Classicism is an aesthetically significant movement in art that originated in the 17th century, developed in the 18th and can be traced in the 19th centuries. It is characterized by an appeal to ancient classics as a strict normative example of perfect harmony. The aesthetic ideas of classicism are formed in the spirit of rationalism, which was spreading its dominance in that era - the philosophical and scientific doctrine according to which reason is the highest ability of man, allowing him to cognize and even transform the world, becoming partly on a par with God, and reorganizing societies. Reason, from the point of view of rationalism, is not only the main, but also the only completely adequate ability of the human mind. Feelings are only a prerequisite for rational conclusions, which in themselves obscure the clear truth; mystical intuition is valuable for its inclusion in the system of rational argumentation. Such a view could not but affect the relationship between the spheres of culture, which began to take shape in the highest circles of society in European countries: science, philosophy and mathematics in particular are the main driving forces of the progress of knowledge; art is assigned a more modest, secondary role of sentimental pleasure, light entertainment and intelligible, impressive edification; traditional religion, not “enlightened” by the rational ideas of philosophical deism, is the faith of simple uneducated people that is useful for the social organism - a kind of stabilizer in the field of social mores.
Classicism is based on normative aesthetic theory. Already Rene Descartes, a French mathematician and philosopher of the first half of the 17th century, in his original works for that time “Discourse on Method”, “Compendium of Music” and others, argues that art must be subject to strict regulation by reason. At the same time, the language of works of art, according to R. Descartes, should be distinguished by rationality, the composition should be built on strictly established rules. The main task of the artist is to convince, first of all, with the power and logic of thoughts. The normative aesthetic theory of classicism is characterized by rationalism, verified clarity, formal calculation with an orientation towards proportionality, integrity, unity, balance and completeness of forms, connection with the ideas of political absolutism and moral imperative. The normative principles of classicism presupposed a clear division into high and low genres.
These principles of classicism are manifested in all types of art: In the theater, which adhered to the ideological generalizations of N. Boileau (Cornel, Racine, Moliere, Lope de Vega, etc.); in literature (La Fontaine) in architecture, especially secular - palace and park (the image of Versailles) and civil and church (Levo, Hardouin-Mansart, Le Brun, Le Nôtre, Jones, Ren, Quarenghi, Bazhenov, Voronikhin, Kazakov, Rossi, etc. .); in painting (Poussin, Velazquez, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Van Dyck): In sculpture (Canova, Thorvaldsen, etc.) in music (Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, early Beethoven, etc.) Some of the listed great creators of art in their deep expressive their plans went beyond the strict normativity of classicism, the separation of high and low genres it postulated, but their work is still united by the principles of expressive clarity, laconicism and harmony of style characteristic of this era.
The most prominent representative of the aesthetic theory of art of that era was Nicolas Boileau (1636 - 1711) - a French satirist poet, theorist of classicism, the norms and rules of which he set out in the poetic treatise "Poetic Art" - a kind of instruction for a novice poet and artist.
N. Boileau is a supporter of the predominance in the poet’s work (and in art in general) of the intellectual sphere over the emotional one. He believes that works of art are addressed not so much to feelings as to reason. The most important signs of beauty - what is easily grasped by the mind - is clarity, distinctness. Everything is incomprehensible and ugly at the same time. The idea of the work, its embodiment must be clear, the parts and the entire architectonics of the work must be clear and distinct. Simplicity and clarity - this is the motive of the famous principle of “three unities”, which N. Boileau extended to poetry and drama in their perfect composition: unity of place (the action is geographically localized, although it involves a change of scenes), unity of time (the action must fit within one day, one day), unity of action (successive scenes must correspond to the temporal order of events). At the same time, the characters depicted should not change throughout the entire work. These principles, according to N. Boileau, being direct manifestations of the laws of reason, discipline creative possibilities the poet and allow the reader or viewer to understand the conveyed content without obstacles, easily, and therefore satisfactorily.
Plausibility is a key concept in the aesthetics of art by N. Boileau. Because N. Boileau presents the beautiful as reasonable and natural. Reason is the basis for the universal validity of norms of taste. Thus, the beautiful is somehow subordinate to the truth. But the truth of life is also a normative idealization, and not just a correct reflection. Beauty, according to N. Boileau, is brought into the world by some intelligent spiritual principle, and a work of art, as a product of intelligent activity, turns out to be more perfect than the creations of nature. Spiritual beauty is placed above physical beauty, and art above nature.
N. Boileau concretizes the theory of genres established in classicism when dividing them into higher and lower: Thus, tragedy should depict the high and heroic, and comedy should depict the low and vicious. The heroes of the comedy are simple people who express their thoughts not in the pompous language of rhetoric, but in the light modern secular language.
The new ideas of the Enlightenment were largely associated with the principles of classicism and represented an organic unity with it in many cultural phenomena of the 18th century. The Age of Enlightenment in its axiomatic principles is just as rationalistic as the emerging worldview of the 17th century... but unlike early rationalism, the Enlightenment is whole program, aimed not so much at mastering the forces of nature through scientific knowledge of its laws (this process, which began in the 17th century, of course, continued), but at transforming the entire culture and the entire society on the basis of reason, on the basis of new scientific knowledge, in many ways contradicting the spiritual tradition, rooted in the attitudes of the Middle Ages. The Enlightenment project, the authors of which are French, English and German thinkers (D. Diderot, Voltaire (M. F. Arouet), J.-J. Rousseau, J. Locke, D. Hume, I. Herder and others, many of of whom were members of secret mystical societies of a rationalistic kind, such as the Illuminati (from the Latin illuminatio - enlightenment) - consisted of a number of interrelated areas: the consolidation of scientific knowledge and the dissemination of rational knowledge of a new type on issues of philosophical understanding of man, society, culture, including including art; dissemination of scientific knowledge and values of the new generation among wide sections of society, appealing to the educated public; improving the laws by which society lives, up to revolutionary transformations.
In this regard, one of the lines of the philosophy of the Enlightenment is the identification of the boundaries of the knowing mind and its connection with other cognitive and active forces of man, such as the comprehending feeling - hence the emergence of philosophical aesthetics as an independent discipline - such as the will, the sphere of which was interpreted as the sphere practical reason. The relationship between naturalness and culture was understood by enlighteners in different ways: the dominant ideas of cultural and civilizational progressivism were opposed by the thesis of the naturalness of man, vividly expressed in the call of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Back to nature.” Another aspect associated with the implementation of the program objectives of the Enlightenment is the emergence of knowledge on the horizons of world culture, the beginning of the development of extra-European experience of culture, art and religion and, in particular, the emergence of the concept of world artistic culture (I. Goethe).
The ideas of the Enlightenment in art were expressed in a number of new phenomena in the artistic life of the 18th century. - in democracy - the movement of art beyond secular salons, offices and palaces into public concert halls, libraries, galleries, in addressing the themes of people's life and national history, in the rejection of heroic aristocracy and the glorification of images of common people, in the mixing of high and low genres, in popularity everyday genre and comedy genre; in an interest in public life and progress; in anti-clericalism and caricaturedly ironic criticism of dilapidated remnants of the Middle Ages and vicious morals, including those disguised as personal piety; in liberalism - the preaching of individual freedom and at the same time the moral preaching of the simplicity and naturalness of man, coordinated with the good of society; in broad encyclopedic interests and attention to extra-European cultures; in realism - the reflection of simple nature, social context and the psychological aura of human images, in an idyllic commitment to naturalness and fidelity to human feeling as opposed to fallible reason.
In literature and theater, this was reflected in the works of Beaumarchais, Lessing, Sheridan, Goldoni, Gozzi, Schiller, Goethe, Defoe, Swift; in painting - Hogarth, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Chardin, Greuze, David, Goya, Levitsky; in sculpture - Houdon, Shubin, etc.
