In Russian fairy tales, the Prince is always called Prince Ivan traditionally. Ivan Tsarevitch and the Grey Wolf is one of the most famous fairy tales in Russian folklore and is depicted by Viktor Vasnetsov in a gorgeous painting of the magical wolf flying through the forest with the Prince and Princess on his back. In another painting, Victor Vasnetsov captures the story of Prince Ivan flying on a magic carpet through the air with a magic golden phoenix captured in a cage. It is not a stretch then to connect the Prince Ivan in Repin’s painting with the Prince Ivan of Russian myth and fairy tales.

When we look at the Prince’s clothes in Repin’s painting, he is wearing bright green boots gilded with gold embroidery. He has a beautiful silver and pink coat. The bright colours of the Prince’s clothes contrast strongly with the simple black costume of his father. The Prince, whose blood flows bright red down his head, and who looks tall and young, seems like he was full of vitality and potential, which was all cut short by one brutish accident. As we gaze into the gaunt face of Ivan the Terrible, we wonder how such a weak looking man might have done something like that. He clutches his son, but his eyes look at something which is not in the room. They look as though he is away into the future, wonder what would happen to his kingdom now without a prince, or to his own life now without an heir. He is replaying his moment of wrath again and again in his mind, hoping somehow that focusing on it will reveal some way to escape the inevitable, fatal, consequence before him.

Around the room there is evidence of the fight. A stool has been turned over. The cushions lie in disarray. The carpets are crumpled where the Prince might have tripped. The murder weapon, a staff, lies in the foreground, the line of it bringing visual harmony to the piece, and its appearance, a material and cold realisation: what is done cannot be undone.

When we look carefully at the Prince himself, we can see that he is not quite dead yet. There is tension still in his left arm as he props himself up. His eye seems to still have a spark, quickly diminishing. A tear is frozen on his cheek. But we know that in a moment he will be limp.

Repin’s genius is revealed in his ability to capture the liminal moment between life and death. Through his decisions in the details he included and how he choreographed them, one single powerful visual composition unfolds an entire story in an instant and demonstrates a mastery of story telling ability. But why did Repin want to tell this story and that too nearly 300 years after the fact?

Historically, the event of the murder left Russia unstable. Ivan the Terrible’s death in 1584 was followed by the Time of Troubles characterised by chaos, famine and foreign invasion. In 1881, Tsar Alexander II had also been assassinated by revolutionaries and this left a troubling impact on Russia. Indeed only about forty years later, the next royal family of Russia, Tsar Nicholas II and his three daughters, wife and son, would be brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks as well. There was clearly a brutal, regicidal energy in the air in Russia and Repin, being an excellent artist, picked up on it and put it in his artwork.

In the fairy tale, the proper prince ascends the throne and all becomes right again in the Kingdom. In Russia, the Princes were being slaughtered and foreigners, revolutionaries and Bolsheviks, were quickly gaining power. Repin predicted, but was not to know, that the 20th century for Russia would be marred with famine and death at scaled hitherto to not known by the innocent pre-war world.

Repin’s painting was not merely an ideological or political critique or message. The main purpose of it was to bring visceral, human recognition of the impact of senseless violence. Through the realism, and the powerful visual storytelling of his painting, the viewer can really fell the horror, regret and tragedy of senseless bloodshed.

This painting in fact inspired such a response in the people who viewed it that one man was inspired to madness upon viewing it in 1913 and slashed the painting, shouting “enough with violence, enough with blood!”.

Russia is in an interesting position today politically. It has become the scapegoat for the west to project its problems onto. Russia alleviates the west of the burden of looking inward at their own rotten political madness. So long as Russia is their villain, they can be the hero and any means the hero must pursue to his end is in this way justified to them.

Russian art is purposely neglected in mainstream art education because of many such political issues, but also, importantly, because Russian art is so real, and so powerful. Once someone has studied the power and beauty of proper art, fake art will reveal itself much more quickly. Modern art defendors often contend that modern art is the best at capturing powerful feelings, and complex emotional and ideological subject matter. Yet, Repin was able to compose a visual scene without resorting to meaningless abstract. The story that he wishes to tell can be understood at a glance. Even without my writing next to it, one would understand every element of the harrowing moment captured therein. I hope that you have enjoyed looking, nevertheless, with me.

