Art is one of the unique forms which reflect the personal, social, and cultural values of society. Art, in different forms and genres, can be seen as a philosophy of life reflecting the values, traditions, and feelings of people. The philosophy of art can be seen as individual opinion buttressed by rhetorical skills that contain truth. Different art forms are more properly regarded as the systematic and critical assessment of the grounds for belief. It characteristically aspires to something motivated than the rhetorical and political, and presumes to be focused on things more substantial than mere assertion (Singer, 2009). Since ancient times, love has been an important and topical theme in art reflecting unique feelings and relations between people, between God and a person, and between a person and nature (Buchholz et al 2007). Different art forms and genres interpret art as a strong feeling experienced by humans only.
Since ancient times, love has been the main theme in lyrics, painting, and music. For instance, in ancient Greece, love scenes were depicted in pottery and sculpture including such works as “Man and boy about to make love” Attic red-figure plate 530-430 BCE., Theseus and Amphitrite Attic Red Figure Vase Painting – Greek Pottery 5th BCE. In ancient Greece and Rome, love was perceived as a sexual feeling (love between men and women, and love between men), and as a uniquely authentic and emotional feeling. Ancient painters and artists try to penetrate more and more deeply into human nature, always keeping hold of the total experience by seeing the analyzed elements of love in the whole, distinguished but not separated from one another (Singer, 2009). Analysis of love relations was not understood after a model of an operation necessarily involving a division of parts from a whole which then has to be put back together again-as if our task were similar to dissecting a specimen in the laboratory. In Ancient Rome, special attention was paid to homosexual relations and true love between men.
The most well-known work of this period is ‘Young man and teenager engaging in sex, a fragment of a black-figure Attic cup, 550 BCE–525 BCE” There is no need to fear that the achievement of love relations about human psychic life has to lead to separate the parts in that way. Ancient art is thus founded in the human need to make sense of the world and our place in it. These themes of love reflected general social norms and principles based on free love relations and the increasing role of freedom in this sphere. What distinguishes it from mere individual viewpoint and naïveté is its rejection of passionate convictions as adequate grounds for belief and action and its commitment to careful examination of cultural values and principles (Buchholz et al 2007).
In contrast to the previous period, the authentic perception of love was changed greatly. During the Middle Ages in Europe, the theme of love was influenced by the increasing role of church and religion in the life of citizens. The theme of love was not depicted openly but artists gave some hints to viewers that romantic relations take place between two people. The Canterbury Tales by J. Chaucer vividly portray love relations between low and middle-class townspeople. This example allows us to say that since a person is not a simple being, only two courses are open: to advocate darkness as a method or to analyze by distinguishing within unity-for there is no need to join up what is distinguished but never separated. It is only a matter of seeing the love and with precision what is first seen as a blurred and haphazard whole. It is a manifestation of conscious experience in order to see each part as a part, which means to see it within the whole, with all the other parts (Singer, 2009).
During the Middle Ages, love for God was the main and the core theme of paintings.
For instance, while experiencing divine love, a common man may also be experiencing the warmth of God, the sweetness of the wind, the glory of light, and movement in nature. These can be distractions from attending to and loving another person. Love can also be integrated into the religious experience. The paintings depicted holy figures and people important to Church. It was a period of symbolism in a painting depicting divine love to God and the submission of a human. The most prominent painters of this period were the Florentine Giotto di Bondone (1266/76–1337) and the Roman Pietro Cavallini (ca. 1240–after ca. 1330). They depicted the glory of God and his power as a symbol of the loved one or something to rejoice in for the sake of the loved one (Singer, 2009). For every religious person, love was accepted as a gift and depicted in frescos. So also hunger and tiredness were merely concurrent experiences, distracting from and so in disagreement with the experience of God’s love. These painters took into the full experience of God’s love, as when they are with cognizant freedom chosen and gladly endured in serving the loved one. (Buchholz et al 2007).
Similar to the previous interpretation of art, the style of Byzantine Art was based on formal expressions and symbolic descriptions of events and people. Though, to distinguish the parts requires focusing attention now on one and now on another and now on the interaction between these as, for instance, one may in ordinary observation note the color and the contour of the divine face, the arch of the eyebrows, the curve of the lips, and the relation between these. For instance, the image of the Virgin with a child reflects the mother’s love and true internal feelings and emotions. This does not require isolating the parts of love and emotions. Rather, each element is attended to precisely as a part within a whole which viewers desire to apprehend, the human face (Singer, 2009).