Many ideas of enlightenment were implemented in art forms developed by the aesthetics of classicism, so we can talk about the real closeness of these styles with a certain ideological delimitation of their principles. Some educational motifs were in harmony with the playful and refined court Rococo style. Within the framework of the ideas of the late Enlightenment, an original style of sentimentalism was formed (especially in poetry and painting), characterized by dreaminess, sensitivity, the special role of conveyed feelings in the comprehension of life and compassion (sympathy) in moral education, conformity with nature and idyllic pastoral - in the spirit of the philosophy of J.J. Rousseau. Sentimentalism on the one hand, and the highly expressive symbolic images of such creators of art of the late 18th century as F. Schiller, I. Goethe, F. Goya, J.-L. David allow us to speak about a special stage of pre-romanticism, prepared in the depths of aesthetics and artistic life of the Enlightenment.
The philosophical ideas of Enlightenment aesthetics were clearly expressed in the works of a number of major thinkers of the 18th century, including:
Alexander Baumgarten (1714 - 1762) - German philosopher, follower of Leibniz and Wolf, founder of the aesthetics of German classical philosophy. In 1735
A. Baumgarten first introduced the term “aesthetics,” which he used to designate the philosophical science of sensory knowledge that comprehends and creates beauty and is expressed in images of art. Baumgarten’s aesthetic views are set out in the works: “Philosophical reflections on certain issues relating to poetic work", "Aesthetics".
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 - 1781) - German philosopher - educator, playwright, literary critic, art theorist, who advocated bringing literature and art closer to life; for freeing them from the shackles of class-aristocratic normativity. Art, according to Lessing, is an imitation of nature, broadly interpreted as knowledge of life. Substantiating the theory of realistic art, he relies on the terminology of Aristotle and the work of Shakespeare to combat classicism. Lessing's main theoretical work: “Laocoon. On the boundaries of painting and poetry."
Johann Goethe (1749 - 1832) - German poet, founder of German modern literature, thinker and naturalist. In his youth, Goethe was one of the leaders of the Sturm and Drang movement. Art, according to Goethe, is called upon to resist outdated conventions, dilapidated morality, and to fight against the oppression of the individual. I. Goethe interpreted art as an “imitation” of nature. In fact, he formulated the idea of “Typification”. To designate any creative force, Goethe introduced the concept of “demonic”. The main works of I. Goethe: “Simple imitation of nature. Manner. Style", "The Doctrine of Light".
Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) - the founder of German classical philosophy. Immanuel Kant's main work on problems of aesthetics is “Critique of the Power of Judgment.” In I. Kant, the aesthetic principle turns out to be the fundamental a priori (determining the constitution of consciousness before any empirical experience) form - the form of a disinterested judgment of taste, universal in its application. The judgment of taste is associated with the ability to feel pleasure or displeasure on the basis of the principle of “expediency without purpose”, the derivatives of which are the practical expediency of the action of human will and the lawfulness of the activity of the mind. The main categories of Kant's aesthetics are expediency (harmonious connection of parts and the whole), the beautiful and the sublime. Kant dispelled rationalistic and utilitarian ideas about beauty, reducing the feeling of beauty to the “disinterested” pleasure delivered by the contemplation of aesthetic form. At the same time, the main advantage of a work of art, according to I. Kant, is not so much its vital content as its perfect form, appealing to the pre-experienced aesthetic ability of a person. The essence of the sublime, according to Kant, is the violation of the usual measure. Judgment of the sublime requires a developed imagination and high morality. To perceive art you need taste, to create - a genius - a unique personality endowed with a high degree of creative imagination.
Georg Hegel (1770 - 1831) is an outstanding representative of German classical philosophy, whose views were formed under the influence of rationalism characteristic of the Enlightenment. However, G. Hegel in his truly universal philosophical system overcame the framework of educational ideas. When forming his original methodology, he was also influenced by early romantic motifs, which were noticeable in the concepts of German philosophers of the early 19th century. I. Fichte and F. Schelling. G. Hegel made the method of rational reflection more perfect, capable of comprehending the contradictions of being and consciousness, integrating both strictly rational-logical and specifically aesthetic and even mystical models of the movement of thought, which, according to Hegel, fit into the broader coordinates of dialectical logic, however , thereby turning into modalities of the mind. G. Hegel is the creator of a system of objective idealism based on the method of dialectics.
In the early period of his creativity, G. Hegel believed that the highest act of reason, embracing all ideas, is an aesthetic act and that truth and goodness are united by family ties only in beauty. Later, aesthetics appears in G. Hegel as a philosophy of art. Art occupies a subordinate level in comparison with philosophy as an absolute form of self-knowledge of the spirit. historical development historical consciousness.
The novelty of G. Hegel’s aesthetics of the mature period consisted in emphasizing the connection of art and beauty with human activity and with the development of the “objective spirit,” that is, in other words, the culture of society as a whole. Beauty according to Hegel is always human. For Hegel, the most general aesthetic category is the beautiful. Hegel's aesthetics is characterized by the historical principle of considering the material. The dialectical triad of self-development of art is formed by its forms, successively replaced in the course of history: symbolic (Ancient East), classical (Antiquity) and romantic (Christian Europe). In Hegel's Aesthetics, the types of art were discussed in detail. Everywhere he tried to grasp the principle of development. The main work that sets out the aesthetic concept of G. Hegel is “Lectures on Aesthetics.”
1. Introduction.Classicism as an artistic method...................................2
2. Aesthetics of classicism.
2.1. Basic principles of classicism...........................…………….….....5
2.2. Picture of the world, concept of personality in the art of classicism......5
2.3. The aesthetic nature of classicism.................................................... ........9
2.4. Classicism in painting......................................................... ........................15
2.5. Classicism in sculpture......................................................... .......................16
2.6. Classicism in architecture................................................................... ....................18
2.7. Classicism in literature................................................................... .....................20
2.8. Classicism in music......................................................... ...............................22
2.9. Classicism in the theater................................................................... ...............................22
2.10. The originality of Russian classicism.................................................... ....22
3. Conclusion……………………………………...…………………………...26
References..............................…….………………………………….28
Applications ........................................................................................................29
1. Classicism as an artistic method
Classicism is one of the artistic methods that actually existed in the history of art. Sometimes it is referred to by the terms “direction” and “style”. Classicism (French) classicisme, from lat. classicus- exemplary) - artistic style and aesthetic direction in European art of the 17th-19th centuries.
Classicism is based on the ideas of rationalism, which were formed simultaneously with the same ideas in the philosophy of Descartes. A work of art, from the point of view of classicism, should be built on the basis of strict canons, thereby revealing the harmony and logic of the universe itself. Of interest to classicism is only the eternal, the unchangeable - in each phenomenon it strives to recognize only essential, typological features, discarding random individual characteristics. The aesthetics of classicism attaches great importance to the social and educational function of art. Classicism takes many rules and canons from ancient art (Aristotle, Horace).
Classicism establishes a strict hierarchy of genres, which are divided into high (ode, tragedy, epic) and low (comedy, satire, fable). Each genre has strictly defined characteristics, the mixing of which is not allowed.
The concept of classicism as a creative method presupposes in its content a historically determined method of aesthetic perception and modeling of reality in artistic images: the picture of the world and the concept of personality, the most common for the mass aesthetic consciousness of a given historical era, are embodied in ideas about the essence of verbal art, its relationship with reality , its own internal laws.
Classicism arises and is formed in certain historical and cultural conditions. The most common research belief connects classicism with the historical conditions of the transition from feudal fragmentation to a unified national-territorial statehood, in the formation of which the centralizing role belongs to the absolute monarchy.
Classicism is an organic stage in the development of any national culture, despite the fact that different national cultures go through the classicist stage at different times, due to the individuality of the national version of the formation of a general social model of a centralized state.
