john onians

Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square is one of the most famous works in the history of art (Figure 12.1). When he painted it in 1915 it was unlike anything that had been made previously. Is it beautiful? People take different sides on the issue and both can give good reasons for their views. Those reasons will often reflect the influence of conversations they have had and books and articles they have read. Such opinions are part of a debate on philosophical aesthetics that has been running since the ancient Greeks. Typically, arguments come from the conscious brain, the part that the Greeks taught us to value most highly. This essay could continue this debate, relating different opinions on Black Square to the millennia-old discussions about beauty, but in the context of this volume, with its partly medical inspiration, it seems more appropriate to talk about beauty from a very different point of view: the biological, considering not just the conscious mind, but the whole central nervous system.

ed was the arena not of marketing, but of production. Given the way products like pots were bought in large numbers from particular workshops, once the merchant had decided that their deigma or demonstration sample was the best for his customers great importance must have attached to the quality of the product and to its standardization. A workshop that could produce many pots which were as close to the sample or ideal form as possible would clearly be more successful than one that could not. Pots of varying form and quality would inevitably put off purchasers who would hesitate, then as now, being uncertain which was the best. Modern bakeries take great care to ensure that every loaf comes out of the oven looking exactly like all the others in shape and colour and the workers in the kilns of the potters' quarter of Athens, the Kerameikos, must have done the same. Certainly there is a remarkable constancy of shape, colour and finish in the Attic black and red figure pots which are the glory of their production. Nowadays constancy of product in series production is above all guaranteed by automation and careful maintenance of the production apparatus, but in ancient Greece where there were no micrometers or thermometers such control was impossible. Instead the principal aid to quality control was the use of a paradeigma or exemplar from which all those involved in production would work. The word paradeigma means Idea and Product: Potter and Philosopher in Classical Athens 67 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.127 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 06:29:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

... bc-ad 600 Jeffrey Blomster 54 South America 500 bc-ad 600 Frank Meddens 56 Europe Europe 500 bc-ad 300 Timothy Taylor 58 The ... bc-ad 600 Peter Shinnie 72 The Nile Valley 500 bc-ad 300 Christina Riggs 74 North Africa ad 300-600 Ruth Leader-Newby 76 Asia & ...

The artistic creativity of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo can be studied from a neuroscientific perspective. We can appreciate their innovativeness if we recognize that creativity is rare, for good evolutionary reasons. Our genetic material predisposes us to imitate our elders and betters because it is safer that way. This is why norms are so prevalent. This is also why innovation is rare, and why it is often found in the work of individuals who, for some reason, are outside the norm. Such people will possess neural resources that are exceptional, and none will be more important for artists than their default mode networks (DMN), which are vital because of their integration of past memories, present experience, and future planning. The more independent and non-normative the artist, the more crucial are such resources, especially for artists such as Leonardo and Michelangelo. Their family backgrounds, family relationships, and experiences were all unlike those of other people, equipping them with highly differentiated networks, which they were in a good position to exploit because of their brains’ neuroplasticity and their training in attention which gave them their mental discipline. These two artists were also skilled in several fields which contributed to their creativity. Their conscious interdisciplinarity included insights from visual arts and music (for Leonardo), from architecture (for Michelangelo), and from the study of human anatomy for both artists.

... Art and thought in the Hellenistic Age: The Greek world view, 350-50 BC. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Onians, John (b. 1942, d. ----. ... PAGES (INTRO/BODY): 192 p. SUBJECT(S): Art, Hellenistic. DISCIPLINE: No discipline assigned. LC NUMBER: N5630 .O54. ...

The title of this lecture may arouse false expectations. Some of you will have come hoping for a disquisition on high theory. If you have, you will be disappointed. This talk is not about linguistics or philosophy. It is not even about architecture. Probably I should have called it ‘buildings, words and the body’ or just ‘living with buildings’. Far from uniting three lofty academic disciplines, as the title seems to do, this paper seeks to remind us of what we have lost by operating with such distinct and lofty categories. Instead of celebrating the separate natures of building, talking and thinking, it endeavours to draw attention to their inseparability. If it succeeds you will by the end be more aware of the extent to which none of these activities can happen without the others being involved. What is argued is that the making of buildings and the experiencing of buildings are both associated with distinctive mental operations and that this association is apparent in our use of language. To put it another way, we use metaphors from architecture to articulate our thoughts because the processes of design and construction and the experience of using building relate to basic mental operations and basic psychological needs. In other words, when we derive from building design the metaphor ‘plan’, as in ‘five-year plan’, or from building construction the expression ‘foundations’, as in ‘foundations of economic theory’ or from the experience of a building once constructed the concept of ’pillars’, as in ‘pillars of society’, we do so because there is a uniquely close relationship between building and thinking. It is on this relationship that I want to reflect. Since the topic is as vast as the worldwide history of architecture and thought, I will probably not get very far this evening. But I hope at least to demonstrate its importance, not just for architectural historians, but for linguisticians and philosophers as well. As I will argue, the study of architectural metaphors sheds light equally on the history of architecture, the history of language and the history of thought.