“In fairy tales, songs, bylinas, and other affects, the entire face of the whole people, internal and external with past and present, as can be, and as the future, is shown” - Viktor Vasnetsov

The depiction of fairy tales in art is one of the most challenging yet important functions of fine art, for unlike other art, the land and inhabitants of the fairy tale are not set in stone nor can they find reference in our “real world”. A child first encounters fine art in his fairy tale books narrated by a parent’s voice at the tenderest and most impressionable stage of life. There, the images of what a fairy, a princess, imp and hero imprint themselves into the young mind and inform forever his ideas of the mystical.

These stories are not merely frivolous entertainment for a child, because they contain within them deep truths about human nature and one’s own culture. For the last century, Disney has been King of the Fairy Tale and has been the primary authority on the images to do with fairy stories and folklore. Who does not imagine Glen Keane’s depiction of the Beast when the story of Beauty and the Beast is mentioned? However there are many other artists, lesser known, yet far more interesting who have depicted fairy tales as well. Here we will delve into one of them, with whose works you are likely familiar, but have never known which name they belonged to. These are the works of Russian painter, Viktor Vasnetsov.

Viktor Vasnetsov was born in a remote village called Lopyal, in Russia in 1848. He studied in the Imperial Academy of Art in Saint Petersburg. Vasnetsov’s work is known for its dark and brooding colours but also for the beautiful and intricate scenes of Russian folklore and fairy tales. In fact, because his art was so beautiful, it came to be a stand in for Russian history when the Soviet Union fell in 1989. During Soviet rule, books were destroyed about Russian history, but the art survived and helped to breathe life back into Russian culture. In the 19th century, the Salon (the institution of the arts) measured the quality of all art against the classical European standard. Russians were never considered European. Russian artists during this time period were working to build a Russian identity against the salon’s desire to imitate European subject matter. Vasnetsov found inspiration in Russian folklore rather than in Greek myth.

The Bogatyrs, 1898

A Bogatyr is a character in slavic legends that is equivalent to a knight-errant in Western romances. Bogatyrs appear in bylinas which means fairy-tales, but literally translates to “something that was”. These stories were usually about a historical event but had fantastical and fairy-tale elements in them. These are different from skazkas stories which means “something that is said”. Skazkas are stories that are completely fantastical. Bogatyrs were mythical Russian heroes equivalent to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Painting them solidified a mythical ideal of masculinity to which young Russian men could aspire.

This painting was done in the 19th century and the effect was to give modern Russians a sense of their mythic past. The heroes wear medieval armour and carry old weapons. They remind the modern Russian what his ancestors might have looked like and by depicting them as heroes, gives the modern man a sense of the kind of heroic qualities that may lay dormant in him. Perhaps some part of him still knows how to do what these men did in the past. In a world of increasing confusion about how to be a man, artwork like this tells young men that it is all in them.

The painting is off centre which is what makes it visually interesting and sets it apart from the mathematically calculated appearance of French neo-classical art in which every line and figure seems placed in precise symmetry to mimic Renaissance perfection. This asymmetry in Vasnetsov’s painting is paired with a kind of messiness throughout. The terrain is covered in dirt and wild grass, a smattering of baby pines, as well as the messy sky showing typical Russian weather which is not perfect like the gentle vistas of Italy and Greece. The horses too bay and dance, with their wild hair scattered left and right. These are not people so concerned with the pristine manners of Western Europe at the time. They have a wilderness to them that does not allow them to be so easily tamed. These details give the whole story depicted a wild feeling. It does not feel so staged. It feels natural and candid, like it actually happened.

The landscape painting in Vasnetsov’s work is not a pastiche of European landscape as the Imperial academy would use. Vasnetsov paints Russian landscape to house its nationalistic fairy tale characters. Vasnetsov was truly trying to depict his home, rather than try to impress the salon by painting Italy or France from references to older paintings. This is what made his work so fresh and interesting.

The Flying Carpet (1880)

The story depicted in this painting is about Prince Ivan and the Firebird. A young Prince steals a Firebird and rescues a Princess, and in some versions of the story, flies home on a magic carpet. This painting situates the Russian fairy tale in the real life Russian landscape thus bringing the story to life so that if someone were to see this landscape in reality, they could imagine a magic flying carpet might have flown through the sky there.