The chronological framework of the existence of classicism in different European cultures is defined as the second half of the 17th - the first thirty years of the 18th century, despite the fact that early classicist trends were noticeable at the end of the Renaissance, at the turn of the 16th-17th centuries. Within these chronological limits, French classicism is considered the standard embodiment of the method. Closely connected with the heyday of French absolutism in the second half of the 17th century, it gave European culture not only great writers - Corneille, Racine, Moliere, La Fontaine, Voltaire, but also a great theorist of classicist art - Nicolas Boileau-Dépreau. Being himself a practicing writer who earned fame during his lifetime for his satires, Boileau became mainly famous for the creation of the aesthetic code of classicism - the didactic poem “Poetic Art” (1674), in which he gave a coherent theoretical concept of literary creativity, derived from the literary practice of his contemporaries. Thus, classicism in France became the most self-conscious embodiment of the method. Hence its reference value.
The historical prerequisites for the emergence of classicism connect the aesthetic problematics of the method with the era of aggravation of the relationship between the individual and society in the process of the formation of autocratic statehood, which, replacing the social permissiveness of feudalism, seeks to regulate by law and clearly delimit the spheres of public and private life and the relationship between the individual and the state. This determines the meaningful aspect of art. Its basic principles are motivated by the system of philosophical views of the era. They form a picture of the world and a concept of personality, and these categories are embodied in a set of artistic techniques of literary creativity.
The most general philosophical concepts present in all philosophical movements of the second half of the 17th - late 18th centuries. and directly related to the aesthetics and poetics of classicism are the concepts of “rationalism” and “metaphysics”, relevant for both idealistic and materialistic philosophical teachings of this time. The founder of the philosophical doctrine of rationalism is the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650). The fundamental thesis of his doctrine: “I think, therefore I exist” - was realized in many philosophical movements of that time, united by the common name “Cartesianism” (from the Latin version of the name Descartes - Cartesius). In essence, this is an idealistic thesis, since it brings out the material existence from an idea. However, rationalism, as the interpretation of reason as the primary and highest spiritual ability of man, is equally characteristic of the materialist philosophical movements of the era - such, for example, as the metaphysical materialism of the English philosophical school of Bacon-Locke, which recognized experience as a source of knowledge, but put it below the generalizing and analytical activity of the mind, extracting from the multitude of facts obtained by experience the highest idea, a means of modeling the cosmos - supreme reality- from the chaos of individual material objects.
The concept of “metaphysics” is equally applicable to both varieties of rationalism - idealistic and materialistic. Genetically, it goes back to Aristotle, and in his philosophical teaching it denoted a branch of knowledge that explores the highest and unchangeable principles of all things, inaccessible to the senses and only rationally and speculatively comprehended. Both Descartes and Bacon used the term in the Aristotelian sense. In modern times, the concept of “metaphysics” has acquired additional meaning and has come to mean an anti-dialectical way of thinking that perceives phenomena and objects without their interrelation and development. Historically, this very accurately characterizes the peculiarities of thinking of the analytical era of the 17th-18th centuries, the period of differentiation of scientific knowledge and art, when each branch of science, standing out from the syncretic complex, acquired its own separate subject, but at the same time lost connection with other branches of knowledge.
2. Aesthetics of classicism
2.1. Basic principles of classicism
1. Cult of reason 2. Cult of civic duty 3. Appeal to medieval subjects 4. Abstraction from the depiction of everyday life, from historical national identity 5. Imitation of ancient models 6. Compositional harmony, symmetry, unity of a work of art 7. Heroes are bearers of one main feature, given without development 8. Antithesis as the main technique for creating a work of art
2.2. Picture of the world, concept of personality
in the art of classicism
The picture of the world generated by the rationalistic type of consciousness clearly divides reality into two levels: empirical and ideological. The external, visible and tangible material-empirical world consists of many separate material objects and phenomena that are in no way connected with each other - it is a chaos of individual private entities. However, above this chaotic multitude of individual objects, there is their ideal hypostasis - a harmonious and harmonious whole, a universal idea of the universe, which includes the ideal image of any material object in its highest, purified from particulars, eternal and unchanging form: in the way it should be according to the original plan of the Creator. This universal idea can only be comprehended rationally and analytically by gradually purifying an object or phenomenon from its specific forms and appearance and penetrating into its ideal essence and purpose.
And since design precedes creation, and thinking is an indispensable condition and source of existence, this ideal reality has the highest primary character. It is easy to notice that the main patterns of such a two-level picture of reality are very easily projected onto the main sociological problem of the period of transition from feudal fragmentation to autocratic statehood - the problem of the relationship between the individual and the state. The world of people is a world of individual private human beings, chaotic and disorderly, the state is a comprehensive harmonious idea that creates a harmonious and harmonious ideal world order out of chaos. It is this philosophical picture of the world of the 17th-18th centuries. determined such substantive aspects of the aesthetics of classicism as the concept of personality and the typology of conflict, universally characteristic (with the necessary historical and cultural variations) for classicism in any European literature.
In the field of human relations with the outside world, classicism sees two types of connections and positions - the same two levels from which the philosophical picture of the world is formed. The first level is the so-called “natural man,” a biological being who stands alongside all objects of the material world. This is a private entity, possessed by selfish passions, disorderly and unrestricted in its desire to ensure its personal existence. At this level human connections with the world, the leading category that determines the spiritual appearance of a person is passion - blind and unrestrained in its desire for realization in the name of achieving individual good.
The second level of the concept of personality is the so-called “social person”, harmoniously included in society in his highest, perfect image, aware that his good is an integral part of the good of the common. A “social man” is guided in his worldview and actions not by passions, but by reason, since reason is the highest spiritual ability of a person, giving him the opportunity for positive self-determination in the conditions of human community, based on the ethical norms of consistent community life. Thus, the concept of human personality in the ideology of classicism turns out to be complex and contradictory: a natural (passionate) and a social (reasonable) person is one and the same character, torn by internal contradictions and in a situation of choice.
Hence the typological conflict of the art of classicism, which directly follows from such a concept of personality. It is quite obvious that the source of a conflict situation is precisely the character of a person. Character is one of the central aesthetic categories of classicism, and its interpretation differs significantly from the meaning that modern consciousness and literary criticism puts into the term “character”. In the understanding of the aesthetics of classicism, character is precisely the ideal hypostasis of a person - that is, not the individual makeup of a specific human personality, but a certain universal view of human nature and psychology, timeless in its essence. Only in this form of an eternal, unchanging, universal attribute could character be an object of classicist art, unambiguously attributed to the highest, ideal level of reality.
The main components of character are passions: love, hypocrisy, courage, stinginess, sense of duty, envy, patriotism, etc. It is by the predominance of one passion that a character is determined: “lover”, “miserly”, “envious”, “patriot”. All these definitions are precisely “characters” in the understanding of classicist aesthetic consciousness.
However, these passions are unequal to each other, although according to the philosophical concepts of the 17th-18th centuries. all passions are equal, since they are all from human nature, they are all natural, and no passion on its own can decide which passion is consistent with the ethical dignity of a person and which is not. These decisions are made only by reason. Despite the fact that all passions are equally categories of emotional spiritual life, some of them (such as love, stinginess, envy, hypocrisy, etc.) are less and more difficult to agree with the dictates of reason and are more associated with the concept of selfish good. Others (courage, sense of duty, honor, patriotism) are more subject to rational control and do not contradict the idea of the common good, the ethics of social relations.
So it turns out that rational and unreasonable passions, altruistic and selfish, personal and social, collide in conflict. And reason is the highest spiritual ability of a person, a logical and analytical tool that allows one to control passions and distinguish good from evil, truth from lies. The most common type of classic conflict is a conflict situation between personal inclination (love) and a sense of duty to society and the state, which for some reason excludes the possibility of realization love passion. It is quite obvious that by its nature this conflict is psychological, although a necessary condition for its implementation is a situation in which the interests of man and society collide. These most important ideological aspects of the aesthetic thinking of the era found their expression in the system of ideas about laws artistic creativity.