In contrast to the previous historical and cultural period of time, the period of Renaissance portrayed love as a unique feeling typical for all social classes and nations. The most prominent artists of this period were Michelangelo, Alberti, Raphael, Donatello, etc. The unique feature of this period was realism reflected in all genres and styles. These psychic and somatic elements of love insofar as they form a unity in consciousness were called love in the sense of the total concrete experience of love. All the views of love the artists had seen in the dialectical way of opinions found some justifying evidence within this total experience-at least in the experience as it typically arises. For instance, the painting, Creation of Adam by Michelangelo depicts the love relations and nude bodies of Adam and young nymphs. This period depicts that what that fundamental or core part of the total experience remains obscure in unreflected experience. There was some undefined insight that enables artists up to a certain point to generally agree on what it was not. Here artists all find themselves in a position similar to that of the philosopher whom critics describe as having that first basic instinct (Singer, 2009). The artist could not communicate it positively, and could not even grasp it in reflection. It showed itself in its “negative power” (Stokstad, 2004).
The sculpture was one of the main art forms in Italy during the Renaissance. The famous sculpture of David by Michelangelo describes a beautiful human body loved and appraised by Italians. During this period, artists have not yet formulated it for themselves and do not quite know what it is until they give it expression. But they know when they have not been faithful to it. So with the experience of love. Viewers know very well up to a point what within the total experience is not the vivifying root that makes the experience of love (Buchholz et al 2007).
The period of Romanticism and in painting, music, literature, and architecture reflected a love of man to nature and the surrounding. Romanticism in literature was marked by a trend that determined a conceptually new vision of reality and the spiritual world. In Ireland, no native literature evolved amongst an overwhelmingly Catholic populace ruled and penalized by an Anglo-Irish hierarchy. But the country’s attachment to Rome gave it its own cultural links with the Continent via the Irish Colleges in France and those native Irishmen who attended French or Italian military academies or became engaged in business overseas. The Lake poets included Robert Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, William Cobbett, William Blake, etc.
During this period, what was brought to light by this mode of reflection on experience was not brought into the light of consciousness for the first time. It was in consciousness but usually escaped clear awareness because attention was focused elsewhere. As far as any clear and discriminating awareness goes, most of what was in artistic consciousness was as unknown as what was in the unconscious, and sometimes much harder to get into the focus of discriminating attention than it was to bring into consciousness the content of the lifeless. British Romanticism was represented by William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, ir Joshua Reynolds, Joseph Wright of Derby, George Stubbs, and John Constable. The French Romantic movement was represented by Eugene Delacroix, Theodore Gericault, Jacques-Louis David, Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, Antoine-Jean Gros, Adelaide Labelle-Guiard. The theme of love was free in interpretation but it was influenced by the theme of nature and love to the environment. Romantic love dominated in relations between people portrayed by these artists (Buchholz et al 2007).
The principal effort was not to suggest what experience might imply nor what it demanded its intelligibility but brought the obscure because of profound elements of conscious experience into the light of attention. Love was more accurate to say the effort was to bring the light of methodically moving attention to bear on the obscure depths of the knowledge of love. When the conceptual analysis was used, it was ordinarily to suggest directions for the movement of attention or to confirm what was discerned by showing that what viewers have seen was what they should have expected to see since the intelligibility of what they started with would not allow it to be otherwise (Buchholz et al 2007).
During the Romantic period, the feeling of love referred to a sensation of touch or to an experience of pain or pleasure, as well as to what the audience called emotion or passion. In painting, love was sometimes limited in meaning to a response at the sensuous rather than at the spiritual level. Passion was limited to mean only a very strong emotion or even only sexual emotion (Sternberg and Weis 20090. On the other hand, love was broadened to mean any reception of influence from reality, the opposite of action. Affection was not as liable to these ambiguities; its meaning was broad enough to include the experiences of happiness and sorrow, love and hate, desire, fear, etc., both mild as well as intense, spiritual as well as sumptuous; but it was not commonly broadened out into a meaning such as that which obsession had in its broadest sense. Another description of love was the sentiment: this referred to an opinion charged with affection rather than to the affection itself and easily connoted to artificial or exaggerated affection (Singer, 2009).
