Description
Book SynopsisFor thirty years John Onians has been trying to expand and deepen the discipline of art history. His books, Art and Thought in the Hellenistic Age (1979), Bearers of Meaning. The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (1988) and Classical Art and the Cultures of Greece and Rome (1999), sought to extend the understanding of art as an aspect of culture, while his current project, A Natural History of Art, is designed to show how that understanding can be further enhanced by the recognition that art, like all of culture, is based in human neurobiology, and so in nature. He has also been active as a founding editor of the journal Art History in 1978, in setting up the World Art Research Programme at the University of East Anglia in 1994 and becoming the first Director of Research and Academic Programs at the Clark Art Institute in 1997.
The present volume gathers together a selection of the editorials, articles, conference papers and essays, though which he has furthered his own attempts to renew art history and participated in those of others. They reflect the influence of many personal contacts built up during three decades of teaching and lecturing in many countries in Europe, America, Asia and Australia.
Table of ContentsTheory. Art history, Kunstgeschichte and historia
Art and ritual. The biological connection
Architecture, metaphor and the mind
I wonder... A short history of amazement
World Art Studies and the need for a new natural history of art; Architecture and painting: the biological connection
Inside the brain: looking for the roots of art history
Gombrich and the biological explanation of art
Prehistory. The origins of art
The biological and geographical bases of cultural borders: the case of the earliest Palaeolithic art
Ancient world. From the double crown to the double pediment
Tabernacle and Temple and the Cosmos of the Jews
War, mathematics and art in Classical Greece
Idea and product: potter and philosopher in Classical Athens
The Greek temple and the Greek brain
Quintilian and the idea of Roman art
Abstraction and imagination in Late Antiquity
Renaissance. Alberti and Filarete
Brunelleschi: humanist or nationalist
Leon Battista Alberti: the problem of personal and urban identity
How to listen to Renaissance art
The biological basis of Renaissance aesthetics
Alberti and the neuropsychology of style
China. Chinese painting in the Twentieth Century and in the context of World Art Studies
The Nature of art in Lin Fengmian's China: a neuropsychological perspective
Additional Notes
Index