The visual composition of the painting creates an illusion of movement. Though the landscape is very still and serene, the carpet is tilted to create a diagonal line from the bottom right to the top left, which usually indicates a return. We can sense that this is the ending of the story when the Prince is returning home with the Firebird. The three owls are flying down to the bottom left of the picture as if they are returning home to sleep, meaning that it is the dawn. The Prince has been travelling all night and the story is coming to a close with a happy ending and the rising of the sun. All of these compositional lines of the river, the carpet and the owls create smooth visual harmony in the painting like the waves of the sea and so the Prince standing upright above them all stands out even more as the ruler of the landscape.

What makes this painting so interesting is the rich detailing of the carpet, the Prince’s clothes and the intricate lantern in which the Firebird is encased. These details hint at the fact that although Russians look European enough, and though they may speak French and have white skin, they are different; there is an Eastern influence to their culture which cannot be denied. These Eastern colours and details make the story more interesting and emphasise the uniqueness of Russian culture and its stories. Artists like Vasnetsov succeeded in this way to carve out Russia’s unique cultural identity. I especially love the glow of the firebird reflecting on the Prince’s cheek like a kiss.

This painting was also Russia’s version of The Wanderer Above the Sea Fog (1818) painted by David Friedrich. Friedrich paints the Western Man as he dominates the World. Vasnetsov paints the Russian man as the King of the Russian landscape.

The Sleeping Princess

The story of Sleeping Beauty is well known and repeated in many different cultures in different ways. This painting in particular depicts the story as an archive of Russian folk culture. The architecture of the dilapidated castle, the colours of the columns, the clothes of the Princess and her court, the painted tiles on the walls and the furniture are all extremely Russian in their details. By painting this, Vasnetsov is a kind of historian or archaeologist who is keeping a treasure trove of these visual details for future generations to appreciate. The rich colours of this painting certainly make it a treasure itself not only of the cultural history it depicts, but itself as a work of art and a piece of Russian culture. This story itself can be considered an allegory for Russia. Asleep for so long, she can always be revived with true love’s kiss. In a way this is what artist’s do with their art work: by loving something so much, they revive it through its depictions.

The painting is also interesting as a work of art because despite the childish bright colours that indicate innocence and fun, there is a feeling of danger that permeates the painting as well. For example, the little girl is sleeping next to a sleeping bear. A sleeping bear is not only a symbol of the Russian spirit, but also a very dangerous thing that might wake up at any moment and wreak havoc on everyone. The foreboding Russian forest behind the Sleeping Princess is another source of danger because anything can come out of forest: wild animals, robbers, wolves. The Russian wilderness is not a hospitable place though it may be beautiful. That the Princess is asleep in front of the forest with no protection shows that she is in danger. Vasnetsov understands the brewing danger of the revolution in the late nineteenth century.

Ivan Tsarevitch and the Grey Wolf

This is the most famous and iconic painting by Viktor Vasnetsov and it depicts one of the most famous Russian fairy tales: Prince Ivan and the Grey Wolf. In this story, Prince Ivan must rescue a Princess and a magical grey wolf helps him on his quest by giving him disguises, and flying him through the woods and even saving his life from his murderous and jealous older brothers. The painting by Vasnetsov includes a beautiful illustration of the chaotic and rugged Russian forest, where most fairy tales take place. The forest is the location of the wilderness and a symbol for the subconscious because it is the place where all wild things live and the dominion of Man ends. Man too, when he encounters the forest, discovers his own wild nature, unchecked desires, and vices.

This is why the myth of a wolf who can turn into a man is so natural a story and appears so many times across cultures. Vasnetsov’s depiction of the forest is realistic rather than a picture perfect pastoral beauty as the woods are often depicted in Western European art. Vasnetsov reminds us of the untamed quality of fairy tales that Western art often misses. The wolf too, doesn’t look like a cuddly creature but a true wolf, who might eat you if you get too close. Just because fairy tales are for children doesn't mean they are innocent and harmless.

Vasnetsov depicts the characters Prince Ivan and the Princess with opulent clothes and jewellery. The Princess wears a stunning blue-purple dress that shines like silk, and the gold embroidering the edges shines with a realistic lustre. Her tiara and her shoes are encrusted with precious jewels just like the tunic of the Prince. The Prince’s opulent sword swings behind him to create movement as the two are flown through the forest on the back of the magic wolf. This opulence would have reminded the ordinary Russian, experiencing great financial hardship, of the richness of the past. Decadence in art and fairy tales would have been exciting for ordinary people to see when there wasn’t any to see in reality.

