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Arty the Art Historian

@ArtyArtHistory

Feb 14

How did the heart symbol come to be a symbol of romantic love?

An urban legend says it’s supposed to symbolize two hearts sewn together... but what's the actual story? (Thread)

Is it a simplified symmetrical version of the heart's general anatomical shape? Some believe the common symbol of the heart was taken from Islamic Moorish doctors. Old medical texts from around 700-800 CE have appeared to show the exact same shape. If you take a look at medieval European art, this shape seems to show up first in Spain, it's possible that they'd seen something from the Arabs.

Depictions of Christ and his wounds themselves have a history of being increasingly abstract through the Medieval era, and it's interesting to note our association of this style of heart with St Valentine.

1486 depiction of the Five Wounds (left).

15th century manuscript depiction of the Heart of Jesus in the context of the Five Wounds (the wounded heart here depicting Christ's wound inflicted by the Lance of Longinus) (right)

The use of the heart shape and its metaphorical meaning was developed in the end of the Middle Ages.

There were possible early examples or direct predecessors in the 13th to 14th century, but the familiar symbol of the heart representing love developed in the 15th century, and became popular in Europe during the 16th.

Before the 14th century, the heart shape was not associated with its meaning. The geometric shape in earlier sources didn't depict a heart, but foliage: in examples from antiquity fig leaves, and in medieval iconography and heraldry, typically the leaves of ivy and of the water-lily.

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Arty the Art Historian

@ArtyArtHistory

Oct 23, 2023

The Hiberno-Saxon style, in Western visual art, is the name given to the interaction of the Irish, or Hibernians, and the Anglo-Saxons of southern England during the 7th century.

This was a pagan art, and a perfect example of Medieval art as being strongly informed by European indigenous art and decorative tradition, as the two ethnic groups who created this syncretic style, the Celts and the Germanic Anglo-Saxons, were animistic pagans.

Interlacing patterns, including elaborate zoomorphic interlace (animal motifs), were common in Anglo-Saxon art, and ancient Celtic decorative tradition consisted of curved line forms: scrolls and spirals, “trumpet” forms, and a double curve, or shield, motif known as a pelta. This abstract ornamental system is visible in their sculpture, in metalwork, and in Irish manuscripts, with their elaborate initials and other decorative embellishments.

A third influence of Hiberno-Saxon art, however, was Mediterranean art, which became an important artistic ingredient after St. Augustine’s mission arrived from Rome with many manuscripts and other art objects to use in converting the Saxons to Christianity. This tradition brought with it the representation of the human figure, such as representations of Mary and Jesus in classical style. These will look familiar in the manuscripts below.

The beautiful evidence of this can be seen in the famous manuscripts produced during this period, when monks Book of Kells, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and the Book of Durrow.

This Hiberno-Saxon style didn't simply die in obscurity in the British isles. Like many barbarian syncretic art styles during the Medieval age, it was incorporated into the wider traditions of Medieval art, specifically by being imported to the European continent by Irish and Saxon Christian missionaries, and there it had a strong influence, particularly on the art of the Carolingian empire.

You can see in this magnificent Chi-Ro symbol in the Book of Kells, a creative initial with a human head at the top, twisted to form the letter. This is an example of the interlace-pattern mixed with animal motifs (or human, therefore, Mediterranean) creating this unique style .

The Anglo-Saxons had no tradition of painting or calligraphy, but excelled in metalwork. The rich gold and jeweled examples that survive show their love of metallic brilliance and bright colour.

Some images from Sutton Hoo loot which show the Germanic art

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Arty the Art Historian

@ArtyArtHistory

Oct 4, 2023

With regards to the jazz tweet, my main objective in all this is to introduce people to a higher level of art critique. The post was shocking in its spirit, because we’ve forgotten what it means to give a severe and generalizing takedown of whole genres at once, to think that our automatic and instinctual impression of something means more than null, to look at styles with a magnifying glass and laser-beam perception strong enough as to incinerate it.

