13th century an Aristotelian clarification of all the details of individual being was needed ... against the backdrop of the sublime and solemn Christian universals still understood in Platonic terms. The symbolic expression of this mindset was then Raphael's "Athenian School". At the same time, religious aesthetics enters the path of a secular understanding of the unique human personality, recognition of the inherent value of his mind and sense of beauty.

For the first time, “Thomas,” notes A.F. Losev, “received a powerful and convinced voice that temples, icons and the whole cult can be the subject of precisely aesthetics, self-sufficient and completely disinterested admiration, the subject of a material-plastic structure and pure form. Since, however, the entire aesthetics of Thomas is inextricably linked with his theology, it is still too early to speak of a direct Renaissance here. However, it has already become absolutely necessary to speak here about the aesthetics of the proto-Renaissance, for it has become possible not only to prostrate before the icon, but also to enjoy the contemplation of its formal and plastic expediency. This is the origin of the subsequently growing tendency to appreciate beauty, thus in a proper aesthetic function, relatively independent in relation to cult.

The theory of pleasure later contributed to the assertion of the value of aesthetic pleasure. Lorenzo Valla(1407-1457), the author of a number of philosophical works (“On True and False Good”, “Dialectical Refutations”, “On Free Will”), where the scholastic tradition was criticized from the standpoint of scientific character, determined through the analysis of language.

Describing the aesthetics of the proto-Renaissance as "Neoplatonism with Aristotelian accentuation", A.F. Losev at the same time emphasizes its qualitative difference from the Hellenistic aesthetics, due to its development in the Christian tradition - a penetrating love for the individuality of a person in the unity of spirit and body, the depth and sincerity of feeling : this is - " intimate humanity", which determined originality of humanism during the Renaissance.

The aesthetic ideas of Thomas Aquinas are reflected in art early renaissance, in the poetry of Dante and Petrarch, the short stories of Boccaccio and Sacchetti. The rehabilitation of physicality was expressed in a three-dimensional image on the plane of the characters of biblical scenes (frescoes by Giotto, Mosaccio), then a person and all living creatures of the natural world, since they carry beauty in themselves.

Further theoretical substantiation of these new trends in artistic culture takes place at the transition from the early Renaissance to the high- at Nicholas of Cusa(1401-1464), the greatest thinker of the Renaissance, the author of the treatise "On Scientific Ignorance" and other works in which he develops ancient ideas about coincidence of opposites in his teaching about coincidentia oppositorum, rethinking the concept of God and opening the perspective of philosophical thought in modern times. “The existence of God in the world is nothing else than the existence of the world in God,” in such a dialectical form, the philosopher sets the movement of thought towards pantheism.

For the neoplatonism of Cusan, inseparable from Aristotelianism, there is no separate world of eternal ideas, and the world exists in the integrity of unique, single things that acquire beauty as they are realized by form. The philosopher calls everything that exists a work of absolute beauty, manifested in harmony and proportion, since “God used arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy in creating the world, all the arts that we also use when we study the relationship of things, elements and movements.” [Quoted in: 9, 299]

In the treatise “On Beauty”, written as a sermon on the theme from the “Song of Songs” - “You are all beautiful, my beloved”, Kuzansky explains the universality of beauty in the world: God is the transcendent primary source of beauty, and when it radiates in the form of light, it most makes clear the good. The beautiful, therefore, is good and a goal that draws to itself, kindles love. Beauty is understood by Cusa, thus, in dynamics: it is an emanation of God's love into the world, and in its contemplation by a person, beauty gives rise to love for God. [For more see: 11] The concept of light remains here the fundamental aesthetic category, along with the concept of beauty.

The connection of goodness, light and beauty in Kuzansky also appears in the dynamics of the relationship between the absolute and the concrete. God is the absolute in the identity of goodness, light and beauty, but in their absoluteness they are incomprehensible. In order to become apparent, absolute beauty must take a concrete form, be different again and again, which gives rise to the multiplicity of its relative manifestations. The absoluteness of beauty gives way to a concrete multitude, in which the light of its unity is gradually weakened and eclipsed.

The revival of this eclipsed light, according to Kuzan, becomes task of the artist's creativity: the world in its concreteness appears simultaneously permeated with the light of truth, goodness, beauty - like a theophany, where every thing shines with an inner meaning. Art is thus mystical pantheism world, and since the mind of the artist is a likeness of the Divine, the artist creates the forms of things that complement nature. First artistic activity is interpreted here not as an imitation, but assimilation of God in creativity, a continuation of His creation. This idea later became fundamental to the work of Leonardo da Vinci.

An active attitude to the world, however, according to Cusa, also carries a danger - the ugliness of a person's soul can distort the perception of beauty. Unlike beauty, ugliness does not belong to the world itself, but to human consciousness. Thus, here for the first time the question of the subjectivity of the aesthetic assessment and the personal responsibility of the artist is also raised.

The concept of beauty of Cusa influenced the entire aesthetics of the high Renaissance and became the theoretical basis for the flourishing of art.

Essentially, it was divided Alberti, concluding that "beauty, as something inherent and innate in the body, is poured throughout the body to the extent that it is beautiful" [Cited by: 9, 258]. However, being not only a theoretician, but also an artist-practitioner, an architect, he sought to concretize the idea of the beauty of the living divine body of nature, giving expression to its harmony in numbers. Neoplatonism thus acquires from Alberti the features of Pythagorean aesthetics, strengthening its secular content: beauty is generally interpreted as a model of the aesthetically perfect; beauty in architecture, painting, sculpture acquires the character of structural-mathematical models.

Neoplatonism took a slightly different direction further with Marsilio Ficino(1433-1499), who headed Platonic Academy in Careggi. He devoted most of his life to commenting on Plato, including the "Commentaries on Plato's Feast", but towards the end of his life he also studies the Neoplatonists. In his commentaries on Plotinus' treatise On Beauty, he explains it in the spirit of Christian Neoplatonism. A beautiful man, a beautiful lion, a beautiful horse are designed in such a way "as the Divine mind established it through its idea and how then the universal nature conceived in its original germinal power." [Quoted from: 9, 256] The beauty of the body is, according to Ficino, the correspondence of its form to the divine idea, ugliness - on the contrary, the absence of such a correspondence. The latter arises as a result of the resistance of matter. The ugly, therefore, unlike Cusa, Ficino argues, can be present in nature itself. Since the Divine mind with its ideas is understood as a prototype of the human mind, insofar as the artist is able to create beauty, giving the bodies a shape corresponding to their idea, and thereby become like God in creative activity, re-create nature, "correcting" the mistakes that have happened in it.

In Ficino, the ideas of the Divine mind lose, in essence, their distance from the human mind, they are adequately manifested in it.

This is how the main principle in Renaissance aesthetics is formulated - anthropocentrism: using Divine ideas, a person creates beauty in the world and becomes beauty himself. A free human individuality, depicted bodily, is considered in three dimensions as the crown of beauty in the natural world, since “we consider the most beautiful that which is animated and reasonable, and, moreover, so shaped as to spiritually satisfy the formula of beauty that we have in the mind, and bodily respond to the germinal the meaning of beauty that we possess in nature…” [Quoted from: 9, 256] Ficino's neoplatonism, according to A.F. Losev, acquires a more secular character.

The principle of the dynamic correlation of aesthetic categories introduced by Cusa was developed in Ficino's interpretation of the concept of harmony. In harmony, he includes three varieties - the harmony of souls, bodies and sounds, emphasizing their common feature - the beauty of movement, which he calls grace. Grace as the harmony of movement expresses individual unique beauty, the highest degree of spirituality of the objective world, and its comprehension by the artist presupposes an active personal understanding of being.

V. Tatarkevich considers the development of the concept of grace as a significant contribution to the aesthetics of the Renaissance, complementing "Platonic-Pythogorean motif" in the interpretation of beauty "Platonic-Plotinian motif". The significance of the latter, - notes the Polish aesthetician, - was primarily in the fact that "along with concinnitas, proportion and nature, grace became the subject of classical aesthetics, less rigoristic and rational than the rest" [Quoted from: 12, 149] These new accents in the understanding of beauty were close to spiritual searches in the works of Raphael, Botticelli, Titian.

The tendency to strengthen anthropocentrism, in essence, reducing the role of God in creation to the Aristotelian prime mover, was already fully manifested in the student of Ficino - Pico della Mirandola(1463-1494), the author of such well-known works as "900 theses on dialectics, morality, physics, mathematics for public discussion", "On Being and the One". Noteworthy in this respect is Pico's short text, Oration on the Dignity of Man (published posthumously), in which the author expounds his own myth of the creation of man.

According to this myth, God, having completed creation, wished "that there was someone who would appreciate the meaning of such a great work, would love its beauty, admire its scope." Having created man for this very purpose, God said: “We do not give you, O Adam, either a certain place, or your own image, or a special duty, so that you have both a place and a person and a duty of your own free will, according to your will and yours. decision. The image of other creations is determined within the limits of the laws we have established. But you, not constrained by any limits, will determine your image according to your decision, in the power of which I leave you. I place you in the center of the world, so that from there it will be more convenient for you to survey everything that is in the world. I did not make you heavenly or earthly, mortal or immortal, so that you yourself, a free and glorious master, mold yourself into the image that you prefer. You can be reborn into lower, unintelligent beings, but you can be reborn, at the behest of your soul, into higher divine beings.”

From this myth it can be seen that a person is interpreted, firstly like a being evaluating. Medieval philosophy largely proceeded from the fact that beauty is an attribute of creation itself, that what exists, good and beautiful are identical in Being, which is God, but differ in creation. The Renaissance attitude towards creation is that it initially exists on the other side of the assessment, and the assessment of the beauty of creation belongs only to man.

Secondly, in this myth the idea is associated with the concept of man places. In medieval philosophy, the place of man was clearly defined: this is the middle position between the kingdom of animals and angels, and such a position determined the following of one's own nature in the form of overcoming the whole animal (carnal) in man in favor of the angelic (spiritual). Pico's myth retains the medieval idea of an order of creation not created by man, but this idea is coupled with the free choice of this place.

The tendency to identify God and nature found its logical conclusion in naturalistic pantheism late renaissance Giordano Bruno(1548-1600) - "On infinity, the universe and the worlds." “Natura est Deus in rebus” (“nature is God in things”) is one of his key conclusions. Physical beauty and spiritual beauty exist for the philosopher inseparably, through each other. Probably, one can accept the definition of beauty in this trend by A.F. Losev as “secular Neoplatonism with its subjective-personal love for nature, for the world, for the Divine…”

However, the purpose of a person “to be like God”, formulated by Pico, had as its consequence further the assertion of the inherent value of human existence in its unique individuality, its expression in the creative manner of the artist. Late Renaissance characterized by the formation and dominance of the aesthetic concept mannerism. The word maniera (from Latin hand) came into use from the practice of teaching "manners" to behave in a society where ease, sophistication of behavior were valued. In aesthetics Giorgio Vasari(1511 - 1574), artist and art historian, "manner" becomes the most important concept for designating the originality of the artist's handwriting, the style of the work and is widely recognized

The problem of beauty in nature gives way to beauty in art, and reflection on the essence of artistic creativity, on the possibility of realizing an idea in matter, on the manner as a form of correlation between idea and matter, comes to the fore. Due to the opposition of matter, according to the concept of mannerism, in nature there is not only beauty, but also ugliness, and the meaning of creativity lies in the ability of the artist, on the one hand, to select only its best parts for imitation, and on the other hand, to make things correspond to the idea in the mind of the artist. The task of genius, then, is to transcend nature, and aesthetic ideal proclaimed for the first time "artificiality".

In the art of the Mannerist era, charm, grace, refinement are valued, replacing the general concept of beauty, eluding the definition of any rules for their creation, primarily mathematical ones. The many faces of beauty in art, permeated with the dynamics of striving for the highest spiritual perfection, contributed to the revival of the Gothic tradition, the revival of expression and exaltation, preparing the formation of Baroque aesthetics.

