The Story Of Art Gombrich Book PDF Free Download
Excerpt From The Book
WE do not know how art began any more than we know how language started.
If we take art to mean such activities as building temples and houses, taking pictures and sculptures, or weaving patterns, there are no people in all the world without art.
If on the other hand, we mean by art some kind of beautiful luxury, something to enjoy in museums and exhibitions or something special to use as a precious decoration in the best parlor.
we must realize that this use of the word is a very recent development and that many of the greatest builders, painters or sculptors of the past never dreamed of it.
We can best understand this difference if we think of architecture. We all know that there are beautiful buildings and that some of them are true works of art.
But there is scarcely any building in the world that was not erected for a particular purpose.
Those who use these buildings as places of worship or entertainment, or as dwellings, judge them first and foremost by standards of utility.
But apart from this, they may like or dislike the design or the proportion of the structure, and appreciate the efforts of the good architect to make it not only practical but “right”.
In the past, the attitude to paintings and statues was often similar. They were not thought of as mere works of art but as objects which had a definite function.
He would be a poor judge of houses who did not know the requirements for which they were built. Similarly, we are not likely to understand the art of the past if we are quite ignorant of the aims it had to serve.
The further we go back in history, the more definite but also the more strange are the aims which art was supposed to serve. The same applies if we leave towns and cities and go to the peasants or, better still.
f we leave our civilized countries and travel to the peoples whose ways of life still resemble the conditions in which our remote ancestors lived.
We call these people ‘primitives’ not because they are simpler than we are their processes of thought are often more complicated than ours-but because they are closer to the state from which all mankind once.
| Author | E.H.Gombrich |
| Language | English |
| Pages | 472 |
| PDF Size | 48.5 MB |
| Category | Story |
The Story Of Art Book PDF Free Download