Discriminatory judgements of artistic styles were the norm in Western art history in its heyday, since by allowing themselves to make them, thinkers were able to arrive at a higher philosophical understanding and view of art and culture in a totalizing way. This discriminating sense belonged to Western men and women for millennia, united with a reality principle and a sense of ideal form, until it was taken away from us violently within a century.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men - that is genius. Speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost, - and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgement."

The final destroyer of this and its final point of Western accomplishment in thought and culture is relativism.

"This is your subjective opinion" is in essence a meaningless statement, because it implies that people simply hold opinions and value judgements for no reason, and, even more dangerously, that liking something at all means nothing. Openly disliking something is not ideal here, for what is allowed is only *not understanding*, and thus remaining silent. (read the successive tweets that go further in depth into this)

Allan Bloom wrote: “They want to make us culture-beings with the instruments that were invented to liberate us from culture. Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason's power. The unrestrained and thoughtless pursuit of openness, without recognizing the inherent political, social, or cultural problem of openness as the goal of nature, has rendered openness meaningless. Cultural relativism destroys both one's own and the good.”

Below, Emerson's quote from "Self Reliance", and Allan Bloom from "The Closing of the American Mind"

To show your approval of jazz as an integral part of human culture is to be a relativist. Here’s why.

In the early 20th century there began a transformation whose effects we still suffer from today, where culture and the arts were transferred exclusively to the hands of an elite group of liberal cultural literati who were “in the know”. They welcomed all kinds of empty, nihilistic and degenerate art as progressivism moved along and with it the loss of the old high culture and social order. What people don’t understand is, to have an opinion about art in the past was not a luxury that only “elites” were allowed to have. The man on the street gave his opinions and generally had no reason to feel *alienated* from the cultured class who “was intellectual enough to understand it”. This is a phenomenon that began with the new *massively unpopular* modern art, as Ortega y Gasset explained in “The Dehumanization of Art”.

A lot of people commented about how what I said is what everyone secretly thinks but don’t say it aloud. Lots of people saying they don’t like it but always figured this was because they “don’t get it” and believed they were supposed keep their opinion to themselves. This is an effect of the cultural destruction we have endured, where regular people were made enemies of the “art and culture world” as the disparity grew between elite and average person.

It isn’t a matter of “understanding”. Some have said the more they listen, the worse it sounds. Studying music theory for years with lots of jazz included won’t “cure” someone who genuinely can’t stand hearing it. And this isn’t the process that happens with great art and music. You don’t have to be “convinced” into liking it, it just naturally and instantly has a transcendent effect on *every member of the population*.

As @BronzeAgeBaker said, “Timeless classics are objectively good, that’s why they’re timeless. In 100 years, people will be dumbfounded that jazz ever existed, if they can even find any semblance that it did.”

On the use of the term “phillistine”:

“You will only ever be called a philistine for denigrating very specific recent evolutions in the arts, namely jazz, primitivism, Bauhaus. You will never be called a philistine for failing to appreciate the other 99% of art history.” - @augustaghast

As @cobrathustra joked “Nooo it’s not elevator music!! It’s HIGHBROW! It’s deconstruction! It’s the Death of God! It’s a Matisse painting! It’s Goethean colour theory!! It’s Lacanian psychoanalysis!!! You fucking chud!!!!!!”

Pictures below from Gasset’s essay

“Formless”. When I said jazz was “formless” and basically random (to our ears), I mean that by technically overcomplicating for its own sake and relying on syncopation and overcomplicated, what you get is formlessness. Read this thread by Lex to understand in more detail

People have said jazz is about experimentation, play, mathematics, playing with forms etc. As others said, jazz is *solely* this, and hence, it is ugly. It *lacks* beauty.

It isn’t artistic, because it doesn’t strive for beauty as its motivating principle, but subversion of rules. As I said, it is disordered and resembles chaos because its creators were motivated by disorder and chaos. A lack of form in a deeper sense, which then took on its own 'formal' rules, that music theory nerds could try to explain for hours and try to get you to find it interesting and suddenly “make sense”, that it might somehow change your IMPRESSION.
Impressions matter, though.