2.3. The aesthetic nature of classicism
The aesthetic principles of classicism have undergone significant changes during its existence. Feature This direction is a reverence for antiquity. Art of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome was considered by classicists as an ideal model of artistic creativity. “Poetics” of Aristotle and “The Art of Poetry” of Horace had a huge influence on the formation of the aesthetic principles of classicism. Here we find a tendency to create sublimely heroic, ideal, rationalistically clear and plastically completed images. As a rule, in the art of classicism, modern political, moral and aesthetic ideals are embodied in characters, conflicts, situations borrowed from the arsenal of ancient history, mythology, or directly from ancient art.
The aesthetics of classicism guided poets, artists, and composers to create works of art distinguished by clarity, logic, strict balance and harmony. All this, according to classicists, was fully reflected in ancient artistic culture. For them, reason and antiquity are synonymous. The rationalistic nature of the aesthetics of classicism manifested itself in the abstract typification of images, strict regulation of genres, forms, in the interpretation of the ancient artistic heritage, in the appeal of art to the mind rather than to feelings, in the desire to subordinate the creative process to unshakable norms, rules and canons (norm - from the Latin. norma – guiding principle, rule, pattern; generally accepted rule, pattern of behavior or action).
How in Italy the most typical expression was found aesthetic principles Renaissance, so in France in the 17th century. – aesthetic principles of classicism. By the 17th century Italian artistic culture has largely lost its former influence. But the innovative spirit of French art clearly emerged. At this time, an absolutist state was formed in France, which united society and centralized power.
The strengthening of absolutism meant the victory of the principle of universal regulation in all spheres of life, from economics to spiritual life. Debt is the main regulator of human behavior. The state personifies this duty and acts as a kind of entity alienated from the individual. Submission to the state, fulfillment of public duty is the highest virtue of an individual. Man is no longer thought of as free, as was typical of the Renaissance worldview, but as subject to norms and rules alien to him, limited by forces beyond his control. The regulating and limiting force appears in the form of the impersonal mind, to which the individual must submit and act according to its commands and instructions.
The high rise in production contributed to the development of the exact sciences: mathematics, astronomy, physics, and this, in turn, led to the victory of rationalism (from the Latin ratio - reason) - a philosophical trend that recognizes reason as the basis of human cognition and behavior.
Ideas about the laws of creativity and structure work of art are determined to the same extent by the epochal type of worldview as the picture of the world and the concept of personality. Reason, as the highest spiritual ability of man, is conceived not only as an instrument of knowledge, but also as an organ of creativity and a source of aesthetic pleasure. One of the most striking leitmotifs of Boileau’s “Poetic Art” is the rational nature of aesthetic activity:
French classicism affirmed the personality of man as the highest value of existence, freeing him from religious and church influence.
Interest in the art of ancient Greece and Rome appeared back in the Renaissance, which, after centuries of the Middle Ages, turned to the forms, motifs and subjects of antiquity. The greatest theorist of the Renaissance, Leon Batista Alberti, back in the 15th century. expressed ideas that foreshadowed certain principles of classicism and were fully manifested in Raphael’s fresco “The School of Athens” (1511).
The systematization and consolidation of the achievements of the great artists of the Renaissance, especially the Florentine ones led by Raphael and his student Giulio Romano, formed the program of the Bolognese school of the late 16th century, the most typical representatives of which were the Carracci brothers. In their influential Academy of Arts, the Bolognese preached that the path to the heights of art lay through a scrupulous study of the heritage of Raphael and Michelangelo, imitation of their mastery of line and composition.
Following Aristotle, classicism considered art to be an imitation of nature:
However, nature was by no means understood as a visual picture of the physical and moral world, appearing to the senses, but rather as the highest intelligible essence of the world and man: not a specific character, but its idea, not a real historical or modern plot, but a universal human conflict situation, not given landscape, but the idea of a harmonious combination of natural realities in an ideally beautiful unity. Classicism found such an ideally beautiful unity in ancient literature - it was precisely this that was perceived by classicism as the already achieved pinnacle of aesthetic activity, the eternal and unchanging standard of art, which recreated in its genre models that very highest ideal nature, physical and moral, which art should imitate. It so happened that the thesis about imitation of nature turned into a prescription to imitate ancient art, where the term “classicism” itself came from (from the Latin classicus - exemplary, studied in class):
Thus, nature in classic art appears not so much reproduced as modeled on a high model - “decorated” with the generalizing analytical activity of the mind. By analogy, we can recall the so-called “regular” (i.e., “correct”) park, where the trees are trimmed in the form of geometric shapes and symmetrically planted, the paths have the correct shape, sprinkled with multi-colored pebbles, and the water is enclosed in marble pools and fountains. This style of gardening art reached its peak precisely in the era of classicism. From the desire to present nature as “decorated” also follows the absolute predominance in literature of classicism of poetry over prose: if prose is identical to simple material nature, then poetry, as a literary form, is certainly an ideal “decorated” nature.”
In all these ideas about art, namely as a rational, ordered, standardized, spiritual activity, the hierarchical principle of thinking of the 17th-18th centuries was realized. Within itself, literature also turned out to be divided into two hierarchical series, low and high, each of which was thematically and stylistically associated with one - material or ideal - level of reality. Low genres included satire, comedy, and fable; to the highest - ode, tragedy, epic. In low genres, everyday material reality is depicted, and a private person appears in social connections (while, of course, both the person and reality are still the same ideal conceptual categories). In high genres, man is presented as a spiritual and social being, in the existential aspect of his existence, alone and along with the eternal fundamentals of questions of existence. Therefore, for high and low genres, not only thematic, but also class differentiation turned out to be relevant based on the character’s belonging to one or another social stratum. The hero of low genres is a middle-class person; high hero - a historical figure, a mythological hero or a fictional high-ranking character - usually a ruler.
In low genres, human characters are formed by base everyday passions (stinginess, hypocrisy, hypocrisy, envy, etc.); in high genres, passions acquire a spiritual character (love, ambition, vindictiveness, a sense of duty, patriotism, etc.). And if everyday passions are clearly unreasonable and vicious, then existential passions are divided into reasonable - social and unreasonable - personal, and the ethical status of the hero depends on his choice. He is unambiguously positive if he prefers a reasonable passion, and unambiguously negative if he chooses an unreasonable one. Classicism did not allow halftones in ethical assessment - and this also reflected the rationalistic nature of the method, which excluded any confusion of high and low, tragic and comic.
Since the genre theory of classicism legitimized as the main those genres that reached the greatest flowering in ancient literature, and literary creativity was thought of as a reasonable imitation of high models, the aesthetic code of classicism acquired a normative character. This means that the model of each genre was established once and for all in a clear set of rules, from which it was unacceptable to deviate, and each specific text was aesthetically assessed according to the degree of compliance with this ideal genre model.
The source of the rules were ancient examples: the epic of Homer and Virgil, tragedy of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Seneca, a comedy by Aristophanes, Menander, Terence and Plautus, an ode by Pindar, a fable by Aesop and Phaedrus, a satire by Horace and Juvenal. The most typical and illustrative case of such genre regulation is, of course, the rules for the leading classic genre, tragedy, drawn both from the texts of ancient tragedians and from Aristotle’s Poetics.
For the tragedy, a poetic form was canonized (“Alexandrian verse” - iambic hexameter with paired rhyme), a mandatory five-act structure, three unities - time, place and action, high style, a historical or mythological plot and a conflict, suggesting a mandatory situation of choice between reasonable and unreasonable passion, and the process of choice itself was supposed to constitute the action of the tragedy. It was in the dramatic section of the aesthetics of classicism that the rationalism, hierarchy and normativity of the method were expressed with the greatest completeness and obviousness:
Everything that was said above about the aesthetics of classicism and the poetics of classicist literature in France applies equally to almost any European variety of the method, since French classicism was historically the earliest and aesthetically most authoritative embodiment of the method. But for Russian classicism these general theoretical principles found a peculiar refraction in artistic practice, since they were determined by the historical and national characteristics of the formation of the new Russian XVIII culture V.
