An engaging companion piece to THE ARTS OF THE BEAUTIFUL, this volume advances Etienne Gilson's theories about art as a process of 'making' by focusing on the substances available to an artist. The basis for his argument is grounded in the distinction between arts concerned with the creation of beauty and arts that are primarily functional. He takes up in turn: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, dance, poetry, and the theater, analyzing in each the basic materials afforded the artist, the possibilities of artistic form, and the means of transformation and creation.
For Gilson, beauty is not an abstract, ideal form, but is inseparable from being, that is, things. Gilson carefully distinguishes between a philosophy of art, with which he is mainly concerned in this book, and aesthetics (''the two disciplines are as different as writing a symphony is from listening to one''). In this book that philosophy, which he articulated in The Arts of the Beautiful, is applied to the specific arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, dance, poetry, and drama. The breadth and detail of Gilson's familiarity with each of these is truly astonishing. We are dealing here with the proverbial Renaissance Man, increasingly a rarity in our age. Come look.
For Gilson, beauty is not an abstract, ideal form, but is inseparable from being, that is, things. Gilson carefully distinguishes between a philosophy of art, with which he is mainly concerned in this book, and aesthetics (''the two disciplines are as different as writing a symphony is from listening to one''). In this book that philosophy, which he articulated in The Arts of the Beautiful, is applied to the specific arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, dance, poetry, and drama. The breadth and detail of Gilson's familiarity with each of these is truly astonishing. We are dealing here with the proverbial Renaissance Man, increasingly a rarity in our age. Come look.
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