Rhetoric and poetics of the Renaissance. The revival of the ancient foundations of culture was especially clearly manifested in the Renaissance theory of literature and literature. In antiquity, culture, understood as paideia, that is, education, relied primarily on the word. Philosophy and rhetoric, of which one (philosophy) is the theory of internal speech, namely, thinking, and the second (rhetoric, or eloquence, oratory) is the theory of external, communicative speech, formed the basis of education and culture. Both disciplines were based on the principle of the priority of the general over the particular, the individual, characteristic of the epochs of the domination of metaphysical consciousness. Poetics (the doctrine of poetic art), as a rule, was part of rhetoric, this was partly due to the fact that, in terms of its social significance, poetry was placed lower than oratory. But two independent works on poetics have come down to us from antiquity - the Greek treatise of Aristotle (not in full form) and the Latin poetic "Epistle to the Pisos" by Horace. Rhetorical principles can also be traced in them, especially in the Roman poet, who drew his ideas from various sources.

During the first millennium following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, in the theory of poetry, Horace had absolute priority in Western European countries, and this is explained primarily by the fact that Horace wrote in Latin, well known in the Middle Ages, while the Greek original of the Poetics » Aristotle was incomprehensible due to the loss of knowledge of this language. The first translations of his treatise into Latin appeared only at the turn of the 15th-16th centuries, followed by translations into national languages- first Italian, then French and all the others.

The rhetorical tradition in the Renaissance, despite the fascination of humanists with antiquity, acquired some new features. One of the most important in them is that the visual arts - painting and sculpture began to be equated in importance with verbal art (which was unheard of in antiquity), and their analysis followed a rhetorical path. Ludovico Dolci (1557) conducts his analysis of painting in the same sequence in which rhetoric prescribed to build a verbal work: he has a consistent consideration of composition, drawing and color, they correspond to the rhetorical rules of stage-by-stage work on speech: inventions (finding a theme), dispositions (arrangement material) and elocution (verbal design).

Rhetoric has so penetrated into all the cells of the Renaissance humanistic consciousness that it can be found not only in the poems of the Italians, but even in Shakespeare. Hamlet's famous monologue about man is built, according to S. Averintsev, purely rhetorically: it begins with admiration for man: “What a miracle of nature is man! How noble of mind he is!<…>”, which is a rhetorical device of encomia (praise), and ends with the words: “What is this quintessence of dust to me?”, - “a normal topic of rhetorical censure”, or “psogos”.

Let us return to the dispute over priority between the Horatian and Aristotelian poetics. If the essay on the poetic art of Marco Vida was written in verse in Latin and was based on Horace, then after the translation of the Aristotelian treatise into Latin by Giorgio Valla in 1498 and the translation of Bernardo Segni into Italian in 1549, Aristotle's main ideas about the ways imitation in poetry - mimesis, the structure of tragedy, the genre specificity of dramatic and epic works, the effect produced by tragedy - catharsis, began to win a firm place in the minds of humanists. Throughout the 16th century, a serious study of Aristotle's poetics continued, comments on it began to appear, gradually developing into independent (based on it) studies of the laws of poetry. In 1550 Maggi's Explanations of Aristotle's Poetics was published, in 1560 the poetics of Scaliger, an outstanding humanist who moved to France and accelerated the development of humanistic thought in this country, appeared in 1560. Scaliger is known primarily as a systematizer of world history and the creator of a unified historical chronology, which is still valid, although disputed by the creators of the so-called "new chronology". Scaliger's poetics was an attempt to reconcile Aristotle with Horace, including the doctrine of the unity of the scene, the rules for constructing a composition, defining the goal of poetry as a combination of teaching and pleasure. The pronounced rationalism of Scaliger makes some scholars consider him a figure on the borderline between the Renaissance and classicism inheriting it.

Perhaps this is so, but we must remember that the mentality of the literary figures of the Renaissance themselves was quite rationalistic. They set themselves the task of comprehending and systematizing in literature everything that the Middle Ages left unthought, spontaneous, unsystematized, not set within the strict framework of norms and laws. In the first place in terms of importance for humanists was the category of genre, so the main attention was paid to the distribution of literary themes by genre and their verification for compliance with the laws of the genre. In this regard, contemporary literature seemed to them strictly built and adjusted to comply with the rules of good taste, as opposed to the literature of the Middle Ages, where, in their opinion, genre confusion dominated, a mixture of low and high, corresponding to a general decrease in taste. However, this did not rule out controversy between various trends in humanism, especially between the supporters of Aristotelian poetics, in whom the features of rationalism were more pronounced, and the Platonists, who defended the idea of the poet as a divine being, inspired, full of enthusiasm and divine madness, that is the views expressed by Plato in the dialogue "Ion" and other works where he dealt with the problems of creativity. In the theory of literature, the Aristotelians were in the majority (unlike Renaissance philosophy, where Platonism and Neoplatonism dominated), but even here there were apologists for the Platonic position.

The Platonic line in poetics was carried out by those writers who can be attributed to the flow of mannerism. They preached a freer treatment of genres, did not require a strict stylistic systematization of literature, so we can say that here, already within the Renaissance literature, that struggle of rationalism with irrationalism began to unfold, which in the next - XVII century will result in a rivalry of trends in European art- Classicism and Baroque. Among the adherents of Plato are the names of Francesco Patrizzi and Giordano Bruno, who opposed the subordination of poetry to rationally developed rules and in his essay “On Heroic Enthusiasm” emphasized the role of inspiration as a decisive moment in the creation of a poetic work.

Another topic of debate was the question: what is the purpose of poetry. If the majority of poetic theorists answered it in a canonical spirit - the goal of poetry is to delight (bring pleasure) and convince (to teach), then there were also those who, contrary to this dogma, began to assert that the goal of poetry, and, first of all, tragedy is limited to the challenge pleasure for the viewer. But these were not just abstract arguments, no, they were based on empirical observations of the behavior of spectators in the theater and were based on a generalization of observational data. As a result, a split occurred among Italian writers, one can say that there are already tendencies, on the one hand, towards an elitist interpretation of art, and on the other hand, towards a mass, democratic one. So Robortello appealed to intellectual elite, as the main component of the theatrical audience, and Castelvetro, on the contrary, - to the mass. It followed from this that the emotional and intellectual lesson of tragedy was important for Robortello - catharsis, which raised the moral ethos of the audience, developed a complex of stoic virtues in them, and for Castelvetro the hedonistic outcome was more important. On the appeal to the consciousness of the “man of the crowd”, Castelvetro also built a defense of “unities” in tragedy - the unity of action and place of action. The need for unity was explained by the fact that a simple person is deprived of imagination and the ability to generalize. In order to believe in the theatrical action taking place, he must be sure that it is really happening before his eyes here and now, on this very stage, and if he is invited to believe that in the very place where the square was, now the forest or the palace chambers have opened, he simply will not be able to figure out how this could happen and will lose interest in the performance.

The desire to create a normative poetics based on the categories of genre and style was typical not only for the representatives of Italian humanism, but also for the humanists of the countries of the Northern Renaissance - France and England.

In France, a literary school that called itself the "Pleiades" put forward such talented poets as Ronsard and Du Bellay. The latter paid great attention to the theory of literature. In his famous work "Defence and glorification of the French language", written in 1549, where Italianizing tendencies simultaneously made themselves felt, he demanded the creation of a strictly systematized theory of poetry. At the same time, Platonic and Aristotelian lines were combined in his poetics. The Platonic appeared in the interpretation of Marsilio Ficino, who united prophecy, mystery, enthusiasm, poetry and love in the belief that they are internally interconnected. Du Bellay, like Ficino, believed that the poet is both a prophet and a lover, filled with enthusiasm. In this sense, creativity is impersonal, since in a state of inspiration the personality is lost, but in order for the work to be real, a return to rationality is necessary. Inspiration must be supplemented by knowledge of the patterns on which taste is oriented, by education in Greek and Latin literature; the poet is also required to follow the rules and practiced the skill of versification.

Turning to the English Renaissance, it should be said that it is somewhat late compared to the Romanesque, therefore its lower and upper boundaries are shifted - it overflows into the 17th century (in the theater - the work of Shakespeare, in philosophy - his contemporary Francis Bacon). Its other distinguishing feature is that the ancient culture was revealed to the English Renaissance figures through the prism of its vision by the Italian humanists. But this did not deprive the British Renaissance of originality; on the contrary, here, perhaps more than anywhere else, the national interpretation of the pan-European Renaissance principles was expressed most clearly.

The national refraction of the antikysis principles of poetics was manifested in Philip Sidney's most famous treatise of the 16th century, A Defense of Poetry, published in 1595. Written in English, Sidney's poetics, by analogy with Du Bellay's treatise, can be called "glorification of the English language", because its author had an elegant style and demonstrated the wide possibilities of his native language, both in the field of poetry and theoretical knowledge about it. The task of the work undertaken by Sidney was also to defend poetry from the traditional attacks on it, accusing poets of lies. Philippics against poetry are based on the fact that the poet creates, following the voice of his imagination, and even in Aristotelian poetics he is ordered to reproduce the possible by probability and necessity, and even more - the impossible probable. (In the latter case, what was meant was the impossible in the actual sense, the fantastic, but the probable in the psychological sense). Consequently, Sidney faced the difficult problem of protecting the imagination as the main tool of poetic creativity, and therefore his forces were directed here. It was here that the Platonic principle appeared in Sidney's treatise. Following Plato, he fearlessly emphasizes the independent power of the imagination, which is considered a divine gift. Imagination creates ideal images of people, which, perhaps, cannot be met in reality, but, in any case, it contributes to the improvement of human nature. The power of poetry is to touch and inspire, and the author of The Defense of Poetry considers this to be more important than the ability to teach and convince (although he also paid tribute to these canonical moments!) And this is because emotional impact gives impetus to the development of all other aspirations - moral and intellectual.

In accordance with Aristotelian poetics, Sidney demanded that the unity of the action and the unity of the place of its course be observed. Having divided poetry into genres - there are only eight of them - Sidney expects from the poet that he clearly defines the genre form and does not mix the tragic beginning with the comic in one work (although he allows such a genre as tragicomedy).

F. Bacon can be called the last philosopher of the Renaissance and the first philosopher of the New Age. In his aesthetics and poetics one already senses the spirit of that rationalism which will prevail in the great metaphysical systems of the seventeenth century. Possessing encyclopedic erudition, the British philosopher decided to systematize all the knowledge, science and art accumulated by his time. Bacon's classification is based on the principle of distinguishing human cognitive abilities - memory, imagination and reason. In accordance with them, he divides the entire vast amount of human knowledge into three large areas: history, poetry, philosophy. By placing poetry between history and philosophy, Bacon in this case followed Aristotle, although in the theory of knowledge he was an opponent of his authority. Like Sidney, Bacon focuses on the imagination. On the one hand, Bacon considers imagination to be an independent ability of the mind, without which cognition is impossible, on the other hand, it requires its subordination to reason, since uncontrolled imagination can easily become a source of “ghosts” or “idols” of consciousness with which Bacon fought. “By poetry,” he writes, “we understand a kind of fictional story, or fiction. History deals with individuals who are seen in certain conditions of place and time. Poetry also speaks of single objects, but created with the help of the imagination, similar to those that are the objects of true history, however, exaggeration and arbitrary representations of what could never happen in reality are quite often possible. Dividing poetry into three kinds - epic, dramatic and parabolic (allegorical), Bacon gives preference to the latter kind, believing that allegory reveals the hidden meaning of phenomena with its images-allegory. But paying tribute to poetry, Bacon did not forget to emphasize that in terms of knowing the truth, poetry cannot be compared with science, therefore poetry should be more “considered an entertainment of the mind” than a serious occupation. Thus, in the person of Bacon, the process of gradual displacement of Renaissance universalism by the dry rationalistic "Enlightenment project" manifested itself.