Knight at Crossroads (1882)

The quote on the tombstone reads “If you go straight ahead, there will be no life; there is no way forward for he who travels past, walks past or flies past.”

This is a much more depressing and dark painting showing a knight at a crossroads, unsure of how to proceed. The horse’s head is bowed and the man’s spear is lowered. His whole body is also slumped to indicate exhaustion as if he has been travelling for quite some time. There is a skull of a man and a horse on the ground that ominously recall death to illustrate the message on the tombstone that warns of demise to the traveller. The dark brooding colours are contrasted, however, by the warm blush colours of the horizon. Is it sunset or sunrise? It is hard to tell.

The lines create a triangle in the painting which is a very strong compositional structure that keeps the focus neither on the knight nor on the tombstone but gives equal importance to both. They are linked together in this way. The knight is affected by the message and it has caused him to despair as he is already exhausted. The green boot gives a pop of colour that recalls details from Vasnetsov’s more fantastical paintings, perhaps also giving us a bit of hope that this is a mystical fairy tale hero and his magical help will arrive soon.

Viktor Vasnetsov created many stunning paintings to depict Russian culture and folklore in a rich and beautiful way. His work features decadence, opulence, beauty is mixed with uniquely Russian patterns, clothes and images. All the stories are framed and situated in the Russian wilderness where the stories take place. Like all fairy tales, Vasnetsov’s work depicts that his stories too occur at the place where wilderness meets civilisation, for that is where Man’s consciousness and unconscious also meet, wrestle and act out the stories necessary to human existence. Vasnetsov’s artwork is now a crucial element of Russian culture, capturing its uniqueness, but also an interesting and wonderful way to depict fairytales, princesses, heroes and knights.

I hope you have enjoyed learning about his work! I encourage you to search for more of Vasnetsov’s wonderful work and tell me what you think about these paintings in the comments.

I am speaking, of course, of the Sistine Chapel, completed in 1512, located between Saint Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican Palace in Rome. There must be something about Roman soil that inspires greatness from the men who tread upon it.

Most people speak about the Sistine Chapel in terms of the achievements of Michelangelo as a craftsman, how he rendered the illusion of depth, or how beautifully he painted the figures, or simply report what is depicted in each image. But these assessments are superficial and undermine the true genius of the work itself: it’s ability to reveal Prophecy through the Image alone.

The Sistine Chapel was to be the court chapel for the papal household and the college of the cardinals. It was a space for preaching, celebrating feast and holy days. The grandeur of the Sistine Chapel project was to promote the identity of Rome as a new Jerusalem and promote the descent of the papacy from Saint Peter. No one was better suited to the task than the former students of the great artist Verrochio: Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Pietro Perugino, and of course, Michaelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni. 

Most people are familiar with the most famous images of the Sistine Chapel: the creation of the world, the birth of Adam, the final judgement, and the beautiful muscular figures adorning the ceilings. But what most do not realise is that the Sistine Chapel ceiling and walls are not merely more decorative scenes illustrating biblical events like many works of art during the centuries preceding.

These images, especially when taken together as a whole in their architectural setting, propose a philosophical hypothesis for the understanding of the Bible itself. The Sistine Chapel is a work not merely of fine art, but of philosophy and theology.

It is for this reason that Michelangelo was considered not merely an artisan, but an artist––for what distinguishes an artisan from an artisan merely manufactures and copies, whereas an artist has something to say. 

The hand of God, fully outstretched to Adam, whereas Adam’s finger, one small flexion away from touching God, has often been the central focus of people’s contemplation of the Sistine Chapel. But this is a microcosm of the whole work of art in its entirety. The whole entire piece is about the inspiration of God that has shown mankind the prophecies of the entire history of the world from the beginning. It is up to us to make that last gesture of faith to believe or not to believe.

Let us delve into how Michelangelo said all that he had to say.

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         No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

         In ancient days by emperor and clown

- John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

Concerns about mortality are usually the prerogative of older men for whom the shadow of the Grim Reaper trails not far behind. So it is always tragic when a young man is keenly away of the Reaper’s chill and can describe it so effectively.