Michael Baxandall was probably the most important art historian of his generation, not just in Britain but in the world. In a series of books published between 1971 and 2003 he kept expanding the frontiers of the discipline, introducing new topics, new ways of writing, and new explanatory models, always demanding of himself and his readers an undissembling clarity of thought and expression. If art history is now a field that can hold its own with more established areas of the humanities, it is largely because Baxandall had a talent to transmit to others through the printed page the powerful intellectual resources he had built up through tireless inward reflection. These resources he applied with equal engagement to Italian Renaissance art criticism, German wood sculpture, the understanding of shadows in the 18th century, the planning of the Forth Bridge, and the functions of the neural structure of the retina.

This essential work contains an eclectic collection of original essays by a group of Professor Ernst Gombrich's pupils. Masters now themselves and dispersed throughout the world, Gombrich's pupils have continued their independent research, attaining distinction in countless fields. Not forming a 'school' in any narrow sense, they reflect the influence of their master rather in their manifold range of interests and in an underlying robust individualism. This careful selection of essays, presented in affectionate tribute, will be read and re-read with undying interest and pleasure, not exclusively by scholars or admirers of Gombrich worldwide but, moreover, by any individual who is curious about the nature of art and the relation we bear to it. Each essay offers a distinctive outlook that is even fresher than the last: they are united in harmony not only by their mutual focus on the same themes, but by a recognizable thread of the foundations that Gombrich laid.

perfection was more the product of physical fear and the need to guarantee one’s security by the creation of the perfect warrior, warriors such as those shown on the frieze of the mausoleum of Halicarnassus c. 353 Bc. The elegant triangles and parallelograms of their bodies probably reflect the common influence of artistic schemata which derive from Polykleitus, and parade-ground poses developed in military training such as that recommended by Plato at the same period. Polykleitus’ tetragonot statues, like Pythagoras’ mathematikol and Plato’s geometretoi, are all contributions to the development of the perfect military male. The disciples whom Pythagoras and Plato sought in the gymnasia of Croton and Athens were not just learned in mathematics and geometry, they actually were ’mathematical’ and ’geometrical’. Like the Doryphorus, they were young men reduced as far as possible to mathematical constructs, ’wrought square’ by their teachers, as Simonides would have said.

Part of a symposium providing a range of critical perspectives on rethinking the art historical canon. The writer discusses the value of the concept of world art studies. Perhaps its greatest immediate advantage is that everyone can contribute to the definition of the concept of world art studies because no one knows what it is. It raises basic questions about future developments in the study of art, requiring the mapping of new areas of inquiry and the formulation of new ways of examining them. Issues that need to be addressed include art's basis in human physiology and psychology, the human relation to the natural environment, and the reasons for the origin of artistic activity and for its abiding importance throughout various times and places. A history of art that explores such issues will inevitably be more a natural than a cultural history. If the field of world art studies provides the context for writing a new natural history of art, it will only be continuing what should be a canonical tradition.

Can visual imagining ever be other than a brain-bound, organismically internal process? The practices of artists with aphantasia - the congenital or acquired incapacity to generate visual mental imagery - suggests that it can. Here we report on a qualitative study of ‘aphantasic’ artists and find that imagery lack coincides with a dependence on external, environmental, structures to generate artwork. Indeed, physical manipulations of external media seem to take place in lieu of the ability to generate and manipulate internal, mental images. Cognitive functions that could, for the non-aphantasic, be carried out by mental imagery - such as bringing non-conscious visio-spatial relationships to awareness - can only be carried out for the aphantasic by manipulating their environment. Thus aphantasic art-making constitutes extended visual imagining. As such, it undermines the universality of the ‘hylomorphic’ model of art-making, in which the work is mentally preconceived before being realised in the material world, with the fact of neurocognitive diversity.

workshop and only presented after a process of laborious polishing, Barolsky lets us share a much more vital experience. Even those scholars who do hunt only seem to be after a buried treasure of facts and documents; or, if they treat their quarry as living, they lumber after it—especially if it is Michelangelo or Vasari—as if it were a slow-moving elephant. Barolsky's hunt, by contrast, fully acknowl edges the extraordinary resourcefulness of both Michelangelo and Vasari in deceiving their pursuers. Like a great expert in artists in the wild, he shows how, even as they seem [Paul Barolsky, Michelangelo's Nose (Uni versity Park: Perm State University Press,

... Everyone will have seen some reproductions of these sculptures—large-scale marbles in niches, on balustrades or in formal gardens; bronze and porcelain reductions on mantelpieces or in showcases; punctuating the painted views of Roman ruins or coarsely travestied in ...

academic practitioners of sociology are largely ignored. These positions do have more fundamental results. Adams seems to believe that there is a pure logic and an asocial objective science. These are obviously extremely contentious positions (as Adams knows). To my mind, he is too dismissive of post-Kuhnian studies of science, which are mentioned only extremely briefly through the work of Barnes on Kuhn, as it is here that some of the fundamental challenges to Adams’ positions could be found. In some respects this is even odder given his sympathetic comments on Wittgenstein in places. An engagement with, for example, David Bloor’s work on the Strong Programme and its Wittgensteinian inflections would have been welcome.