Aesthetics of architecture and painting. New ideological landmarks of the era find their expression in a new type of artistic vision. The emerging Renaissance worldview is alien to the excessive expression of late Gothic plasticity and the immensity of the space of Gothic cathedrals unrestrainedly directed upwards. The new artistic method, based on the aesthetic perception of the surrounding reality, and trust in sensory experience, finds support in the ancient cultural tradition. The first attempts to achieve clear, harmonious and commensurate forms were made by the masters of the Proto-Renaissance, while the Florentine architect Fillipo Brunelleschi is considered the true founder of the new Renaissance style in architecture. In his works, the medieval and ancient traditions are creatively rethought, forming a single harmonious whole, as, for example, during the construction of the dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, where the use of the Gothic frame structure is combined with elements of the ancient order. Brunelleschi's buildings in Florence marked the beginning new era in the art of architecture, however, to become the basis of an independent style, new artistic techniques required theoretical understanding. In the architecture of the Renaissance, such a theoretical basis for further creative development compiled a treatise of the 15th century "Ten Books on Architecture" by the Italian humanist, artist and architect Leon Battista Alberti. In his work, Alberti largely proceeded from contemporary architectural practice. Thanks to Alberti's treatise, the architecture of the Renaissance from a set of individual practical recommendations became a science and an art that requires the architect to master many disciplines.

The essence of beauty, according to Alberti, is harmony. “Beauty is a strict proportionate harmony of all parts, such that nothing can be added, subtracted, or changed without making it worse.” Harmony is seen as a kind of universal law that permeates the entire universe. As a fundamental principle, harmony, according to Alberti, unites all the diversity of things, measures all nature and becomes the basis of the way of life and the inner world of man. Applying the laws of harmony, architecture, as conceived by Alberti, should meet the ideal of “serenity and tranquility of a joyful soul, free and content with itself,” which was characteristic of the humanistic worldview.

Following Vitruvius, Alberti recognizes the combination of "strength, usefulness and beauty" as the basis of an architectural structure. The concept of beauty is now becoming applicable to works of art, is one of the most important criteria for their evaluation, beauty and usefulness are inextricably linked. “Providing what is necessary is simple and easy, but where a building is devoid of elegance, convenience alone will not bring joy. In addition, what we are talking about contributes to convenience and durability.

The true unity and harmony of an architectural structure could be achieved, according to Alberti, by applying the ancient rules of measure, proportionality of parts to the whole, symmetry, proportion and rhythm in architecture. The main means that ensures the humanistic nature of the work of architecture, i.e. its proportionality to human nature and perception, served as a classical warrant. Based on the treatise of Vitruvius, as well as on his own measurements of the ruins of ancient Roman buildings, Alberti developed rules for the construction and application various options warrants for various types of buildings. The ancient order system made it possible to achieve harmonious relations between a person and the space of the architectural environment by observing proportions proportionate to a person.

Insisting that the beauty and harmony of a building can only be achieved by following certain and strict rules, Alberti nevertheless wrote that, learning from the ancients, "we should not act as if under the compulsion of laws" and rationalistic rules should not serve as an obstacle to expression of the creative will of the artist. True skill lies in the fact that, when erecting various buildings, each time act in such a way that each individual architectural detail or their combination, thanks to which the building acquires an individual look, turns out to be a natural, organic part of a single whole, and the whole structure leaves an overall impression of unity and perfect completeness.

Alberti emphasizes the importance of the appearance of the building to match the status and purpose of the building. He builds a certain hierarchy of buildings according to their dignity (dignitas), at the top of which is the temple. The Renaissance temple acquires, in comparison with the medieval one, a completely new look. The central dome composition now becomes its basis, as it most fully expresses the consonance of the divine macrocosm and the human microcosm in a harmoniously arranged universe. The basis of such a composition was a circle, which is considered the most perfect geometric figure and therefore the most suitable for a temple, and the internal space organized in this way was perceived as easily visible and complete. Many Renaissance architects, starting with Brunelleschi, solved the problems of erecting a central-domed structure through experiments in different ways. The pinnacle of these searches and the symbol of Renaissance architecture was the construction of St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome, begun by Bramante and completed according to the project of Michelangelo, crowned with a powerfully rising dome, which, with its grandeur and at the same time perfect harmony, affirmed the new humanistic ideal of the heroic personality in the space of the Christian cosmos.

The type of secular building that best met the new aspirations of the era was a country villa, in the atmosphere of which most of the humanistic dialogues take place. "... The villa should entirely serve joy and expanse", contributing to humanistic pursuits and the establishment of harmonious relations between man and nature. Another characteristic type of Renaissance building, the urban palazzo, seemed to be a kind of analogue of a villa in an urban environment, bearing a closed, more strict character. One of the famous palaces of Florence was the Palazzo Rucellai, designed by Alberti in accordance with the rules he set forth.

The theoretical foundations of architecture, as well as the practical guidelines formulated by Alberti, corresponded to the spirit and needs of the time, and Alberti's treatise became the basis for the work of outstanding architects of the High Renaissance, such as Donato Bramante or Michelangelo Buonaroti. The aesthetics of Renaissance architecture received its finished “classical” expression in the treatise “Four Books on Architecture” by the outstanding Cinquecento architect Andrea Palladio. Summarizing his own experience, as well as the results of a thorough study of the ruins of ancient buildings, Palladio created a new system of proportionality of ancient orders, taking into account the practical needs of his time. He made the order a flexible instrument of the architect, due to the correct use of which the maximum force of aesthetic impact is achieved.

New art forms were born as a result of an awakening interest in earthly, real things. The interest and thirst for knowledge of the surrounding world found its expression, first of all, in the fine arts. The first way to understand natural things was the art of looking into the world embodied in works of art. Leonardo da Vinci considered painting to be the perfect tool for understanding the world around him, since it is able to capture the most diverse of his creations and perfectly display them. The main task of the painter now was to recreate the real world, which led to the development of the theory of linear perspective, which makes it possible to obtain a three-dimensional image of objects in their spatial environment.

Leon Battista Alberti in his Treatise on Painting likens a painting to a transparent window or opening through which visible space opens up to us. The task of the painter, according to Alberti, is to “represent the forms of visible things on this surface in no other way than if it were transparent glass through which the visual pyramid passes” and “depict only what is visible.” No less important was the achievement by the painter of the image of plastic volume on the plane: "Of course, we expect from painting that it seems very convex and similar to what it depicts."

This understanding of painting was the result of a gradual overcoming of the medieval pictorial principle. Medieval art understood the pictorial surface as a plane on which individual figures appear against a neutral background, forming a single extension, devoid of spatiality. This principle of representation was based on the medieval interpretation of space as “pure light”, not structured in any way, in which the real world dissolves. New art was born in the course of a gradual rethinking of space as "infinity, embodied in reality." Painting forms its own space and can now exist independently of architecture, just like sculpture. This is the time of appearance easel painting. But even while remaining monumental, it no longer asserted, as before, the plane of the wall, but strove to create an illusory space.

The first elements of the three-dimensional image of space and three-dimensional figures appear in Giotto's painting, while the further development of painting demonstrates the masters' search for a perspective unity of the entire space of the picture. Artists were looking for support for the correct construction of perspective in mathematical theory, so a true painter had to have knowledge of mathematics and geometry. The theory of a mathematically rigorous method for constructing perspective was developed in the works of Piero della Francesca and Leon Battista Alberti and became the basis of artistic practice.

The desire for a realistic image does not mean a departure from religiosity. The realism of the Renaissance is different from the later realism of the 17th century. At the core artistic thinking- the desire to connect the two poles, to elevate the earthly, to see in it the divine perfection, its ideal essence, and to bring the heavenly, the world of transcendental reality closer to the earthly. Religious subjects remain leading in painting, but in their interpretation there is a desire to give the religious content a new force of persuasiveness, bringing it closer to life, combining the divine and the earthly in an ideal image. “Perspective,” notes E. Panofsky, “opens up in art ... something completely new - the sphere of the visionary, within which a miracle becomes a direct experience of the viewer, when supernatural events seem to invade his own, seemingly natural visual space and it is by supernaturalness that they encourage you to believe in yourself.” Perspective perception of space "brings the Divine to a simple human consciousness and, on the contrary, expands the human consciousness to contain the Divine" .

Leonardo da Vinci calls painting a science and "the legitimate daughter of nature". Following nature, the painter must in no way deviate from her laws, strive for authenticity, realism of the image. “You are painters, find your teacher in the surface of flat mirrors, who teaches you chiaroscuro and abbreviations of each subject.” However, this should not be a simple copy. Tirelessly observing, exploring, analyzing natural forms, the painter recreates them with the power of imagination in his work in a new harmonious unity, which, with its authenticity and persuasiveness, testifies to the beauty and perfection of creation. According to the depth of comprehension, Leonardo da Vinci compares painting with philosophy. “Painting extends to the surfaces, colors and figures of all objects created by nature, and philosophy penetrates into these bodies, considering in them their own properties. But it does not satisfy the truth that the painter reaches, independently embracing the first truth. A visual image captures the true essence of an object more fully and more reliably than a concept. Thanks to the study and mastery of the external form of objects, the artist is able to penetrate into the deep essence of natural laws and become like the Creator, creating a second nature. “The divinity that the science of the painter possesses makes it so that the spirit of the painter turns into a semblance of a divine spirit, since he freely controls the birth of various essences of different animals, plants, fruits, landscapes ...” . Imitation of nature became an imitation of divine creation. The detail with which Leonardo da Vinci lists all the natural phenomena available to the painter's brush betrays his capture by the fullness and diversity of the world around him.

Recognizing that the laws of beauty and harmony underlying the universe can be comprehended by means of painting, Leonardo da Vinci developed in his notes the foundations of artistic practice, thanks to which the artist can achieve perfection in depicting the entire surrounding world. He draws attention to the transmission of the light-air environment in painting and introduces the concept of aerial perspective, which makes it possible to achieve unity of a person with the environment in a pictorial work. The artist explores the problem of transmission of light and shadow reflexes, noting various gradations of light and shadow under different lighting conditions, which help to achieve relief in images. Leonardo da Vinci assigns a significant role to the study of proportions based on the number.

The same conviction in the rational, mathematical basis of beauty led Albrecht Dürer to create his aesthetic theory of proportions. Throughout his career, Dürer tried to solve the problem of beauty. According to Dürer, human beauty should be based on a numerical ratio. Durer, in accordance with the Italian tradition, perceives art as a science. Dürer's original intention was to find an absolute formula for the beauty of the human figure, but he subsequently abandoned this thought. The Four Books of Proportions is an attempt to create a theory of the proportions of the human body by finding the correct proportions for various types of human figures. In his treatise, Dürer strives to cover the whole variety of real forms, while subordinating them to a single mathematical theory. He proceeded from the conviction that the task of the artist is to create beauty. “We should strive to create what, throughout human history, has been considered beautiful by the majority.” The foundations of beauty are in nature, "the more accurately the work corresponds to life, the better and more true it is." However, in life it is difficult to find a completely beautiful form, and therefore the artist must be able to extract the most beautiful elements from all natural diversity and combine them into a single whole. “For beauty is gathered from many beautiful things, just as honey is gathered from many flowers.” A painter can follow his imagination only if the beautiful image formed in his imagination is the result of a long practice of observation and sketching. beautiful figures. “Truly, art lies in nature; whoever knows how to discover it, owns it, ”he writes. Beauty, in Durer's understanding, is an ideal image of reality. Admitting, “what is beautiful - I don’t know this”, he at the same time defines the basis of beauty as proportionality and harmony. "The golden mean is between too much and too little, try to achieve it in all your works."

The aesthetics of the Renaissance is a complex, multifaceted picture, which is far from exhausted by the examples considered here. There were a number of independent trends and schools in art that could argue and clash with each other. Nevertheless, with all the complexity and versatility of development, these features of the Renaissance aesthetics were decisive for the era.

musical aesthetics. Considering the aesthetic culture of the Renaissance, one cannot fail to mention the transformations that took place at that time in the musical field, since it was then that the formation of those principles of music making began that developed over the next three centuries and led European music to unprecedented artistic heights, made it the deepest expression of human subjectivity.

At the same time, for an unprepared listener, perhaps, it would be difficult to distinguish the musical compositions of the Renaissance from the medieval ones. At the very time when great and revolutionary creations appeared in painting, sculpture, architecture, breaking sharply with the previous tradition, when humanistic ideas were born, a new science and a new bright and unlike anything before literature were developing - music seemed to be hiding, remaining in the former, at first glance, completely medieval forms.

What may suggest the idea of underlying profound changes is a sharp outbreak that occurred in the 17th century. and associated with the emergence of new genres, as well as with the transformation traditional forms, even the very structure of religious chant - and so strong that since then religion itself begins to set completely new requirements for musical composition.