2.4. Classicism in painting
At the beginning of the 17th century, young foreigners flocked to Rome to get acquainted with the heritage of antiquity and the Renaissance. The most prominent place among them was occupied by the Frenchman Nicolas Poussin, in his paintings, mainly on the themes of ancient antiquity and mythology, who provided unsurpassed examples of geometrically precise composition and thoughtful relationships between color groups. Another Frenchman, Claude Lorrain, in his antique landscapes of the environs of the “eternal city”, organized the pictures of nature by harmonizing them with the light of the setting sun and introducing peculiar architectural scenes.
Poussin's coldly rational normativism won the approval of the Versailles court and was continued by court artists like Le Brun, who saw in classicist painting the ideal artistic language for praising the absolutist state of the "sun king." Although private customers preferred various options Baroque and Rococo, the French monarchy kept classicism afloat by funding academic institutions such as the École des Beaux-Arts. The Rome Prize provided the most talented students with the opportunity to visit Rome for direct acquaintance with the great works of antiquity.
The discovery of “genuine” ancient painting during the excavations of Pompeii, the deification of antiquity by the German art critic Winckelmann and the cult of Raphael, preached by the artist Mengs, who was close to him in views, breathed new breath into classicism in the second half of the 18th century (in Western literature this stage is called neoclassicism). The largest representative of the “new classicism” was Jacques-Louis David; his extremely laconic and dramatic artistic language served with equal success to promote the ideals of the French Revolution (“The Death of Marat”) and the First Empire (“The Dedication of Emperor Napoleon I”).
In the 19th century, classicist painting entered a period of crisis and became a force restraining development of art, and not only in France, but also in other countries. David’s artistic line was successfully continued by Ingres, who, while maintaining the language of classicism in his works, often turned to romantic subjects with an oriental flavor (“Turkish Baths”); his portrait works are marked by a subtle idealization of the model. Artists in other countries (like, for example, Karl Bryullov) also filled works that were classic in form with the spirit of romanticism; this combination was called academicism. Numerous art academies served as its breeding grounds. In the middle of the 19th century, the young generation, gravitating towards realism, represented in France by the Courbet circle, and in Russia by the Itinerants, rebelled against the conservatism of the academic establishment.
2.5. Classicism in sculpture
The impetus for the development of classicist sculpture in the mid-18th century was the writings of Winckelmann and archaeological excavations of ancient cities, which expanded the knowledge of contemporaries about ancient sculpture. In France, such sculptors as Pigalle and Houdon vacillated on the verge of Baroque and Classicism. Classicism reached its highest embodiment in the field of plastic art in the heroic and idyllic works of Antonio Canova, who drew inspiration mainly from the statues of the Hellenistic era (Praxiteles). In Russia, Fedot Shubin, Mikhail Kozlovsky, Boris Orlovsky, and Ivan Martos gravitated towards the aesthetics of classicism.
Public monuments, which became widespread in the era of classicism, gave sculptors the opportunity to idealize military valor and the wisdom of statesmen. Fidelity to the ancient model required sculptors to depict models naked, which conflicted with accepted moral norms. To resolve this contradiction, modern figures were initially depicted by classicist sculptors as naked ancient gods: Suvorov as Mars, and Polina Borghese as Venus. Under Napoleon, the issue was resolved by moving to the depiction of modern figures in ancient togas (these are the figures of Kutuzov and Barclay de Tolly in front of the Kazan Cathedral).
Private customers of the Classical era preferred to immortalize their names in tombstones. The popularity of this sculptural form was facilitated by the arrangement of public cemeteries in the main cities of Europe. In accordance with the classic ideal of the figure on tombstones, as a rule, are in a state of deep rest. The sculpture of classicism is generally alien to sudden movements and external manifestations of emotions such as anger.
Late, Empire classicism, represented primarily by the prolific Danish sculptor Thorvaldsen, is imbued with a dryish pathos. Purity of lines, restraint of gestures, and dispassionate expressions are especially valued. In choosing role models, the emphasis shifts from Hellenism to the archaic period. Religious images are coming into fashion, which, in Thorvaldsen’s interpretation, produce a somewhat chilling impression on the viewer. Tombstone sculpture of late classicism often bears a slight touch of sentimentality.
2.6. Classicism in architecture
The main feature of the architecture of classicism was the appeal to the forms of ancient architecture as a standard of harmony, simplicity, rigor, logical clarity and monumentality. The architecture of classicism as a whole is characterized by regularity of layout and clarity of volumetric form. The basis of the architectural language of classicism was the order, in proportions and forms close to antiquity. Classicism is characterized by symmetrical axial compositions, restraint of decorative decoration, and a regular system of city planning.
The architectural language of classicism was formulated at the end of the Renaissance by the great Venetian master Palladio and his follower Scamozzi. The Venetians absolutized the principles of ancient temple architecture to such an extent that they even applied them in the construction of such private mansions as Villa Capra. Inigo Jones brought Palladianism north to England, where local Palladian architects followed Palladian principles with varying degrees of fidelity until the mid-18th century.
By that time, satiety with the “whipped cream” of the late Baroque and Rococo began to accumulate among the intellectuals of continental Europe. Born of the Roman architects Bernini and Borromini, Baroque thinned out into Rococo, a predominantly chamber style with an emphasis on interior decoration and decorative arts. This aesthetics was of little use for solving large urban planning problems. Already under Louis XV (1715-74), urban planning ensembles were built in Paris in the “ancient Roman” style, such as Place de la Concorde (architect Jacques-Ange Gabriel) and the Church of Saint-Sulpice, and under Louis XVI (1774-92) a similar “noble Laconism" is already becoming the main architectural direction.
The most significant interiors in the classicist style were designed by the Scot Robert Adam, who returned to his homeland from Rome in 1758. He was greatly impressed by both the archaeological research of Italian scientists and the architectural fantasies of Piranesi. In Adam’s interpretation, classicism was a style hardly inferior to rococo in the sophistication of its interiors, which gained it popularity not only among democratically minded circles of society, but also among the aristocracy. Like his French colleagues, Adam preached a complete rejection of details devoid of constructive function.
The Frenchman Jacques-Germain Soufflot, during the construction of the Church of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, demonstrated the ability of classicism to organize vast urban spaces. The massive grandeur of his designs foreshadowed the megalomania of the Napoleonic Empire style and late classicism. In Russia, Bazhenov moved in the same direction as Soufflot. The French Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Etienne-Louis Boullé went even further towards developing a radical visionary style with an emphasis on abstract geometrization of forms. In revolutionary France, the ascetic civic pathos of their projects was of little demand; Ledoux's innovation was fully appreciated only by the modernists of the 20th century.
The architects of Napoleonic France drew inspiration from majestic images military glory left behind by imperial Rome, such as the triumphal arch of Septimius Severus and Trajan's Column. By order of Napoleon, these images were transferred to Paris in the form of the triumphal arch of Carrousel and the Vendôme Column. In relation to monuments of military greatness from the era of the Napoleonic wars, the term “imperial style” is used - Empire style. In Russia, Carl Rossi, Andrei Voronikhin and Andreyan Zakharov proved themselves to be outstanding masters of the Empire style. In Britain, the empire style corresponds to the so-called. "Regency style" ( largest representative- John Nash).
The aesthetics of classicism favored large-scale urban planning projects and led to the streamlining of urban development on the scale of entire cities. In Russia, almost all provincial and many district cities were replanned in accordance with the principles of classicist rationalism. Cities such as St. Petersburg, Helsinki, Warsaw, Dublin, Edinburgh and a number of others have turned into genuine open-air museums of classicism. A single architectural language, dating back to Palladio, dominated throughout the entire space from Minusinsk to Philadelphia. Ordinary development was carried out in accordance with albums of standard projects.