... bc-ad 600 Jeffrey Blomster 54 South America 500 bc-ad 600 Frank Meddens 56 Europe Europe 500 bc-ad 300 Timothy Taylor 58 The ... bc-ad 600 Peter Shinnie 72 The Nile Valley 500 bc-ad 300 Christina Riggs 74 North Africa ad 300-600 Ruth Leader-Newby 76 Asia & ...

I used to be almost embarrassed to admit to friends and colleagues the place where I spent so many hours with things medieval. It was constructed to be, and can still be be construed as, celebrating those aspects of art history that I had despised-triumphant nationalism, a purely stylistic ...

John Onians, European Art: A Neuroarthistory. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016. 320 pages. ISBN-10: 0300212798. ISBN-13: 9780300212792. £40.50.What bearing should considerations of human nature have on the study of art? Many might disagree with the basic premise of this question. There is no such thing as 'human nature,' they might state, for we are shaped by multiple social, cultural and linguistic determinations. This rules out the very possibility of talking about human nature in the first place. As Hannah Arendt suggested in a much discussed argument, when stripped of the 'external' predicates of culture and society, what is revealed is not the essence of human being, but something that is hardly human at all, what Giorgio Agamben has since referred to as 'bare life.' 1Yet the matter is not so easily resolved. Arendt and other promoters of constructionist theories of the self are, after all, offering a thesis about human nature (that it is socially constructed). Moreover, there are many aspects of human being that would hardly be disputed. We are the outcome, it is generally agreed, of biological evolution. The details may remain areas for disagreement and refinement, but the consensus is that our biological character is the result of the processes of natural and sexual selection, that we are endowed with characteristics that conferred some kind of competitive advantage. The disappearance of Neanderthal humanoids, for example, is usually attributed to the fact that they were unable to complete with modern humans for resources, once the latter, with superior cognitive powers and forms of social organization, started encroaching on the same European territory. With the exception of a small number of modern day Cartesians, it is also widely accepted that human mental activity is intimately connected with human physiology. Cognition does not operate somewhere outside of the body. Analysis of the relation between brain functions and mental activity has thrown up remarkable findings; correlations between the two enable scientists to localize a wide range of cognitive functions in the brain.Given such consensus, it seems a small logical step to then wonder how our understanding of art could be informed by our view of it as the product of an evolved biological organism with a brain that permits operations of almost unimaginable complexity. A growing number of commentators have explored the possibilities of such an approach. The prominent aesthetician Noel Carroll, for example, has argued that the sheer ubiquity of art objects throughout human history and prehistory suggests it is implausible to think of art diffusing from a single source as a cultural product. Instead, it is more likely to be grounded, in ways still to be determined, in basic features of human nature. Against those who would emphasise the social specificity of art practices, to the extent of denying the crosscultural validity of the category of art, Carroll argues that 'we have an inbred capacity to detect the expressive behavior of our conspecifics as it is inscribed in the sensuous media of the traditional arts. We may not know what a tribal decoration means, but we know that, by means of it, its maker intends to communicate something special, something that is worth remarking on.'2 The capacity for making and appreciating art may well be a universal feature of human nature.A growing number of luminaries in art history have followed this kind of argument, focusing on the brain. Assuming the supervenience of the brain and the mind, it is reasoned, the science of the brain should therefore be able to cast some light on art, as the product of intentional activity.3 John Onians's European Art: A Neuroarthistory is the latest example of this phenomenon. It follows on from his earlier book Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki, in which he sought to lay down the intellectual genealogy of this new field of study. …

This essential work contains an eclectic collection of original essays by a group of Professor Ernst Gombrich's pupils. Masters now themselves and dispersed throughout the world, Gombrich's pupils have continued their independent research, attaining distinction in countless fields. Not forming a 'school' in any narrow sense, they reflect the influence of their master rather in their manifold range of interests and in an underlying robust individualism. This careful selection of essays, presented in affectionate tribute, will be read and re-read with undying interest and pleasure, not exclusively by scholars or admirers of Gombrich worldwide but, moreover, by any individual who is curious about the nature of art and the relation we bear to it. Each essay offers a distinctive outlook that is even fresher than the last: they are united in harmony not only by their mutual focus on the same themes, but by a recognizable thread of the foundations that Gombrich laid.

84-9801-040-3. Historia del arte que presenta comparativamente y con un uso extenso de mapas el desarrollo de las diversas manifestaciones (pintura, arquitectura, escultura y otras) en cuatro regiones continentales del planeta (América, Europa, Africa y Asia y el Pacífico) a lo largo ...