One can recall the judgments about music of later thinkers. For example, about what characterizing in the early twentieth century. Western European "Faustian" culture, originating in the late Middle Ages and flourishing in the Renaissance, O. Spengler calls music the highest expression. Music is judged in the same way by such thinkers as Hegel, who calls it the pure “voice of the heart” and, to an even greater extent, Schopenhauer, who draws it apart from all arts as a direct expression of the Will and, at the same time, the deepest act of subjective self-consciousness.

At the same time, we could not find anything similar to the “voice of the heart” either in the music of the Middle Ages, or in the music of the Renaissance - or in any other musical tradition different from the one that began to develop in Western Europe from the beginning of the 17th century. The French writer and musicologist R. Rolland gives a description of music that came from the 13th century: “the main obstacle to composing

The term Renissance (Renaissance) belongs to Giorgio Vasari , author of "Biographies of famous painters, sculptors and architects" (1550). Vasari considered antiquity to be the ideal example of art and thought it necessary revive her designs. As in antiquity, the main theme in art is not God but man, aesthetics acquires anthropocentric character. Even for the comprehension of divine beauty, human senses, especially sight, are best suited. Thus, God became closer to the world, formed interest not to the transcendent (“beyond”), but to natural beauty.

The result was a flourishing of the visual arts, especially painting, in which the genre landscape (in the medieval, and in ancient art nature was not the subject of the image, but only the conditional environment in which the characters were placed). Leonardo da Vinci considered painting to be the queen of all sciences.

Such convergence of art and science assumed that art can give true knowledge about the essence of things, it singles out this essence, makes it explicit. For art to give knowledge, the image should be based on mathematical patterns. In particular, Albrecht Dürer developed the doctrine of the numerical proportions of the human body, Leonardo pursued the same goal with his drawing of a man inscribed in a circle and a square. In their constructions, they focused on golden section rule. Renaissance artists discovered the secret of constructing a straight line perspectives , i.e. images of the volume on the plane. So, the creators of the Renaissance strove to develop clear, almost scientific rules for the artist, "to believe harmony with algebra." At the same time, they avoided blind copying of reality, their artistic method - idealization , the image is real as it should be. One should imitate nature, but only the beautiful in it. In essence, this approach is very close to Aristotle's idea that art, imitating nature, should capture the ideal form in the material.

Renaissance aesthetics paid considerable attention to the category tragic , while medieval thought tended to analyze the category of the sublime. Renaissance philosophers felt contradiction between ancient and Christian foundations their culture, as well as the instability of the position of a person who relies only on himself, his abilities and reason.

Historical relativity and variability of the concept of "work of art"

Piece of art, piece of art- an object of aesthetic value; a material product of artistic creativity, conscious human activity. This concept includes works of fine art (painting, photography, arts and crafts, sculpture, etc.), architectural or landscape design, musical compositions and musical improvisations, theatrical performances, artistic literary texts, ballet or opera theater performances, cinematography; all objects that are primarily of interest from the point of view of their artistic merit.

A work of art meets certain categories of aesthetic value. According to V. Kandinsky, "a true work of art arises in a mysterious, mysterious, mystical way" from the artist "". M. Bakhtin wrote that a work of art acts as an intermediary between the consciousness (picture of the world) of the author and the consciousness of the recipient - the reader, viewer, listener.

Marco Polo's treatise "On the Plurality of Worlds" as a prerequisite for the ideological concepts of the Renaissance

Renaissance, or Renaissance(fr. Renaissance, Italian Rinascimento) - an era in the history of European culture, which replaced the culture of the Middle Ages and preceded the culture of modern times. Approximate chronological framework of the era - the beginning of the XIV - the last quarter of the XVI centuries.

A distinctive feature of the Renaissance is the secular nature of culture and its anthropocentrism (that is, interest, first of all, in a person and his activities). There is an interest in ancient culture, there is, as it were, its “revival” - and this is how the term appeared.

Term rebirth found already in the Italian humanists, for example, in Giorgio Vasari. In its modern meaning, the term was coined by the 19th-century French historian Jules Michelet. Currently the term rebirth turned into a metaphor for cultural flourishing: for example, the Carolingian Renaissance of the 9th century.

Radical breaking of the medieval system of views on the world and the formation of a new, humanistic ideology.
Humanistic thought puts man at the center of the universe, speaks of the unlimited possibilities for the development of the human personality. The idea of the dignity of the human person, deeply developed by the great thinkers of the Renaissance, firmly entered the philosophical and aesthetic consciousness of the Renaissance. Outstanding artists of the time drew their optimism and enthusiasm from her.
Hence the fullness of the development of the personality, the comprehensiveness and universality of the characters of the figures of the Renaissance that strikes us. “It was,” F. Engels wrote, “the greatest progressive upheaval of all experienced by mankind up to that time, an era that needed titans and which gave birth to titans in terms of the power of thought, passion and character, in terms of versatility and scholarship.”
During this period, a complex process of formation of a realistic worldview takes place, a new attitude to nature, religion, and the artistic heritage of the ancient world is being developed. Of course, it would be wrong to believe that the culture of the Renaissance finally overcomes the religious worldview and breaks with religion: a negative attitude towards religion is often combined with a revival of interest in religion and various mystical ideas. But at the same time, it is obvious that in the Renaissance there is an increase in the secular principle in culture and art, secularization and even aestheticization of religion, which was recognized only to the extent that it became an object of art.
Researchers of the culture and art of the Renaissance have convincingly shown what a complex breakdown of the medieval picture of the world is taking place in art. The rejection of "Gothic naturalism", of the creative method of the Middle Ages, which was based on canons and geometric schemes, leads to the creation of a new artistic method based on the exact reproduction of living nature, the restoration of confidence in sensory experience and human perception, the fusion of vision and understanding.
The main theme of Renaissance art is man, man in harmony with his spiritual and physical powers. Art glorifies the dignity of the human person, the infinite ability of man to cognize the world. Faith in man, in the possibility of a harmonious and all-round development of personality is a distinctive feature of the art of this time.
The study of the artistic culture of the Renaissance began a long time ago, among its researchers there are well-known names of J. Burkhardt, G. Wölfflin, M. Dvorak, L. Venturi, E. Panofsky and others.
As in the history of art, three main periods can be distinguished in the development of the aesthetic thought of the Renaissance, corresponding to the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. The aesthetic thought of the Italian humanists, who turned to the study of the ancient heritage and reformed the system of upbringing and education, is associated with the 14th century, the aesthetic theories of Nicholas of Cusa, Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola belong to the 15th century, and, finally, in the 16th century a significant contribution to aesthetic theory is made by the philosophers Giordano Bruno, Campanella, Patrici. In addition to this tradition associated with certain philosophical schools, there was also the so-called practical aesthetics, which grew on the basis of the experience of developing certain types of art - music, painting, architecture and poetry.
It should not be thought that the ideas of Renaissance aesthetics developed only in Italy. One can trace how similar aesthetic concepts spread in other European countries, especially in France, Spain, Germany, England. All this indicates that the aesthetics of the Renaissance was a pan-European phenomenon, although, of course, the specific conditions for the development of culture in each of these countries left a characteristic imprint on the development of aesthetic theory.

1. Aesthetics of the early Renaissance as the aesthetics of early humanism

The emergence and development of the aesthetic theory of the Renaissance was greatly influenced by humanistic thought, which opposed the medieval religious ideology and substantiated the idea of the high dignity of the human person. Therefore, characterizing the main directions of the aesthetic thought of the Renaissance, one cannot ignore the legacy of the Italian humanists of the 15th century.
It should be noted that in the Renaissance the term "humanism" had a slightly different meaning than the one that is usually invested in it today. This term arose in connection with the concept of "studia humanitatis", that is, in connection with the study of those disciplines that opposed the scholastic education system and were connected by their traditions with ancient culture. These included grammar, rhetoric, poetics, history, and moral philosophy (ethics).
Renaissance humanists were those who devoted themselves to the study and teaching of the studia humanitatis. This term had not only professional, but also ideological content: humanists were the bearers and creators of a new system of knowledge, in the center of which was the problem of man, his earthly destiny.
The humanists included representatives of various professions: teachers - Filelfo, Poggio Bracciolini, Vittorino da Feltre, Leonardo Bruni; philosophers - Lorenzo Valla, Pico della Mirandola; writers - Petrarch, Boccaccio; artists - Alberti and others.
The work of Francesc Petrarca (1304-1374) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) represents an early period in the development of Italian humanism, which laid the foundations for a more integral and systematized worldview, which was developed by later thinkers.
Petrarch with extraordinary force revived interest in antiquity, especially in Homer. Thus, he laid the foundation for that revival of ancient antiquity, which was so characteristic of the entire Renaissance. At the same time, Petrarch formulated a new attitude towards art, opposite to that which underlay medieval aesthetics. For Petrarch, art had already ceased to be a simple craft and began to acquire a new, humanistic meaning. In this regard, Petrarch's treatise "Invective against a certain physician" is extremely interesting, representing a polemic with Salutati, who argued that medicine should be recognized as a higher art than poetry. This thought arouses Petrarch's angry protest. "An unheard-of sacrilege," he exclaims, "to subordinate the mistress to a maid, free art to mechanical." Rejecting the approach to poetry as a craft, Petrarch interprets it as a free, creative art. Of no less interest is Petrarch's treatise "Remedies for Healing a Happy and Unhappy Fate", which depicts the struggle between reason and feeling in relation to the sphere of art and pleasure, and, in the end, a feeling close to earthly interests wins.
Another outstanding Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio played an equally important role in substantiating new aesthetic principles. The author of the Decameron devoted a quarter of a century to working on what he considered to be the main work of his life, the theoretical treatise Genealogy of the Pagan Gods.
Of particular interest are the XIV and XV books of this extensive work, written in "defence of poetry" against medieval attacks on it. These books, which gained immense popularity during the Renaissance, marked the beginning of a special genre of "poetry apology".
In essence, we observe here a polemic with medieval aesthetics. Boccaccio opposes accusing poetry and poets of immorality, excess, frivolity, deceit, etc. In contrast to medieval authors who reproached Homer and other ancient writers for depicting frivolous scenes, Boccaccio proves the poet's right to depict any plot.
Also unfair, according to Boccaccio, is the accusation of poets of lies. Poets do not lie, but only "weave fictions", they tell the truth under the cover of deceit or, more precisely, fiction. In this regard, Boccaccio passionately proves the right of poetry to fiction (inventi), the invention of the new. In the chapter "That poets are not false," Boccaccio says bluntly: poets "... are not bound by the obligation to keep the truth in the external form of fiction; on the contrary, if we deprive them of the right to freely apply any kind of fiction, all the benefit of their labor will turn into dust".
Boccaccio calls poetry "divine science". Moreover, sharpening the conflict between poetry and theology, he declares theology itself a kind of poetry, because, like poetry, it refers to fiction and allegories.
In his apology for poetry, Boccaccio argued that its main qualities are passions (furor) and ingenuity (inventio). This attitude to poetry had nothing to do with the craft approach to art, it justified the freedom of the artist, his right to create.
Thus, already in the XIV century, early Italian humanists formed a new attitude towards art as a free occupation, as an activity of imagination and fantasy. All these principles formed the basis of the aesthetic theories of the 15th century.
A significant contribution to the development of the aesthetic worldview of the Renaissance was also made by Italian humanist teachers, who created a new system of upbringing and education, focused on the ancient world and ancient philosophy.
In Italy, starting from the first decade of the 15th century, one after another, a whole series of treatises on education appeared, written by humanist educators: "On noble morals and free sciences" by Paolo Vergerio, "On the education of children and their good morals" by Matteo Vegio, " On Free Education" by Gianozzo Manetti, "On Scientific and Literary Studies" by Leonardo Bruni, "On the Order of Teaching and Study" by Battisto Guarino, "Treatise on Free Education" by Aeneas Silvia Piccolomini, and others. Eleven Italian treatises on pedagogy have come down to us. In addition, numerous letters of humanists are devoted to the topic of education. All this constitutes a vast heritage of humanistic thought.