Comments I received:
- "I see jazz as over-mathematization of modernist music like Debussy. Jazz has structure, it's just so complex it resembles chaos. It's even more obvious in free jazz"
- "People simply defending it for its technicality. 'Complexity for the sake of complexity and impression makes my music smart' "
- "It’s adding extra layers to the math equation and still getting the answer wrong"
- "Creating a memorable unique yet simple melody is much harder than stringing together aimless rambling sequences of notes over arbitrary key changes. It's just entropy at work."
- "'Music for musicians'. It’s all technical. It’s the same as formal elements of art. I triggered the world when i said “formless” etc because that’s the defense of it to be in the know, and to be any sort of defender of arts, that’s why they thought it was absurd I’m an art historian and I will say such things. But in essence it amounts to basically being formless."

It is well known that most people hate listening to jazz, and musicians pretty much just enjoy playing it because it’s fun

From that Adorno essay on jazz I kept hearing I was apparently riffing off of and finally looked at (restating this idea in other words):

Read 5 tweets

Arty the Art Historian

@ArtyArtHistory

Sep 7, 2023

https://twitter.com/ArtyArtHistory/status/1699580152382992543

Arty's theory 👁 👁 SCULPTURE VS PAINTING

Is sculpture an inherently masculine artistic medium and painting a more inherently feminine one?
Mega 🧵

https://twitter.com/ArtyArtHistory/status/1699580152382992543

1. What was the BIRTH of monumental (i.e. life-size) sculpture in art history?

A now-forgotten art historian, Rhys Carpenter, wrote in "Greek Sculpture" how monumental sculpture, developed by the Greeks, *was firmly intertwined with the form of the male nude body itself*

From Egypt they adapted the kouros, removing the loincloth, but feeling comfortable only with the MALE nude in all its hard musculature and Apollonian form.

He writes: “Apart from its communication through cultural diffusion...

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Arty the Art Historian

@ArtyArtHistory

Jul 6, 2023

How Greek religion birthed our Western natural-scientific worldview, by Alois Riegl:

From the outset, anthropomorphic polytheism recognized only material forces, no spiritual ones and therefore no moral ones. In contrast to its Oriental counterpart, it grasped the forces of nature individually and sought to coordinate them among themselves. Polytheism thus came to differentiate natural forces much more sharply and there existed a greater multitude of deities, who each equally enjoyed a certain independence and freedom of movement.

The Greeks did not feel pressured to place all the gods under the domination of a single supremely strong figure. Although one higher ruler, Zeus, did exist in the heavenly sphere, there was room alongside him for the activity of countless others. One therefore did not need to turn to Zeus on every occasion but could summon other gods individually according to the natural power one needed. In this way, Greek mythology was gradually transformed into something akin to a natural-scientific universal system.

For example, Aeolus is the god of the winds; today we would say the "law of air currents". What we call "laws" or "principles", the Greeks could only call a "god".

An better example: you witness a lightning bolt spare a house at the edge of a forest over which a storm is passing

The ancient Greek assigned meaning to that natural event by saying this particular spot is especially pleasant to Jupiter Tonans, who spared the house because its owner had dedicated a nearby grove to him.

Read 6 tweets

Arty the Art Historian

@ArtyArtHistory

Jun 26, 2023

Alois Riegl, a great art theorist, talked about how
symmetry and movement are *mutually exclusive opposites*, like body and soul.

"Symmetry is the formal law of matter, movement that of spirit." These are the two components that make up organic life, and art. What do you think?

Through the natural disruption of pure, still symmetry by organic life-giving movement, a third principle then originates, that of proportion, to artificially balance the effects of movement by RESTORING some amount of symmetry and balance to a picture, to put the viewer at ease.

Take for example the Greek contrapposto. Classical art is seen as the highest form of art because this theorem was followed to its perfect end, and a touch of spirit and of human movement and life impregnated the stone, while it still retained its clear and distinct outline

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