The modern period defines art as sexual desire and the ideal of freedom and liberty so important for a modern man. The main genres of art include impressionism, expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. The main element of these trends are freedom of love which means the power of self-determination by choice which is not stipulated by any condition or cause whether extrinsic to the artist or intrinsic to the artist but extrinsic to the act of choosing. It was the power by which the artist responsibly approved or disapproved social relations and morals about love and sexuality affirmed or negated social morals of love, my spontaneous affective responses. All these had some unity in as much as they were all responses of this one personal subject (Buchholz et al 2007).
They did not form anything approaching unity in the sense of being harmoniously integrated. Rather, there were usually tensions and collisions and confusions among the love scene in painting (Sternberg and Weis 20090. Limited in what artists could sense or understanding of the object at any one moment and apprehending the object of love under one aspect and under another; reacting with ambivalent affections to the; loved object under different aspects; influenced in our perception, understanding, and affections, by our temperament and by the effects of education, environment, personal romantic experiences, and past decisions; drawn one way by the spirit and another way by sensuality, one way in spirit by kind aspirations and another by selfishness-caught in all these conflicts, artists has to bring into play the act of freedom of love by which people (more or less in possession of their lovers, depending on the degree of effective freedom at the moment) accepted one of the conflicting alternatives and affirmed it as the chosen expression of our free and responsible selves (Janson 2004).
One of the prominent and unique artists of the period was the Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo. In her works, she describes bodily reactions and refers to those elements in the experience such as accelerated heartbeat, blushing and tears, constriction of the throat, sexual (that is, physical vs. emotional) excitement, sighs, gestures, smiles (Janson 2004). These appear most visibly in very intense experiences, but some of them are readily noticeable to some degree in any experience of love. The free choice of Frida changes impulsive love from a merely necessary response into a chosen love and so renders it a fully human, individuality responsible, self-possessed, act of person. For Frida, love is not itself the free choice nor in essence freely chosen. If it were, people would not find themselves making a free decision in opposition to impulsive love. But this is a very common experience for Frida and her surrounding (Stokstad, 2004). This way of proceeding gives her understanding of the experience and makes intelligent discussion about love difficult or impossible. Her paintings depict that if love is fundamentally a freely chosen act, the question remains, what is the act which is generously chosen? Is it freely chosen wish or delight or compassion? The fundamental question is answered by each viewer individually (Janson 2004).
The standard art-historical method of understanding surrealism and the dada movement is to see it as representing the legacy of French artists such as Gauguin, Seurat, Van Gogh, and Cézanne, alongside a general shift of sensibility that had been affected by European Symbolism in the 1880s and 1890s. In the paintings of Cézanne and Gauguin, for example, love was flattened out and color distorted in a radical departure from naturalism. Such elements of love relations paved the way for the abandonment of Renaissance pictorial principles, such as linear perspective, in Picasso’s watershed painting of 1907, the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. At the same time, German Expressionism and French Fauvism experimented further with expressive uses of color. For these artists, love is a free choice but not a cognitive act or a physiological reaction (Stokstad, 2004). By the above process of removal, viewers and artists have readily arrived at the conclusion that the fundamental element among all those elements noted in the concrete experience of love is to be found in the emotional acts (Janson 2004).
In sum, during all historical periods of time, the visualizations of art also have significant affinities with sociology and social theory. Different interpretations of love and romantic relations were a direct result of social and cultural traditions of a nation or historical period. As a matter, of fact, the main reason for attending to the other elements of the concrete experience is to enable artists from different periods to keep the affections in a concrete perspective and also to set up the structure within which the audience can work out a coherent picture of love’s interpretation with the other elements within the totality Some of them do make love scenes ontological energy running through reality; when other describes love symbolically as love to nature or God; some artists speak of love as it appears in conscious human experience, others speak of affection, whether passion or joy or concern or benevolence, etc. Many artists speak of love as union, presence, co-existence. But such prefer to depict it as vague and of little help in understanding human relations unless the act which constitutes the love to divine power is identified. Art and love as its main theme inextricable cultural environment, its deep involvement in shaping and maintaining social relations, and the profound extent to which its meanings are socially mediated and developed are each pivotal concerns for contemporary artists and audiences.
References
Buchholz, E. L., Kaeppele, S., Hille, K., Stotland, I. 2007, Art: A World History. Abrams Books.
Janson, A. F. 2004, History of Art. Prentice Hall; 6th edition.
Singer, J. 2009, Philosophy of Love: A Partial Summing-Up (Irving Singer Library). MIT Press.
Sternberg, R.J., Weis, K. 2009, The New Psychology of Love. Yale University Press; Reprint edition.
Stokstad, M. 2004, Art History. Prentice Hall; 2 edition.