2. Aesthetics of the High Renaissance

2.1. Neoplatonism

In the aesthetics of the Renaissance, a prominent place is occupied by the Neoplatonic tradition, which in the Renaissance received a new meaning.
Neoplatonism is not a homogeneous phenomenon in the history of philosophy and aesthetics. In different periods of history, he acted in various forms and performed ideological and cultural-philosophical functions.
Ancient Platonism (Plotinus, Proclus) arose on the basis of the revival of ancient mythology and opposed the Christian religion. In the 6th century, a new type of Neoplatonism arose, developed primarily in the Areopagitics. Its aim was to attempt to synthesize the ideas of ancient Neoplatonism with Christianity. Neoplatonism developed in this form throughout the Middle Ages.
In the Renaissance, a completely new type of Neoplatonism arises, which opposed medieval scholasticism and "scholasticized" Aristotelianism.
The first stages in the development of Neoplatonic aesthetics were associated with the name of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464).
It should be noted that aesthetics was not just one of the areas of knowledge that Nicholas of Cusa turned to along with other disciplines. The peculiarity of the aesthetic teaching of Nicholas of Cusa lies in the fact that it was an organic part of his ontology, epistemology, and ethics. This synthesis of aesthetics with epistemology and ontology does not allow us to consider the aesthetic views of Nicholas of Cusa in isolation from his philosophy as a whole, and on the other hand, the aesthetics of Cusa reveals some important aspects of his teaching about the world and knowledge.
Nicholas of Cusa is the last thinker of the Middle Ages and the first philosopher of modern times. Therefore, in his aesthetics, the ideas of the Middle Ages and the new, Renaissance consciousness are peculiarly intertwined. From the Middle Ages, he borrows the "symbolism of numbers", the medieval idea of the unity of micro and macrocosmos, the medieval definition of beauty as the "proportion" and "clarity" of color. However, he significantly rethinks and reinterprets the legacy of medieval aesthetic thought. The idea of the numerical nature of beauty was not for Nicholas of Cusa a mere fantasy game - he sought to confirm this idea with the help of mathematics, logic and empirical knowledge. The idea of the unity of the micro- and macrocosm, in its interpretation, turned into the idea of a high, almost divine destiny of the human personality. Finally, a completely new meaning is given in his interpretation of the traditional medieval formula about beauty as "proportion" and "clarity".
Nicholas of Cusa develops his concept of the beautiful in his treatise On Beauty. Here he relies mainly on the Areopagitics and on Albert the Great's treatise On Goodness and Beauty, which is one of the commentaries on the Areopagitics. From the "Areopagitic" Nicholas of Cusa borrows the idea of the emanation (emergence) of beauty from the divine mind, of light as a prototype of beauty, etc. All these ideas of Neoplatonic aesthetics are expounded in detail by Nicholas of Cusa, providing them with comments.
The aesthetics of Nicholas of Cusa unfolds in full accordance with his ontology. The basis of being is the following dialectical trinity: complicatio - folding, explicatio - deployment and alternitas - otherness. This corresponds to the following elements - unity, difference and connection - which lie in the structure of everything in the world, including the basis of beauty.
In the treatise "On Beauty", Nicholas of Cusa considers beauty as a unity of three elements that correspond to the dialectical trinity of being. Beauty turns out to be, first of all, an infinite unity of form, which manifests itself in the form of proportion and harmony. Secondly, this unity unfolds and gives rise to the difference between goodness and beauty, and, finally, a connection arises between these two elements: realizing itself, beauty gives rise to something new - love as the final and highest point of beauty.
Nicholas of Cusa interprets this love in the spirit of Neoplatonism as an ascent from the beauty of sensual things to a higher, spiritual beauty. Love, says Nicholas of Cusa, is the ultimate goal of beauty, "our concern should be to ascend from the beauty of sensual things to the beauty of our spirit ...".
Thus, the three elements of beauty correspond to the three stages of the development of being: unity, difference and connection. Unity appears in the form of proportion, difference - in the transition of beauty into goodness, communication is carried out through love.
Such is the teaching of Nicholas of Cusa about beauty. It is quite obvious that this teaching is closely connected with the philosophy and aesthetics of Neoplatonism.
The aesthetics of Neoplatonism significantly influenced not only the theory, but also the practice of art. Studies of the philosophy and art of the Renaissance have shown a close relationship between the aesthetics of Neoplatonism and the work of prominent Italian artists (Raphael, Botticelli, Titian and others). Neoplatonism revealed to the art of the Renaissance the beauty of nature as a reflection of spiritual beauty, aroused interest in human psychology, discovered dramatic collisions of spirit and body, the struggle between feeling and reason. Without the disclosure of these contradictions and collisions, the art of the Renaissance could not have achieved that deepest sense of inner harmony, which is one of the most significant features of the art of this era.
The well-known Italian humanist philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) joined the Platonic Academy. He touches upon the problems of aesthetics in his famous "Speech on the Dignity of Man", written in 1486 as an introduction to the debate he proposed with the participation of all European philosophers, and in "Comments on the canzone on love by Girolamo Benivieni", read at one of the meetings of the Platonic Academy .
In the Oration on the Dignity of Man, Pico develops the humanist concept of the human person. Man has free will, he is in the center of the universe, and it depends on him whether he rises to the height of a deity or descends to the level of an animal. In the work of Pico della Mirandola, God addresses Adam with the following parting words: “We do not give you, O Adam, neither your place, nor a certain image, nor a special duty, so that you have a place, a person, and a duty of your own free will, according to Your own will and your own decision. The image of other creatures is determined within the limits of the laws we have established. But you, not constrained by any limits, will determine your image according to your own decision, in the power of which I leave you. I place you in the center of the world, so that from there you will be more comfortable survey all that is in the world. I did not make you either heavenly or earthly, neither mortal nor immortal, so that you yourself ... formed yourself in the image that you prefer. "
Thus, Pico della Mirandola forms in this work a completely new concept of the human personality. He says that a person himself is a creator, a master of his own image. Humanistic thought puts man at the center of the universe, speaks of the unlimited possibilities for the development of the human personality.
The idea of the dignity of the human person, deeply developed by Pico della Mirandola, firmly entered the philosophical and aesthetic consciousness of the Renaissance. The outstanding artists of the Renaissance drew their optimism and enthusiasm from her; _
A more detailed system of aesthetic views of Pico della Mirandola is contained in Girolamo Benivieni's Commentary on the Love Canzone.
This treatise is closely related to the Neoplatonic tradition. Like most of the writings of the Italian Neoplatonists, it is devoted to Plato's teachings on the nature of love, and love is interpreted in a broad philosophical sense. Pico defines it as "the desire for beauty", thus linking Platonic ethics and cosmology with aesthetics, with the doctrine of beauty and the harmonious structure of the world.
The doctrine of harmony, therefore, occupies a central place in this philosophical treatise. Speaking about the concept of beauty, Pico della Mirandola states the following: "The concept of harmony is associated with the broad and general meaning of the term" beauty ". So, they say that God created the whole world in musical and harmonic composition, but, just like the term" harmony in a broad sense can be used to denote the composition of any creation, but in the proper sense it means only the merging of several voices into a melody, so one can call beauty the proper composition of any thing, although its own meaning refers only to things visible, like harmony to things audible " .
Pico della Mirandola was characterized by a pantheistic understanding of harmony, which he interpreted as the unity of the micro- and macrocosm. "... A person in his various properties has a connection and similarity with all parts of the world and for this reason is usually called a microcosm - a small world."
But, speaking in the spirit of the Neoplatonists about the meaning and role of harmony, about its connection with beauty, with the structure of nature and the cosmos, Mirandola to a certain extent departs from Ficino and other Neoplatonists in understanding the essence of harmony. For Ficino, the source of beauty is in God or in the soul of the world, which serve as a prototype for all nature and all things that exist in the world. Mirandola rejects this view. Moreover, he even enters into a direct polemic with Ficino, refuting his opinion about the divine origin of the world soul. In his opinion, the role of the creator god is limited only to the creation of the mind - this "incorporeal and rational" nature. To everything else - to the soul, love, beauty - God no longer has anything to do: "... according to the Platonists,_ says the philosopher, - God did not directly produce any other creation, except for the first mind.
Thus, the concept of God in Pico della Mirandola is closer to the Aristotelian concept of the prime mover than to Platonic idealism.
Therefore, being close to the Platonic Academy, Pico della Mirandola was not a Neoplatonist, his philosophical concept was wider and more diverse than Ficino's Neoplatonism.