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- Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty”

Dreams and desires are intimately linked, as dreams are where desires are revealed when they are too dangerous to express under the watchful guard of consciousness and rationality. The Gothic Novel was an extremely popular form of literature at the end of the eighteenth century and featured a quasi-medieval setting, a clandestine love affair haunted by villains and ghosts. This world of the Gothic Romance is what forms the architecture of Keats’ poem, “The Eve of St Agnes” which was published in 1816. Like an abandoned and crumbling castle, however, the breath of life that flies through the vaulted stone ceilings and encircles the cold stone gargoyles of this dormant setting, is Keats’ poetry which harnesses the throbbing fire of Eroticism and the longing melancholy of Romance.

Gothic Nostalgia

The Eve of St. Agnes is an iconic poem because it captures and illustrates so many of the images and themes of the Gothic Story, which is a nostalgia for Europe when it was more serious in its religious convictions, in its mythologies, and its passions. At the end of the eighteenth century, the looming of the industrial revolution caused a “de-romanticization” of European culture, a culling of adventure and de-magicking of its religion. It is little wonder that the artists of the time longed for an, albeit imagined, more magical quasi-medieval past. In the poem, even Madeline is “asleep in the lap of legends old” and the magic of the poem is part of “those enchantments old” (134-135). Tales of chivalry and medieval knights and heroes were extremely popular during this time. Keats, being a poet, was sensitive to this collective nostalgia and when he wrote this poem, it was a love song longing for a time of heroes and damsels who needed saving.

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After eight years of hard science searching for truth by the scientific method, I realized it can only be found through the humanities. Science may bring us data, but only a mind trained in the humanities can ever understand it.

It is a familiar trope for children of struggling parents to be pushed toward a practical education because it was advertised for so long as the only way to pull the family toward a more stable financial status in society. It is a common meme that the Asian Parents get shocked and dismayed when their children propose studying something like history or art in university. The purpose of an education then, is primarily to get a good job at the end. A degree is the means to an end for a vocation. The degrees in question that are most efficacious to this end are degrees related to Science, Engineering, Technology and Maths. In fact, the Science and Maths part can be removed from this equation as merely subsidiary fields serving the Engineering and Technology aspect of the equation. 

Because Science and Maths, pursued for their own ends, for their own curiosity, are not useful, they cannot be applied. When people do a science degree, it is to get into medical school or to become a nurse or even some kind of technician. Few people purse Science for its own sake. Those who do become “scientists” do not hold the primary prerogative of scientific discovery, but rather, must write grants to get their research approved.

Their scientific questions must be demonstrated to be “relevant” to cure cancer, depression or dementia or to protect the planet from climate change. The idea of asking a scientific question for its own sake is preposterous, not to mention will not get funding from big pharma (which funds a large majority of scientific research). When people do a maths degree, it is to become an engineer of some sort. Besides the obvious question which hangs in the air, about whether or not this research actually does help these causes that justify it, it is clear that intellectual pursuit for its own sake, is unthinkable in modern academia.

There is a crucial confusion here of the words education and training and we must recognize that the two are not the same thing. An education helps you to think and answer questions about the world, whereas training prepares you for a job. Education can form a crucial part of training, but it seems that it is not respected in its own right in the modern world. This is because we live in a society that only measures value based on material utility, rather than spiritual satisfaction. 

But we cannot get away from the spiritual no matter how much money we make or “stability” we acquire. At the end of the day, we search for poetry when we wish to eulogize the dead, we search for philosophy when life leaves us in quagmires of existential crises, we search for beauty when we walk from one place to the other, and we search for an ability to understand the narratives of history when we wish to make sense of the present.

Man is not merely a material being with material needs. He is also a spiritual being with spiritual needs. More specifically, the arts give us an ability to understand stories, whether they are in novels, poetry, architecture or history. The ability to understand stories, can be translated in a vulgar way to mean “data processing”.

Data would not exist without stories. Data is always an answer to a question. That question is embedded in a story about how one predicts the world works. Then it is tested and the “Results” only make sense in the context of that story. A list of numbers doesn’t mean anything unless you know what they are measuring. Let’s say you find out they are measurements in metres and are people’s heights. The numbers still are not “data” because they do not tell you anything, not even whose heights they are. Let’s say you find out other things like each person’s sex and whether they live in Europe or North America. Suddenly, you can ask questions like, “is the average height of men greater than the average height of women?” or “is the median height of Europeans meaningfully different from the median height of North Americans?”. These questions may seem simple but they are derived not from the sciences, but from the humanities, for they are the humanities that teach us to ask meaningful questions. 