In the period following the Napoleonic Wars, classicism had to coexist with romantically colored eclecticism, in particular with the return of interest in the Middle Ages and the fashion for architectural neo-Gothic. In connection with Champollion's discoveries, Egyptian motifs are gaining popularity. Interest in ancient Roman architecture is replaced by reverence for everything ancient Greek (“neo-Greek”), which was especially pronounced in Germany and the USA. German architects Leo von Klenze and Karl Friedrich Schinkel built up, respectively, Munich and Berlin with grandiose museum and other public buildings in the spirit of the Parthenon. In France, the purity of classicism is diluted with free borrowings from the architectural repertoire of the Renaissance and Baroque (see Beaux Arts).
2.7. Classicism in literature
The founder of the poetics of classicism is the Frenchman Francois Malherbe (1555-1628), who carried out a reform of the French language and verse and developed poetic canons. The leading representatives of classicism in drama were the tragedians Corneille and Racine (1639-1699), whose main subject of creativity was the conflict between public duty and personal passions. “Low” genres also achieved high development - fable (J. Lafontaine), satire (Boileau), comedy (Molière 1622-1673).
Boileau became famous throughout Europe as the “legislator of Parnassus”, the largest theorist of classicism, who expressed his views in the poetic treatise “Poetic Art”. Under his influence in Great Britain were the poets John Dryden and Alexander Pope, who made alexandrines the main form of English poetry. English prose of the classical era (Addison, Swift) is also characterized by a Latinized syntax.
Classicism of the 18th century developed under the influence of the ideas of the Enlightenment. The work of Voltaire (1694-1778) is directed against religious fanaticism, absolutist oppression, and is filled with the pathos of freedom. The goal of creativity is to change the world for the better, to build society itself in accordance with the laws of classicism. From the standpoint of classicism, the Englishman Samuel Johnson reviewed contemporary literature, around whom a brilliant circle of like-minded people formed, including the essayist Boswell, the historian Gibbon and the actor Garrick. For dramatic works three unities are characteristic: unity of time (the action takes place on one day), unity of place (in one place) and unity of action (one storyline).
In Russia, classicism originated in the 18th century, after the reforms of Peter I. Lomonosov carried out a reform of Russian verse, developed the theory of “three calms,” which was essentially an adaptation of French classical rules to the Russian language. The images in classicism are devoid of individual features, since they are designed primarily to capture stable generic characteristics that do not pass over time, acting as the embodiment of any social or spiritual forces.
Classicism in Russia developed under the great influence of the Enlightenment - the ideas of equality and justice have always been the focus of attention of Russian classic writers. Therefore, in Russian classicism, genres that require the author’s obligatory assessment of historical reality have received great development: comedy (D. I. Fonvizin), satire (A. D. Kantemir), fable (A. P. Sumarokov, I. I. Khemnitser), ode (Lomonosov, G. R. Derzhavin).
In connection with Rousseau’s proclaimed call for closeness to nature and naturalness, crisis phenomena were growing in classicism at the end of the 18th century; The absolutization of reason is replaced by the cult of tender feelings - sentimentalism. The transition from classicism to pre-romanticism was most clearly reflected in German literature of the era of Sturm and Drang, represented by the names of J. W. Goethe (1749-1832) and F. Schiller (1759-1805), who, following Rousseau, saw art as the main force of education person.
2.8. Classicism in music
The concept of classicism in music is steadily associated with the works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, called Viennese classics and determined the direction of further development of musical composition.
The concept of "music of classicism" should not be confused with the concept of "classical music", which has a more general meaning as the music of the past that has stood the test of time.
The music of the Classical era glorifies the actions and deeds of man, the emotions and feelings he experiences, and the attentive and holistic human mind.
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For theatrical arts Classicism is characterized by a solemn, static structure of performances and measured reading of poetry. The 18th century is often called the “golden age” of theater. The founder of European classical comedy is the French comedian, actor and theater figure, reformer of stage art Moliere (name: Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) (1622-1673). For a long time, Moliere traveled with a theater troupe around the province, where he became acquainted with stage technology and the tastes of the public. In 1658, he received permission from the king to play with his troupe at the court theater in Paris. Based on the traditions of folk theater and the achievements of classicism, he created the genre of social comedy, in which slapstick and plebeian humor were combined with grace and artistry. Overcoming the schematism of the Italian comedies dell'arte (Italian commedia dell'arte - comedy of masks; the main masks are Harlequin, Pulcinella, the old merchant Pantalone, etc.), Moliere created life-like images. He ridiculed the class prejudices of the aristocrats, the narrow-mindedness of the bourgeoisie, the hypocrisy of the nobles ( "The Tradesman in the Nobility", 1670). With particular intransigence, Moliere exposed hypocrisy, hiding behind piety and ostentatious virtue: “Tartuffe, or the Deceiver” (1664), “Don Juan” (1665), “The Misanthrope” (1666). Moliere's artistic heritage had a profound influence on the development of world drama and theater. The most mature embodiment of the comedy of manners is recognized as “The Barber of Seville” (1775) and “The Marriage of Figaro” (1784) by the great French playwright Pierre Augustin Beaumarchais (1732-1799). They depict the conflict between the third estate and the nobility. Operas by V.A. were written based on the plots of the plays. Mozart (1786) and G. Rossini (1816). |
2.10. The originality of Russian classicism
Russian classicism arose in similar historical conditions - its prerequisite was the strengthening of autocratic statehood and national self-determination of Russia starting from the era of Peter I. The Europeanism of the ideology of Peter's reforms aimed Russian culture at mastering the achievements of European cultures. But at the same time, Russian classicism arose almost a century later than French: by the middle of the 18th century, when Russian classicism was just beginning to gain strength, in France it reached the second stage of its existence. The so-called “Enlightenment classicism” - a combination of classicist creative principles with the pre-revolutionary ideology of the Enlightenment - in French literature flourished in the work of Voltaire and acquired an anti-clerical, socially critical pathos: several decades before the Great French Revolution, the times of apology for absolutism were already distant history. Russian classicism, due to its strong connection with secular cultural reform, firstly, initially set itself educational tasks, trying to educate its readers and instruct monarchs on the path of public good, and secondly, acquired the status of a leading direction in Russian literature towards that time when Peter I was no longer alive, and the fate of his cultural reforms was jeopardized in the second half of the 1720s - 1730s.
Therefore, Russian classicism begins “not with the spring fruit - ode, but with the autumn fruit - satire,” and social-critical pathos is inherent in it from the very beginning.
Russian classicism also reflected a completely different type of conflict than Western European classicism. If in French classicism the socio-political principle is only the soil on which the psychological conflict of rational and unreasonable passion develops and the process of free and conscious choice between their dictates is carried out, then in Russia, with its traditionally anti-democratic conciliarity and the absolute power of society over the individual, the situation was completely different. otherwise. For Russian mentality, who had just begun to comprehend the ideology of personalism, the need for humility of the individual before society, the individual before power was not at all such a tragedy as for the Western worldview. The choice, relevant for the European consciousness as an opportunity to prefer one thing, in Russian conditions turned out to be imaginary, its outcome was predetermined in favor of society. Therefore, the situation of choice itself in Russian classicism lost its conflict-forming function, and was replaced by another.
The central problem of Russian life in the 18th century. There was a problem of power and its succession: not a single Russian emperor after the death of Peter I and before the accession of Paul I in 1796 came to power by legal means. XVIII century - this is an age of intrigue and palace coups, which too often led to absolute and uncontrolled power of people who did not at all correspond not only to the ideal of an enlightened monarch, but also to ideas about the role of the monarch in the state. Therefore, Russian classic literature immediately took a political-didactic direction and reflected precisely this problem as the main tragic dilemma of the era - the inconsistency of the ruler with the duties of the autocrat, the conflict of the experience of power as an egoistic personal passion with the idea of power exercised for the benefit of his subjects.