2.2. Alberti and the theory of art of the 15th century

The center of the development of the aesthetic thought of the Renaissance in the 15th century was the aesthetics of the greatest Italian artist and humanist thinker Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472).
In numerous works of Alberti, among which were works on the theory of art, the pedagogical essay "On the Family", the moral and philosophical treatise "On the Peace of the Soul", a significant place is occupied by humanistic views. Like most humanists, Alberti shared an optimistic idea about the limitless possibilities of human knowledge, about the divine destiny of man, about his omnipotence and exceptional position in the world. Alberti's humanistic ideals were reflected in his treatise "On the Family", in which he wrote that nature "created man in part heavenly and divine, in part the most beautiful among the whole mortal world ... she gave him mind, understanding, memory and reason - properties divine and at the same time necessary in order to distinguish and understand what should be avoided and what should be striven for in order to better preserve ourselves. This idea, in many respects anticipating the idea of Pico della Mirandola's treatise On the Dignity of Man, pervades all of Alberti's work as an artist, scientist and thinker.
Engaged mainly in artistic practice, especially architecture, Alberti, however, paid much attention to the theory of art. In his treatises - "On Painting", "On Architecture", "On Sculpture" - along with specific issues of the theory of painting, sculpture and architecture, general issues of aesthetics were widely reflected.
It should immediately be noted that Alberti's aesthetics does not represent some kind of complete and logically integral system. Separate aesthetic statements are scattered throughout Alberti's writings, and quite a lot of work is required to somehow collect and systematize them. In addition, Alberti's aesthetics is not only philosophical discussions about the essence of beauty and art. In Alberti we find a wide and consistent development of the so-called "practical aesthetics", that is, the aesthetics arising from the application of general aesthetic principles to specific questions of art. All this allows us to consider Alberti as one of the largest representatives of the aesthetic thought of the early Renaissance.
The theoretical source of Alberti's aesthetics was mainly the aesthetic thought of antiquity. The ideas on which Alberti draws in his theory of art and aesthetics are many and varied. This is the aesthetics of the Stoics with its demands to imitate nature, with the ideals of expediency, the unity of beauty and utility. From Cicero, in particular, Alberti borrows the distinction between beauty and adornment, developing this idea into a special theory of adornment. From Vitruvius, Alberti compares a work of art with the human body and the proportions of the human body. But the main theoretical source of Alberti's aesthetic theory is, of course, the aesthetics of Aristotle with its principle of harmony and measure as the basis of beauty. From Aristotle, Alberti takes the idea of a work of art as a living organism, from him he borrows the idea of the unity of matter and form, purpose and means, the harmony of part and whole. Alberti repeats and develops Aristotle's idea of artistic perfection ("when nothing can be added, subtracted, or changed without making it worse"). This whole complex set of ideas, deeply comprehended and tested in the practice of contemporary art, underlies Alberti's aesthetic theory .
At the center of Alberti's aesthetics is the doctrine of beauty. Alberti speaks about the nature of the beautiful in two books of his treatise "On Architecture" - the sixth and ninth. These arguments, despite their laconic nature, contain a completely new interpretation of the nature of the beautiful.
It should be noted that in the aesthetics of the Middle Ages, the dominant definition of beauty was the formula of beauty as "consonantia et claritas", that is, the proportion and clarity of light. This formula, originating in early patristics, was dominant until the 14th century, especially in scholastic aesthetics. In accordance with this definition, beauty was understood as a formal unity of "proportion" and "brilliance", mathematically interpreted harmony and clarity of color.
Alberti, although he attached great importance to the mathematical basis of art, does not reduce, as medieval aesthetics does, beauty to mathematical proportion. According to Alberti, the essence of beauty lies in harmony. To designate the concept of harmony, Alberti resorts to the old term "concinnitas", borrowed by him from Cicero.
According to Alberti, there are three elements that make up the beauty of architecture. These are number (numerus), limitation (finitio), and placement (collocatio). But beauty is more than these three formal elements. “There is something more,” says Alberti, “composed of the combination and connection of all these three things, something that miraculously illuminates the whole face of beauty. We will call this harmony (concinnitas), which, without a doubt, is the source of all charm and beauty. the purpose and goal of harmony is to arrange parts, generally speaking, different in nature, by some perfect ratio so that they correspond to one another, creating beauty.And not so much in the whole body as a whole or in its parts, harmony lives, but in itself and in its nature, so that I would call it a partaker of soul and mind. And there is for her a vast field where she can manifest and bloom: she embraces all human life, permeates the whole nature of things. For everything that nature produces - all this is in proportion the law of harmony. And nature has no greater concern than that what it produces be completely perfect. This cannot be achieved without harmony, for without it the higher harmony of the parts falls apart.
In this reasoning Alberti should highlight the following points.
First of all, it is obvious that Alberti abandons the medieval understanding of beauty as "the proportion and clarity of color", returning, in fact, to the ancient idea of beauty as a certain harmony. He replaces the two-term formula of beauty "consonantia et claritas" with a one-term one: beauty is the harmony of parts.
In itself, this harmony is not only the law of art, but also the law of life, it "penetrates the whole nature of things" and "encompasses the whole life of man." Harmony in art is a reflection of the universal harmony of life.
Harmony is the source and condition of perfection; without harmony no perfection is possible either in life or in art.
Harmony consists in the correspondence of parts, and in such a way that nothing can be added or subtracted. Here Alberti follows the ancient definitions of beauty as harmony and proportion. “Beauty,” he says, “is a strict proportionate harmony of all parts, united by what they belong to, such that nothing can be added, subtracted, or changed without making it worse.”
Harmony in art consists of various elements. In music, the elements of harmony are rhythm, melody and composition, in sculpture - measure (dimensio) and border (definitio). Alberti associated his concept of "beauty" with the concept of "decoration" (ornamentum). According to him, the distinction between beauty and decoration should be understood by feeling rather than expressed in words. But still, he draws the following distinction between these concepts: "... decoration is, as it were, a kind of secondary light of beauty, or, so to speak, its addition. Indeed, from what has been said, I believe it is clear that beauty, as something inherent and innate in the body , is poured over the whole body to the extent that it is beautiful; and the decoration is more of the nature of the attached than the innate "(On architecture).
The internal logic of Alberti's thought shows that "decoration" is not something external to the beautiful, but constitutes its organic part. After all, any building, according to Alberti, without decorations will be "erroneous." Strictly speaking, in Alberti "beauty" and "decoration" are two independent types of beauty. Only "beauty" is the internal law of beauty, while "decoration" is added from the outside and in this sense it can be a relative or accidental form of beauty. With the concept of "decoration" Alberti introduced into the understanding of the beautiful moment of relativity, subjective freedom.
Along with the concept of "beauty" and "decoration" Alberti also uses a number of aesthetic concepts, borrowed, as a rule, from ancient aesthetics. He connects the concept of beauty with dignity (dignitas) and grace (venustas), following directly on Cicero, for whom dignity and grace are two kinds of (male and female) beauty. Alberti connects the beauty of a building with "necessity and convenience", developing the Stoic idea of the connection between beauty and usefulness. Alberti also uses the terms "charm" and "attractiveness". All this testifies to the diversity, breadth and flexibility of his aesthetic thinking. The desire to differentiate aesthetic concepts, to the creative application of the principles and concepts of ancient aesthetics to modern artistic practice is a distinctive feature of Alberti's aesthetics.
It is characteristic how Alberti interprets the concept of "ugly". Beauty is an absolute work of art for him. The ugly acts only as a certain kind of error. Hence the demand that art should not correct, but hide ugly and ugly objects. "Ugly-looking parts of the body and others like them, not particularly graceful, let them cover themselves with clothes, some kind of branch or hand. The ancients wrote a portrait of Antigonus only on one side of his face, on which an eye was not gouged out. They also say that Pericles the head was long and ugly, and therefore, unlike others, he was portrayed by painters and sculptors in a helmet.
These are the basic philosophical principles of Alberti's aesthetics, which served as the basis for his theory of painting and architecture, which we will talk about a little later.
It should be noted that Alberti's aesthetics was the first significant attempt to create a system that was fundamentally opposed to the aesthetic system of the Middle Ages. Focused on the ancient tradition, coming mainly from Aristotle and Cicero, it was basically realistic in nature, recognized experience and nature as the basis of artistic creativity, and gave a new interpretation to traditional aesthetic categories.
These new aesthetic principles were also reflected in Alberti's treatise On Painting (1435).
It is characteristic that the original treatise "On Painting" was written in Latin, and then, obviously, in order to make this work more accessible not only to scientists, but also to artists who did not know Latin, Alberti rewrites it into Italian.
At the heart of Alberti's work lies the pathos of innovation, it is driven by the interest of the discoverer. Alberti refuses to follow Pliny's descriptive method. “However, we do not need to know here who the first inventors of art or the first painters were, for we are not engaged in retelling all sorts of stories, as Pliny did, but we are rebuilding the art of painting, about which in our age, as far as I know, you will not find anything written." Apparently, Alberti was not familiar with the Treatise on Painting by Cennino Cennini (1390).
As you know, the treatise of Cennini contains many more provisions coming from the medieval tradition. In particular, Cennino requires the painter to "follow patterns." On the contrary, Alberti speaks of the "beauty of fiction". The rejection of traditional schemes, of following patterns is one of the most important features of the art and aesthetics of the Renaissance. “Just as in food and music we like novelty and abundance the more, the more they differ from the old and familiar, for the soul rejoices at every abundance and variety, so we like abundance and variety in a picture.”
Alberti talks about the importance of geometry and mathematics for painting, but he is far from any mathematical speculation in the spirit of the Middle Ages. He immediately stipulates that he writes about mathematics "not as a mathematician, but as a painter." Painting deals only with what is available to the eye, with what has a certain visual image. This reliance on a concrete basis of visual perception is characteristic of Renaissance aesthetics.
Alberti was one of the first to demand the all-round development of the artist's personality. This ideal of a universally educated artist is present in almost all Renaissance art theorists. Ghiberti in his "Comments", following Vitruvius, believes that the artist must be comprehensively educated, must study grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astrology, optics, history, anatomy, etc. We meet a similar thought in Leonardo (for whom painting is not only an art, but also a "science"), in Durer, who requires artists to know mathematics and geometry.
The ideal of the universally educated artist had a great influence on the practice and theory of Renaissance art. Comprehensively educated, versed in the sciences and crafts, knowing many languages, the artist acted as a real prototype of that ideal of "homo universalis", which the thinkers of that time dreamed of. Perhaps for the first time in the history of European culture, in search of an ideal, social thought turned specifically to an artist, and not to a philosopher, scientist or politician. And this was not an accident, but was determined, first of all, by the real position of the artist in the cultural system of this era. The artist acted as a mediating link between physical and mental labor. Therefore, in his work, Renaissance thinkers saw a real way to overcome the dualism of theory and practice, knowledge and skill, which was so characteristic of the entire spiritual culture of the Middle Ages. Each person, if not by the nature of his occupation, then by the nature of his interests, had to imitate the artist.
It is no coincidence that in the Renaissance, especially in the 16th century, the genre of "life stories" of artists arose, which at that time gained immense popularity. A typical example of this genre is Vasari's Lives of the Artists, one of the first attempts to explore the biographies, individual manner and style of Italian Renaissance artists. Along with this, numerous autobiographies of artists appear, in particular Lorenzo Ghiberti, Benvenuto Cellini, Baccio Bandinelli and others. All this testified to the growth of the artist's self-awareness, his separation from the craft environment. In this huge and extremely interesting biographical literature, an idea arises of the "genius" of the artist, of his natural talent (ingenio) and the peculiarities of his individual manner of creativity. The aesthetics of romanticism of the 19th century, having created a romantic cult of genius, in fact, revived and developed the concept of "genius", which first appeared in the aesthetics of the Renaissance.
In creating a new theory of fine art, theorists and artists of the Renaissance relied mainly on ancient tradition. Treatises on architecture by Lorenzo Ghiberti, Andrea Palladio, Antonio Filarete, Francesco di George Martini, Barbaro most often relied on Vitruvius, in particular on his idea of the unity of "usefulness, beauty and strength". However, commenting on Vitruvius and other ancient authors, in particular Aristotle, Pliny and Cicero, Renaissance theorists tried to apply the ancient theory to modern artistic practice, to expand and diversify the system of aesthetic concepts borrowed from antiquity. Benedetto Varchi introduces the concept of grace into his reasoning about the goals of painting, Vasari evaluates the merits of artists using the concepts of grace and manners.
The concept of proportion also receives a broader interpretation. In the 15th century, all artists, without exception, recognize adherence to proportions as an unshakable law of artistic creativity. Without knowledge of proportions, the artist is unable to create anything perfect. This universal recognition of proportions was most clearly reflected in the work of the mathematician Luca Pacioli "On the Divine Proportion".
It is no coincidence that Pacioli introduces the term "divine" into the title of his treatise. He is absolutely convinced of the divine origin of proportions and therefore begins his treatise, in fact, with the traditional theological justification of proportions. There was nothing new in this approach, it largely came from the medieval tradition. However, after this, Pacioli leaves theology and moves on to practice, from recognizing the "divineness" of proportions, he comes to asserting their utility and practical necessity. "Both the tailor and the shoemaker use geometry without knowing what it is. Likewise, masons, carpenters, blacksmiths and other artisans use measure and proportion without knowing it, because, as they sometimes say, everything consists of quantity, weight and measures. But what about modern buildings, ordered in their own way and corresponding to various models? They seem attractive when they are small (that is, in the project), but then, in the structure, they cannot withstand the weight, and will they last for millennia? - rather They call themselves architects, but I have never seen in their hands an outstanding book by our most famous architect and great mathematician Vitruvius, who wrote the treatise On Architecture.
Luca Pacioli's work combines Neo-Pythagorean and Neo-Platonic tendencies. In particular, Luca Pacioli uses the famous fragment from Plato's "Timaeus" that the world elements are based on certain stereometric formations. Citing this place, he writes: "... our holy proportion, being a formal phenomenon, gives - according to Plato in his Timaeus - the sky the figure of a body. And likewise, each of the other elements is given its own form, in no way coinciding with forms of other bodies; thus, fire has a pyramidal figure called a tetrahedron, earth has a cubic figure called a hexahedron, air has a figure called an octahedron, and water has an icosahedron. All these five correct bodies are, according to Pacioli, "the decoration of the universe", and, in fact, underlie all things.
The rules for constructing various polyhedra are illustrated in Luca Pacioli's treatise with drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, which gave Pacioli's ideas even greater concreteness and artistic expressiveness. It should be noted the enormous popularity of Luca Pacioli's treatise, its great influence on the practice and theory of Renaissance art.
In particular, we feel this influence in the aesthetics of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who was connected with Pacioli by friendship and was well acquainted with his writings.
The aesthetic views of Leonardo were not systematized by him. They are made up of numerous disparate and fragmentary notes contained in letters, notebooks, and sketches. And, nevertheless, despite the fragmentation and fragmentation, all these statements give a fairly complete picture of the originality of Leonardo's views on issues of art and aesthetics.
Aesthetics of Leonardo is closely connected with his ideas about the world and nature. Leonardo looks at nature through the eyes of a natural scientist, for whom the iron law of necessity and the universal connection of things is revealed behind the play of chance. "Necessity is nature's mentor and nurse. Necessity is nature's theme and inventor, and a bridle, and an eternal law." Man, according to Leonardo, is also included in the universal connection of phenomena in the world. "We create our life, we are the death of others. In a dead thing, an unconscious life remains, which, once again falling into the stomach of the living, regains sentient and rational life."
Human knowledge must follow the dictates of nature. It is experiential in nature. Only experience is the basis of truth. "Experience does not err, only our judgments err...". Therefore, the basis of our knowledge is the sensations and evidence of the senses. Among the human senses, vision is the most important.
The world that Leonardo speaks of is the visible, visible world, the world of the eye. Connected with this is the constant glorification of sight as the highest of the human senses. The eye is "the window of the human body, through which the soul contemplates the beauty of the world and enjoys it...". Vision, according to Leonardo, is not passive contemplation. It is the source of all sciences and arts. "Do you not see that the eye embraces the beauty of the whole world? He is the head of astrology; he creates cosmography; he advises all human arts and corrects them; he moves man to various parts of the world; he is the sovereign of the mathematical sciences, his sciences are the most reliable; he measured the height and magnitude of the stars, he found the elements and their places, he gave birth to architecture and perspective, he gave rise to divine painting."
Thus, Leonardo puts visual cognition in the first place, recognizing the priority of vision over hearing. In this regard, he also builds a classification of art, in which painting occupies the first place, and after it - music and poetry. "Music," says Leonardo, "cannot be called otherwise than the sister of painting, since it is the object of hearing, the second sense after the eye...". As for poetry, painting is more valuable than it, since it "serves a better and nobler feeling than poetry."
Recognizing the high importance of painting, Leonardo calls it a science. "Painting is a science and the legitimate daughter of nature." At the same time, painting differs from science, because it appeals not only to reason, but also to fantasy. It is thanks to fantasy that painting can not only imitate nature, but also compete and argue with it. It creates even that which does not exist.
Speaking about the nature and purpose of painting, Leonardo likens the painter to a mirror. Such a comparison does not mean that the painter should be the same dispassionate copyist of the surrounding world as a mirror: "The painter, senselessly copying; guided by practice and the judgment of the eye, is like a mirror that imitates in itself all the objects opposed to it, without having knowledge of them." The artist is like a mirror in its ability to universally reflect the world. To be a mirror in this sense means to be able to reflect the appearance and qualities of all objects of nature. "The mind of the painter should be like a mirror, which always turns into the color of the object that it has as an object, and is filled with as many images as there are objects opposed to it ... You cannot be a good painter if you are not a universal master in imitating by his art all the qualities of the forms produced by nature...".
According to Leonardo, the mirror should be a teacher for the artist, it should serve him as a criterion for the artistry of his works. If you want to see if your picture as a whole corresponds to an object drawn from nature, then take a mirror, reflect a living object in it and compare the reflected object with your picture and, properly, consider whether both similarities agree with each other object. The mirror and the picture show images of objects surrounded by shadow and light. If you know how to combine them well with each other, your picture will also seem like a natural thing, visible in a large mirror. "
Each type of art is characterized by the originality of harmony. Leonardo talks about harmony in painting, music, poetry. In music, for example, harmony is built "by a combination of its proportional parts, created at the same time and forced to be born and die in one or more harmonic rhythms; these rhythms embrace the proportionality of the individual members from which this harmony is composed, only as a general the contour embraces the individual members, from which human beauty is born. Harmony in painting consists of a proportional combination of figures, colors, a variety of movements and positions. Leonardo paid much attention to the expressiveness of various postures, movements, facial expressions, illustrating his judgments with various drawings.
In understanding the beautiful, Leonardo proceeded from the fact that the beautiful is something more significant and meaningful than external beauty. Beauty in art presupposes the presence of not only beauty, but also the whole range of aesthetic values: beautiful and ugly, sublime and base. According to Leonardo, the expressiveness and significance of these qualities increase from mutual contrast. Beauty and ugliness seem more powerful side by side.
A true artist is able to create not only beautiful, but also ugly or funny images. “If the painter wants to see beautiful things that inspire him with love, then it is in his power to give birth to them, and if he wants to see ugly things that frighten, or clownish and funny, or truly pitiful, then he is the ruler and god over them.” The principle of contrast was widely developed by Leonardo in relation to painting. So, when depicting historical plots, Leonardo advised artists to "mix direct opposites in the neighborhood in order to strengthen one another in comparison, and the more they are closer, that is, ugly next to the beautiful, big to small, old to young, strong to weak, and so should be diversified as much as possible and as close as possible [one from the other]." In the aesthetic statements of Leonardo da Vinci, studies of proportions occupy a large place. In his opinion, proportions are of relative importance, they change depending on the figure or the conditions of perception: “The measures of a person change in each member of the body, since it bends more or less, and is visible from different points of view; they decrease or increase in it so much more or less on one side by how much they increase or decrease on the opposite side. These proportions change with age, so they are different in children than in adults. "In a man in his first infancy, the width of the shoulders is equal to the length of the face and the space from the shoulder to the elbow, if the arm is bent. But when a man has reached his maximum height, then each of the above-mentioned intervals doubles its length, with the exception of the length of the face." In addition, the proportions change according to the movement of the body parts. The length of the outstretched arm is not equal to the length of the bent arm. "The arm increases and decreases from its full extension to its flexion to an eighth of its length." The proportions also change depending on the position of the body, postures, etc.

Leonardo did not systematize his many notes on art and aesthetics, but his judgments in this area play a big role, including for understanding his own work.

3. Aesthetics of the late Renaissance

3.1. Natural philosophy

A new period in the development of Renaissance aesthetics is the 16th century. During this period, the art of the High Renaissance reaches its greatest maturity and completeness, which then gives way to a new artistic style - mannerism.
In the field of philosophy, the 16th century is the time of the creation of major philosophical and natural philosophical systems, represented by the names of Giordano Bruno, Campanella, Patrici, Montaigne. As Max Dvorak notes, until the 16th century, “there were no philosophers of European significance in the Renaissance. In what grandeur ... the Cinquecento era appears before us! remember Giordano Bruno and Jacob Boehme". It was during this period that the final formation of the main genres of fine art, such as landscape, genre painting, still life, historical painting, portrait, took place.
The greatest philosophers of this time do not bypass the problems of aesthetics. Indicative in this respect is the natural philosophy of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600).
Researchers of Bruno's philosophy note that there is a poetic moment in his philosophical writings. Indeed, his philosophical dialogues bear little resemblance to academic treatises. In them we find too much pathos, mood, figurative comparisons, allegories. By this alone, one can judge that aesthetics is organically woven into the system of Bruno's philosophical thinking. But the aesthetic moment is inherent not only in the style, but also in the content of Bruno's philosophy.
Bruno's aesthetic views are developed on the basis of pantheism, that is, on the basis of a philosophical doctrine based on the absolute identity of nature and God and, in fact, dissolving God in nature. God, according to Bruno, is not outside and not above nature, but inside it itself, in the material things themselves. "God is the infinite in the infinite; he is everywhere and everywhere, not outside and above, but as the most present ...". That is why beauty cannot be an attribute of God, since God is an absolute unity. Beauty is multifaceted.
Pantheistically interpreting nature, Bruno finds in it a living and spiritual beginning, a desire for development, for perfection. In this sense, it is not lower, and even in certain respects higher than art. "Art during creation reasons, thinks. Nature acts without reasoning, immediately. Art acts on someone else's matter, nature - on its own. Art is outside matter, nature is inside matter, moreover: it itself is matter."
Nature, according to Bruno, has an unconscious artistic instinct. In this sense of the word, she "is herself an inner master, a living art, an amazing ability ... calling to reality her own, and not someone else's matter. She does not reason, hesitate and ponder, but easily creates everything from herself, just as the fire blazes and burns, as the light scatters everywhere without difficulty. It does not deviate when moving, but - constant, unified, calm - measures everything, applies and distributes. For that painter and that musician are unskillful have just begun to learn. Farther and ever, nature does its job ... ".
This glorification of the creative potentials of nature is one of the best pages of the philosophical aesthetics of the Renaissance - here the materialistic understanding of beauty and the philosophy of creativity was born.
An important aesthetic point is also contained in the concept of "heroic enthusiasm" as a way of philosophical knowledge, which Bruno substantiated. The Platonic origins of this concept are obvious, they come from the idea of "cognizing madness" formulated by Plato in his Phaedrus. According to Bruno, philosophical knowledge requires a special spiritual uplift, arousal of feelings and thoughts. But this is not a mystical ecstasy, and not a blind intoxication that deprives a person of reason. "The enthusiasm that we talk about in these sayings and which we see in action is not oblivion, but remembrance; not inattention to ourselves, but love and dreams of the beautiful and good, with the help of which we transform ourselves and get the opportunity to become more perfect and become like them. This is not soaring under the rule of the laws of unworthy fate in the snares of bestial passions, but a reasonable impulse that follows the mental perception of good and beautiful ... ".
Enthusiasm in Bruno's interpretation is love for the beautiful and the good. Like neoplatonic love, it reveals spiritual and bodily beauty. But in contrast to the Neoplatonists, who taught that the beauty of the body is just one of the lowest rungs on the ladder of beauty leading to the beauty of the soul, Bruno emphasizes bodily beauty: “A noble passion loves the body or bodily beauty, since the latter is the manifestation of the beauty of the spirit. And even what makes me love the body is a certain spirituality that is visible in it and we call beauty; and it does not consist in larger and smaller sizes, not in certain colors and shapes, but in a certain harmony and coherence of members and colors. ". Thus, in Bruno, spiritual and bodily beauty are inseparable: spiritual beauty is known only through the beauty of the body, and the beauty of the body always evokes a certain spirituality in the one who knows it. This dialectic of ideal and material beauty is one of the most remarkable features of the teachings of J. Bruno.
Bruno's doctrine of the coincidence of opposites, which comes from the philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa, also has a dialectical character. “Whoever wants to know the greatest secrets of nature,” writes Bruno, “let him consider and observe the minima and maxima of contradictions and opposites. Deep magic lies in the ability to deduce the opposite, having previously found the point of unification.”
A significant place in the problems of aesthetics is occupied in the writings of the famous Italian philosopher, one of the founders of utopian socialism, Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639).
Campanella entered the history of science, primarily as the author of the famous utopia "City of the Sun". At the same time, he made a significant contribution to Italian natural philosophical thought. He owns important philosophical works: "Philosophy Proven by Sensations", "Real Philosophy", "Rational Philosophy", "Metaphysics". A significant place in these works is occupied by questions of aesthetics. So, in "Metaphysics" there is a special chapter - "On the Beautiful". In addition, Campanella owns a small essay "Poetics", dedicated to the analysis of poetic creativity.
The aesthetic views of Campanella are distinguished by their originality. First of all, Campanella sharply opposes the scholastic tradition, both in the field of philosophy and aesthetics. He criticizes all authorities in the field of philosophy, rejecting equally both the "myths of Plato" and the "fictions" of Aristotle. In the field of aesthetics, this criticism characteristic of Campanella is manifested, first of all, in the refutation of the traditional doctrine of the harmony of the spheres, in the assertion that this harmony does not agree with the data of sensory knowledge. "In vain Plato and Pythagoras represent the harmony of the world like our music - they are mad in this, like someone who would attribute our sensations of taste and smell to the universe. If there is harmony in the sky and among the angels, then it has other bases and consonances than the fifth , quart or octave".
At the heart of the aesthetic teachings of Campanella is hylozoism - the doctrine of the universal animation of nature. Feelings are embedded in matter itself, otherwise, according to Campanella, the world would immediately "turn into chaos." That is why the main property of all being is the desire for self-preservation. In humans, this desire is associated with pleasure. "Pleasure is a feeling of self-preservation, while suffering is a feeling of evil and destruction." The sense of beauty is also associated with a sense of self-preservation, a sense of fullness of life and health. "When we see people healthy, full of life, free, well-dressed, we rejoice, because we experience a feeling of happiness and the preservation of our nature."
The original concept of beauty is developed by Campanella in the essay "On the Beautiful". Here he does not follow any of the leading aesthetic trends of the Renaissance - Aristotelianism or Neoplatonism.
Refusing to look at beauty as harmony or proportion, Campanella revives Socrates' idea that beauty is a certain kind of expediency. The beautiful, according to Campanella, arises as the correspondence of an object to its purpose, its function. “Everything that is good for using a thing is called beautiful if it shows signs of such use. A sword is called beautiful that bends and does not remain bent, and one that cuts and stabs and has a length sufficient to inflict wounds. But if it is so long and heavy that it cannot be moved, it is called ugly. A sickle is said to be beautiful that is fit for cutting, therefore it is more beautiful when it is of iron and not of gold. In the same way, a mirror is beautiful when it reflects the true appearance, not when it's golden"
Thus, the beauty of Campanella is functional. It lies not in a beautiful appearance, but in internal expediency. That is why beauty is relative. What is beautiful in one respect is ugly in another. “So the doctor calls that rhubarb beautiful that is suitable for purification, and ugly that which is not suitable. eye, for it speaks of damage to the eye and of illness"
All these arguments largely repeat the provisions of ancient dialectics. Using the tradition coming from Socrates, Campanella develops the dialectical concept of beauty. This concept does not reject the ugly in art, but includes it as a correlative moment of beauty.
Beautiful and ugly are relative terms. Campanella expresses a typical Renaissance view, believing that the ugly is not contained in the essence of being itself, in nature itself. “Just as there is no essential evil, but every thing is by its nature good, although for others it is evil, for example, as heat is for cold, so there is no essential ugliness in the world, but only in relation to those to whom it indicates evil. Therefore, the enemy appears ugly to his enemy, and beautiful to his friend.In nature, however, there is evil as a defect and a certain violation of purity, which attracts things that come from the idea to non-existence; and, as said, ugliness in essences is a sign of this lack. and breaches of cleanliness.
Thus, the ugly appears in Campanella as just a certain defect, a certain violation of the usual order of things. The purpose of art is, therefore, to correct the deficiency of nature. This is the art of imitation. “Art, after all,” says Campanella, “is an imitation of nature. The hell described in Dante’s poem is called more beautiful than the paradise described there, because, imitating, he showed more art in one case than in another, although in reality heaven is beautiful, but hell is terrible.
In general, Campanella's aesthetics contains principles that sometimes go beyond the boundaries of Renaissance aesthetics; the connection of beauty with utility, with the social feelings of a person, the assertion of the relativity of beauty - all these provisions testify to the maturation of new aesthetic principles in the aesthetics of the Renaissance.