Thus, the Russian classic conflict, having preserved the situation of choice between reasonable and unreasonable passion as an external plot pattern, was entirely realized as socio-political in nature. Positive hero Russian classicism does not humble its individual passion in the name of the common good, but insists on its natural rights, defending its personalism from tyrannical attacks. And the most important thing is that this national specificity of the method was well understood by the writers themselves: if the plots of French classic tragedies are drawn mainly from ancient mythology and history, then Sumarokov wrote his tragedies based on plots from Russian chronicles and even on plots from not so distant Russian history.
Finally, one more specific feature Russian classicism was that it did not rely on such a rich and continuous tradition of national literature as any other national European variety of method. What any European literature had at the time of the emergence of the theory of classicism - namely, literary language with an orderly stylistic system, principles of versification, a defined system of literary genres - all this had to be created in Russian. Therefore, in Russian classicism, literary theory was ahead of literary practice. The normative acts of Russian classicism - reform of versification, reform of style and regulation of the genre system - were carried out between the mid-1730s and the end of the 1740s. - that is, mainly before a full-fledged literary process in line with classicist aesthetics unfolded in Russia.
3. Conclusion
For the ideological premises of classicism, it is essential that the individual’s desire for freedom is considered here to be as legitimate as the need of society to bind this freedom by laws.
The personal principle continues to retain that immediate social significance, that independent value with which the Renaissance first endowed it. However, in contrast, now this principle belongs to the individual, along with the role that society now receives as a social organization. And this implies that any attempt by an individual to defend his freedom in spite of society threatens him with the loss of the fullness of life connections and the transformation of freedom into an empty subjectivity devoid of any support.
The category of measure is a fundamental category in the poetics of classicism. It is unusually multifaceted in content, has both a spiritual and plastic nature, is in contact with, but does not coincide with, another typical concept of classicism - the concept of norm - and is closely connected with all aspects of the ideal affirmed here.
Classical reason, as the source and guarantor of balance in nature and the lives of people, bears the stamp of poetic faith in the original harmony of all things, trust in the natural course of things, confidence in the presence of an all-encompassing correspondence between the movement of the world and the formation of society, in the humanistic, human-oriented nature of this communications.
I am close to the period of classicism, its principles, poetry, art, creativity in general. The conclusions that classicism makes regarding people, society, and the world seem to me to be the only true and rational ones. Measure, as the middle line between opposites, order of things, systems, and not chaos; a strong relationship between man and society against their rupture and enmity, excessive genius and selfishness; harmony against extremes - in this I see the ideal principles of existence, the foundations of which are reflected in the canons of classicism.
List of sources
Russian history literature XVII 1st century Lebedeva O.B.
Aesthetics of classicism
Aesthetics of classicism
Ideas about the laws of creativity and the structure of a work of art are determined to the same extent by the epochal type of worldview as the picture of the world and the concept of personality. Reason, as the highest spiritual ability of man, is conceived not only as an instrument of knowledge, but also as an organ of creativity and a source of aesthetic pleasure. One of the most striking leitmotifs of Boileau’s “Poetic Art” is the rational nature of aesthetic activity:
Along a dangerous path as slippery as ice
You should always go towards common sense.
Whoever leaves this path dies immediately:
There is one path to reason, there is no other.
From here arises a completely rationalistic aesthetics, the defining categories of which are the hierarchical principle and normativity. Following Aristotle, classicism considered art to be an imitation of nature:
Don’t torment us with the incredible, disturbing the mind:
And the truth is sometimes unlike the truth.
I will not be delighted with wonderful nonsense:
The mind does not care about what it does not believe.
However, nature was by no means understood as a visual picture of the physical and moral world, appearing to the senses, but rather as the highest intelligible essence of the world and man: not a specific character, but its idea, not a real historical or modern plot, but a universal human conflict situation, not given landscape, but the idea of a harmonious combination of natural realities in an ideally beautiful unity. Classicism found such an ideally beautiful unity in ancient literature - it was precisely this that was perceived by classicism as the already achieved pinnacle of aesthetic activity, the eternal and unchanging standard of art, which recreated in its genre models that very highest ideal nature, physical and moral, which art should imitate. It so happened that the thesis about imitation of nature turned into an injunction to imitate ancient art, where the term “classicism” itself came from (from the Latin classicus - exemplary, studied in class): Let nothing separate you from nature.
An example would be Terence's painting:
A gray-haired father scolds his son who has fallen in love ‹…›
No, this is not a portrait, but life. In such a picture
The spirit of nature lives in the gray-haired father and son.
Thus, nature in classic art appears not so much reproduced as modeled on a high model - “decorated” with the generalizing analytical activity of the mind. By analogy, we can recall the so-called “regular” (i.e., “correct”) park, where the trees are trimmed in the form geometric shapes and symmetrically seated, regularly shaped paths strewn with colorful pebbles, and water enclosed in marble pools and fountains. This style of gardening art reached its peak precisely in the era of classicism. The desire to present nature as “decorated” also results in the absolute predominance in literature of classicism of poetry over prose: if prose is identical to simple material nature, then poetry, as a literary form, is certainly an ideal “decorated” nature.”
In all these ideas about art, namely as a rational, ordered, standardized, spiritual activity, the hierarchical principle of thinking of the 17th-18th centuries was realized. Within itself, literature also turned out to be divided into two hierarchical series, low and high, each of which was thematically and stylistically associated with one - material or ideal - level of reality. Low genres included satire, comedy, and fable; to the high – ode, tragedy, epic. In low genres, everyday material reality is depicted, and a private person appears in social connections (while, of course, both the person and reality are still the same ideal conceptual categories). In high genres, man is presented as a spiritual and social being, in the existential aspect of his existence, alone and along with the eternal fundamentals of questions of existence. Therefore, for high and low genres, not only thematic, but also class differentiation turned out to be relevant based on the character’s belonging to one or another social stratum. The hero of low genres is a middle-class person; high hero - a historical figure, a mythological hero or a fictional high-ranking character - usually a ruler.
In low genres, human characters are formed by base everyday passions (stinginess, hypocrisy, hypocrisy, envy, etc.); in high genres, passions acquire a spiritual character (love, ambition, vindictiveness, a sense of duty, patriotism, etc.). And if everyday passions are clearly unreasonable and vicious, then existential passions are divided into reasonable - social and unreasonable - personal, and the ethical status of the hero depends on his choice. He is unambiguously positive if he prefers a reasonable passion, and unambiguously negative if he chooses an unreasonable one. Classicism did not allow halftones in ethical assessment - and this also reflected the rationalistic nature of the method, which excluded any confusion of high and low, tragic and comic.
Since the genre theory of classicism legitimized as the main those genres that reached the greatest flowering in ancient literature, and literary creativity was thought of as a reasonable imitation of high models, the aesthetic code of classicism acquired a normative character. This means that the model of each genre was established once and for all in a clear set of rules, from which it was unacceptable to deviate, and each specific text was aesthetically assessed according to the degree of compliance with this ideal genre model.
The source of the rules were ancient examples: the epic of Homer and Virgil, the tragedy of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Seneca, the comedy of Aristophanes, Menander, Terence and Plautus, the ode of Pindar, the fable of Aesop and Phaedrus, the satire of Horace and Juvenal. The most typical and illustrative case of such genre regulation is, of course, the rules for the leading classic genre, tragedy, drawn both from the texts of ancient tragedians and from Aristotle’s Poetics.
For the tragedy, a poetic form was canonized (“Alexandrian verse” - iambic hexameter with paired rhyme), a mandatory five-act structure, three unities - time, place and action, high style, a historical or mythological plot and a conflict, implying a mandatory situation of choice between reasonable and unreasonable passion, and the process of choice itself was supposed to constitute the action of the tragedy. It was in the dramatic section of the aesthetics of classicism that the rationalism, hierarchy and normativity of the method were expressed with the greatest completeness and obviousness:
But we, who respect the laws of reason,
Only skillful construction captivates ‹…›
But the scene requires both truth and intelligence.