3.2. Crisis of humanism

From the end of the XV century. important changes are brewing in the economic and political life of Italy, caused by the movement of trade routes in connection with the discovery of America (1492) and a new route to India (1498). Northern Italy's trade advantage waned. This led to its economic and political weakening. Italy is increasingly becoming the object of the expansionist desires of France and Spain. It is subjected to military plunder and loses its independence. All this leads to the activation of the Catholic reaction, encouraged by the Spaniards. The activities of the Inquisition are intensifying, new monastic orders are being created. The Papal Curia already presents the world as a "garden overgrown with weeds." He says: "The whole world is a prison with many locks, dungeons and dungeons, and Denmark is one of the worst." In Macbeth, life is also interpreted pessimistically:
So burn it out, fagot!
What is life? A fleeting shadow, buffoon,
Furiously noisy on the stage
And an hour later forgotten by everyone; story
In the mouth of a fool, rich in words
And the ringing of phrases, but poor in meaning.
Shakespeare is already clearly aware of the hostile nature of the emerging capitalist relations to art and beauty. He understands that in the conditions of chaos of egoistic wills, there is almost no room left for the unrestricted development of the human personality. The end of the Renaissance utopia about the unlimited perfection of man in a comic form was proclaimed by Cervantes. The last books of Rabelais' novel "Gargantua and Pantagruel" are also imbued with pessimism. Thus, what the theorists of the art of the Renaissance did not notice, practices reflected with great force in their work. However, Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Cervantes still remained devoted exponents of the great principles of humanism, although they saw how they collapse in the world of bourgeois prose.
The ideals of humanism underwent a significant metamorphosis in the art of the Baroque. In the works of many artists of this style, the character of a person no longer emphasizes the harmonic principle and civic pathos, and his titanism is now opposed by those features that characterize a person as a weak being, under the rule of incomprehensible supernatural forces.
Baroque art reflects the intensification of Catholic reaction. This is reflected in the themes of the works, which now often depict martyrs for the Christian faith, various kinds of ecstatic states, scenes of suicide, people who reject worldly temptations and accept martyrdom. Sometimes hedonistic motives appear in Baroque art, but they are combined with motives of repentance, and, as a rule, the ascetic doctrine prevails here.
The stylistic means also correspond to the new ideological complex. In the visual arts, straight lines, joyful colors, clear plastic forms, harmony and proportionality (which is typical of the Renaissance) are replaced in the Baroque by intricate, winding lines, massive dynamics of forms, dark and gloomy tones, vague and exciting chiaroscuro, sharp contrasts, dissonances. The same picture is observed in verbal art. Poetry becomes pretentious and mannered: they write poems in the form of a glass, a cross, a rhombus; invent cutesy, pompous metaphors.
Baroque art is a controversial phenomenon. Significant works of art were created within its framework. However, it did not put forward prominent theorists, and the influence of art itself was not as strong as that of Renaissance art or the art of classicism. But it would be a mistake to underestimate his influence on the formation of realistic art in subsequent periods in the development of world art. Some features of the Baroque are being revived in contemporary modernist art.

Conclusion

Emphasizing the cognitive value of art, the aesthetics of the Renaissance pays great attention to external credibility when reflecting reality, since the real world, rehabilitated by humanists with great pathos, is worthy of adequate and accurate reproduction. In this regard, their interest in the technical problems of art and, above all, in painting is completely understandable. Linear and aerial perspective, chiaroscuro, local and tonal color, proportion - all these issues are discussed in the most lively way. And we must pay tribute to the humanists: here they have achieved such successes that it is difficult to overestimate. Humanists attach great importance to anatomy, mathematics, and the study of nature in general. Demanding accuracy in reproducing the real world, however, they are very far from striving to copy objects and phenomena of reality in a naturalistic way. Loyalty to nature for them does not mean blind imitation of it. Beauty is poured into separate objects, and a work of art must collect it into one whole, without violating fidelity to nature. In the treatise "On the Statue" Alberti, trying to determine the highest beauty that nature endowed many bodies, as if distributing it accordingly between them, wrote: "... and in this we imitated the one who created the image of the goddess for the Crotons, borrowing from the most girls of outstanding beauty, everything that in each of them was the most elegant and refined in terms of the beauty of forms, and transferring this to our work.So we chose a number of bodies, the most beautiful, according to experts, and from these bodies we borrowed our measurements, and then, comparing them with each other, and, throwing the deviations in one direction or another, we chose those average values \u200b\u200bthat were confirmed by the coincidence of a whole series of measurements using the exemped.
Durer expresses a similar thought: "It is impossible for an artist to draw a beautiful figure from one person. For there is no such beautiful person on earth who could not be even more beautiful."
In this understanding of beauty by humanists, a feature of the realistic concept of the Renaissance is revealed. No matter how high their opinion of man and nature, nevertheless, as is clear from Alberti's statement, they are not inclined to declare the first nature that comes across to be the canon of perfection. Interest in the unique originality of the individual, which manifested itself in the heyday of portraiture, is combined among Renaissance artists with the desire to discard "deviations in one direction or another" and take the "average value" as the norm, which means nothing more than an orientation towards the general, typical. The aesthetics of the Renaissance is, first of all, the aesthetics of the ideal. However, for humanists, the ideal is something that is not opposed to reality itself. They do not doubt the reality of the heroic principle, the reality of the beautiful. Therefore, their desire for idealization in no way contradicts the principles of artistic truth. After all, the very ideas of humanists about the limitless possibilities of the harmonious development of man could not at that time be considered only a utopia. Therefore, we believe in the heroes of Rabelais, no matter how he idealized their exploits to fully portray these features. Considering the problem of artistic truth, the theorists of the Renaissance spontaneously ran into the dialectic of the general and the individual in relation to the artistic image. As noted above, humanists are looking for a balance between the ideal and reality, truth and fantasy . Their search for the right relationship between the individual and the general is directed along the same line. This problem is most sharply posed by Albert in his treatise On the Statue. “With sculptors, if I interpret it correctly,” he wrote, “the ways of grasping similarity are directed along two channels, namely: on the one hand, the image they create should, in the final analysis, be as similar as possible to a living being, in in this case, on a person, and it does not matter at all whether they reproduce the image of Socrates, Plato, or some other famous person - they consider it quite sufficient if they achieve that their work is similar to a person in general, even the most unknown; on the other hand , we must try to reproduce and depict not only a person in general, but the face and whole bodily appearance of this particular person, for example Caesar, or Cato, or any other famous person, just like that, in this position - sitting on a tribunal or delivering a speech in a popular assembly. "And then Alberti points to rules by which one can achieve these goals.Alberti does not resolve this antinomy, he deviates towards solving purely technical problems.But the very identification of the dialectic of the artistic image is a great merit of the humanist.
The dialectical interpretation of the image (dialectic here appears in its original form) is due to the fact that the very process of cognition is also interpreted dialectically by humanists. Humanists do not yet oppose feelings and reason. And although they are waging a struggle with the Middle Ages under the banner of reason, the latter does not appear in them in a one-sided, mathematically rational form and is not yet opposed to sensuality.
The world for them has not yet lost its multicoloredness, has not turned into the abstract sensibility of a geometer, the mind has also not acquired a one-sided development, but appears in the form of complex, sometimes even semi-fantastic thinking, while not devoid of the ability in naive simplicity to guess the real dialectics of the real world (compare for example, the dialectical conjectures of Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, etc.). All this affected both the nature of realism and the aesthetic concepts of Renaissance thinkers.
The aesthetics of the Renaissance is not an absolutely homogeneous phenomenon. There were different currents that often clashed with each other. The culture of the Renaissance itself went through a number of stages. Aesthetic ideas, concepts and theories changed accordingly. This requires a special study. But for all the complexity and inconsistency of the aesthetics of the Renaissance, it was still a realistic aesthetics, closely connected with artistic practice, aimed at reality, objective.
The ideas of humanism are the spiritual basis for the flourishing of Renaissance art. The art of the Renaissance is imbued with the ideals of humanism; it created the image of a beautiful, harmoniously developed person. The Italian humanists demanded freedom for man. But freedom in the understanding of the Italian Renaissance had in mind the individual. Humanism proved that a person in his feelings, in his thoughts, in his beliefs is not subject to any guardianship, that there should not be willpower over him, preventing him from feeling and thinking as he wants. In modern science there is no unambiguous understanding of the nature, structure and chronological framework of Renaissance humanism. But, of course, humanism should be considered as the main ideological content of the Renaissance culture, inseparable from the entire course of the historical development of Italy in the era of the beginning of the disintegration of feudal and the emergence of capitalist relations. Humanism was a progressive ideological movement that contributed to the establishment of a means of culture, relying primarily on the ancient heritage. Italian humanism went through a series of stages: formation in the 14th century, a bright heyday of the next century, internal restructuring and gradual declines in the 16th century. The evolution of the Italian Renaissance was closely connected with the development of philosophy, political ideology, science, and other forms of social consciousness and, in turn, had a powerful impact on the artistic culture of the Renaissance.
Revived on an ancient basis, humanitarian knowledge, including ethics, rhetoric, philology, history, turned out to be the main area in the formation and development of humanism, the ideological core of which was the doctrine of man, his place and role in nature and society. This doctrine developed mainly in ethics and was enriched in various areas of the Renaissance culture. Humanistic ethics brought to the fore the problem of man's earthly destiny, the achievement of happiness through his own efforts. Humanists approached the issues of social ethics in a new way, in the solution of which they relied on ideas about the power of man's creative abilities and will, about his wide possibilities for building happiness on earth. They considered the harmony of the interests of the individual and society to be an important prerequisite for success, they put forward the ideal of the free development of the individual and the improvement of the social organism and political orders, which is inextricably linked with it. This gave a pronounced character to many ethical ideas and teachings of the Italian humanists.
Many problems developed in humanistic ethics acquire a new meaning and special relevance in our era, when the moral stimuli of human activity perform an increasingly important social function.

Women's Portal Flero

Introduction

1. Aesthetics of the early Renaissance as the aesthetics of early humanism

2. Aesthetics of the High Renaissance

2.1. Neoplatonism

2.2. Alberti and the theory of art of the 15th century

3. Aesthetics of the late Renaissance

3.1. Natural philosophy

3.2. Crisis of humanism

Conclusion

Used Books

1. Aesthetics of the early Renaissance as the aesthetics of early humanism

2. Aesthetics of the High Renaissance

2.1. Neoplatonism

2.2. Alberti and the theory of art of the 15th century

3. Aesthetics of the late Renaissance

3.1. Natural philosophy

3.2. Crisis of humanism

Conclusion

RELATED ARTICLES