The laws of logic in the theater are very strict.
Do you want to bring a new type to the stage?
Please combine all the qualities of the face
And maintain the image from beginning to end.
Everything that was said above about the aesthetics of classicism and the poetics of classicist literature in France applies equally to almost any European variety of the method, since French classicism was historically the earliest and aesthetically most authoritative embodiment of the method. But for Russian classicism, these general theoretical principles found a unique refraction in artistic practice, since they were determined by the historical and national characteristics of the formation of the new Russian culture of the 18th century.
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From the author's book From the author's bookThe image of man in the literature of European classicism of the 17th century New literary ideas of the Renaissance could not be translated into real life. Disappointment in the teachings of humanists leads to very significant changes in the depiction of classicist
In the art and aesthetics of classicism (17th century), based on the ideas of French absolutism, the center appeared as an active active personality - the hero. His character is not characterized by the titanic scale that distinguished the heroes. Renaissance, as well as integrity of character and active direction of will to achieve the goal that defined the heroes of Greek antiquity.
In line with the ideas of mechanistic materialism of the era, he divided the world into two independent substances - spiritual and material, thinking and sensual, the hero of the art of classicism appears as an individualized personification of these opposites and is called upon to decide on priorities. He becomes a heroic figure due to the provision of advantages to values that personify the “universal”, and by “universal” classicism understood such rather conventional values as noble honor, the feudal lord’s knightly devotion to his moral duty to the ruler and so on. The dominance of philosophical rationalism is not a positive direction in the sense of affirming the ideas of the integrity of the state under the rule of a strong personality. In art, it determined the speculative nature of the characters and conflicts of the heroes of the tragedy. Researchers rightly note that classicism "extracted a harmonious principle not from the depths of human nature itself (this humanistic "illusion" was overcome), but from the social sphere in which the hero acted."
The rationalistic method became the methodological basis of the aesthetics of classicism. Descartes, based on mathematical knowledge. It corresponded to the content of the ideology of absolutism, which sought to regulate all areas of culture and life. The theory of passions, motivated by the philosopher, relieved souls of bodily excitement caused by external stimuli. The rationalistic method was used by the theory of tragedy in the spirit of Cartesianism and applied the principles of poetics. Aristotle. This trend can be clearly seen in the tragedies of the most outstanding playwrights of classicism -. P. Corneille and. J. Racine Racine.
outstanding theorist of the aesthetics of classicism. O. Boileau (1636-1711) in his work “Poetic Art” (1674) teaches the aesthetic principles of the art of classicism. The author considers the basis of the aesthetic to be the subordination of duties to the laws of rational thought. However, this does not mean denying the poetry of art. The measure of the artistry of a work depends on the degree of truth of the work and the verisimilitude of its paintings. Identifying the perception of beauty with the knowledge of truth with the help of reason, he also strengthens the creative imagination and intuition of the artist with reason.
O. Boileau encourages artists to understand nature, but advises subjecting it to a certain purification and correction. The researcher paid great attention aesthetic means expressions of content. To achieve the ideal in art, he considered it necessary to be guided by strict rules arising from certain universal principles; he adhered to the idea of the existence of a certain absolute beauty, and therefore the possible means of its creation. The main purpose of art, according to. O. Boileau, - a presentation of rational ideas, shrouded in a veil of poetically beautiful. The goal of his perception is the combination of reasonableness of thought and sensual pleasure of docile and fortu forms.
The rationalization of forms of experience, including artistic experience, is also reflected in the differentiation of genres of art; the aesthetics of classicism divides into “high” and “low.” The author believes that they cannot be mixed, since they never turn into each other. By. O. Boileau, heroic actions and noble passions - sphere high genres. The life of ordinary ordinary people is the sphere of “low” genres. That is why I give or credit to the works. Jean-Baptiste. Moliere, he considered their disadvantage to be close to folk theater. So, aesthetics. O. Boileau is focused on the creation of regulations that the artist must adhere to so that his work would embody the idea of beauty as the orderliness of content and form, taking into account the reasonable expediency of the content and the proper poetry of its form and the proper poeticity of its form.
Certain aesthetic ideas are contained in treatises. P. Corneille, dedicated to the theory of drama. The playwright sees the main meaning of the latter in the “cleansing” action of the theater, like Aristotle’s “catharsis.” The theater must explain the events of the work to the audience so that they can leave the theater, dispelling all doubts and contradictions. Valuable for the theory of aesthetics is the idea of taste, justified. F La Rochefoucauld (1613 - 1680) in his work "Maxims" The author examines the opposite tendencies in knowledge, caused by differences between tastes and the mind. In the middle of the said aesthetic sphere, the opposites recur in the form of taste: passionate, related to our interests, and general, which directs us to the truth, although the difference between them is relative. The shades of taste are varied, the value of his judgments undergoes changes. The philosopher recognizes the existence of good taste, which opens the path to truth. Despite the declarative nature of the aesthetic ideas of classicism, the spiritual and social soil on which they grew, namely the formation of national states with strong individual power (king, emperor) - turned out to be extremely fruitful for the practice of art. Based on the ideas of classicism, drama, theater, architecture, poetry, music, and painting flourished. In all these types of art, national art schools were formed and national art schools were formed.
Ethical and aesthetic program
The initial principle of the aesthetic code of classicism is imitation of beautiful nature. Objective beauty for the theorists of classicism (Boileau, Andre) is the harmony and regularity of the universe, which has as its source a spiritual principle that shapes matter and puts it in order. Beauty, therefore, as an eternal spiritual law, is the opposite of everything sensual, material, changeable. Therefore, moral beauty is higher than physical beauty; the creation of human hands is more beautiful than the rough beauty of nature.
The laws of beauty do not depend on the experience of observation; they are extracted from the analysis of internal spiritual activity.
The ideal of the artistic language of classicism is the language of logic - accuracy, clarity, consistency. The linguistic poetics of classicism avoids, as far as possible, the objective figurativeness of the word. Her usual remedy is an abstract epithet.
The relationship between the individual elements of a work of art is built on the same principles, i.e. a composition that is usually a geometrically balanced structure based on a strict symmetrical division of the material. Thus, the laws of art are likened to the laws of formal logic.
The political ideal of classicism
In his political struggle The revolutionary bourgeois and plebeians in France, both in the decades preceding the revolution and in the turbulent years of 1789-1794, made extensive use of ancient traditions, ideological heritage and external forms of Roman democracy. So, at the turn of the XVIII-XIX centuries. In European literature and art, a new type of classicism emerged, new in its ideological and social content in relation to the classicism of the 17th century, to the aesthetic theory and practice of Boileau, Corneille, Racine, Poussin.
The art of classicism of the era bourgeois revolution was strictly rationalistic, i.e. required complete logical correspondence of all elements artistic form very clearly expressed intention.
Classicism of the 18th-19th centuries. was not a homogeneous phenomenon. In France, the heroic period of the bourgeois revolution of 1789-1794. preceded and accompanied the development of revolutionary republican classicism, which was embodied in the dramas of M.Zh. Chenier, in the early painting of David, etc. In contrast, during the years of the Directory and especially the Consulate and the Napoleonic Empire, classicism lost its revolutionary spirit and turned into a conservative academic movement.
Sometimes, under the direct influence of French art and the events of the French Revolution, and in some cases, independently of them and even preceding them in time, a new classicism developed in Italy, Spain, the Scandinavian countries, and the USA. In Russia, classicism reached its greatest heights in the architecture of the first thirds of the XIX V.
One of the most significant ideological and artistic achievements of this time was the work of the great German poets and thinkers - Goethe and Schiller.
With all the variety of variants of classicist art, there was much in common. And the revolutionary classicism of the Jacobins, and the philosophical-humanistic classicism of Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and the conservative classicism of the Napoleonic Empire, and the very diverse - sometimes progressive-patriotic, sometimes reactionary-great-power - classicism in Russia were contradictory products of the same historical era.