The dismal state of the modern sciences can be attributed to the fact that modern scientists are rarely trained in the humanities and can therefore not ask good questions. Or, if they do ask questions, they are questions that have been blindly absorbed from the state propaganda rather than formed by some kind of sincere curiosity or critical thought. The proof that modern sciences are in a dismal state can be supported by the evidence that new drugs are just iterations of previous ones, there have been no major breakthroughs in the treatment of major illnesses. Academia is underoing a “Replication crisis” in which the vast majority of scientific papers have proven to not be replicable, meaning the experiments and results cannot be replicated by a third party. Even innovations in technology are merely amplifications of the same kind of increasingly enhanced simulation world--we just keep making better cameras and better rendered images for our video games, more addictive apps to trap people in the matrix, better ways to track people’s activities so that ever more draconian laws can be more easily enforced. There are certainly very creative and innovative people doing interesting things today, but they are certainly not the ones who adhere to the mainstream academic dogma, but rather rebel against it.

An education in the humanities teaches people how to think on their own. Vocational studies, studies that give you a list of facts to learn for a job, teach you what to know and to what end. Whereas the humanities, in other words an education rather than simply a training program, teaches you how to ask questions and which questions to ask. It teaches you how to compare different ends for your study and teaches you to consider which ones are better than others. Without this ability to think, you are merely an automaton for others to use, no better than a machine with buttons. It doesn’t matter if you can regurgitate every statistic from Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union if you cannot explain why he rose to power or how he kept it for so long. It doesn’t matter if you can cite the name and date of every battle in World War I if you can’t ask and answer questions about the significance of the new form of warfare and how it completely altered society economically and psychologically afterwards forevermore. Learning facts is just as important as learning to think about these facts.

An education in the humanities also gives people the vocabulary to understand their inner world and society much better. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “the limits of my language are the limits of my world”. When a person knows fewer words, their experience of the world is limited to those words because a person cannot be aware of experiences they cannot articulate. A simple example is an artist learning new words for a wider variety of colours. Suddenly once you learn the name “burnt ochre” you start to see it distinctly from brown and orange that you might have once used to categorize it as. The new word opens up a new dimension of reality. The same thing happens when we read great literature or appreciate great art. Great writers and artists open up new dimensions of reality for us to observe, appreciate and understand. A person who is well educated in the humanities therefore not only has a richer understanding of their own psychology and mind, but also of the world and the ways that it works. This does not offer direct monetary benefit to an individual, but it does offer value indirectly as a more thoughtful person is therefore more intelligent and has more options in life. 

It is understandable why the humanities would be purposely sabotaged by a tyrannical regime. Consider the Cultural Revolution in China that destroyed their history, literature and art, or the denigration of the humanities in Soviet Russia, that silenced a once immensely creative people. Consider the arts of today, a mockery of the word art itself. Consider the quality of most writing today that can be replaced with robots. It it never a coincidence when a regime makes a people illiterate and neglectful of the arts. This is because such a people cannot ask questions or critically assess propaganda. A people untrained in the humanities cannot form their own opinions.

People who do not learn real history as a humanities but just the facts that they must memorize for an exam, cannot evaluate history and compare it to modern times. They cannot evaluate the sources to understand whether or not the narrative that they are being told about such and such a period of time is accurate. They cannot argue their perspective or investigate the logic of other people’s perspectives. Logic and critical thinking are not automatic skills, they must be taught through rigorous study and this is precisely the purpose of the study of the humanities: to learn how to ask questions and to learn how to evaluate different peoples answers. Most modern people do not even study history formally, they absorb it from movies and tv shows and take that as unerring fact; in other words, they absorb the state sponsored propaganda without a second thought. This is an illiterate people that is easy to control.

A people untrained in the humanities do not even have the language to articulate the un-ease they might feel in their own societies and their rage is impotent, and their ideas for improvement or rebellion die in their chests. In short, a people uneducated in the humanities are much easier to control and manipulate because they are closer to beasts.

To philosophize is to be human. At times we are beasts, simply attempting to survive from one day to the next, to get food and water, to maintain a shelter, to procreate. But what separates man from beast is arguably his ability to look up from this daily sisyphean task of mere survival, and to thrive, which requires an intellect, a sense of beauty, of art and of curiosity about the world for its own sake. The invention of the humanities was the invention of true education and living in the world, not merely surviving in it like an animal. When we looked up from the ground, scrounging for food, and up at the stars and wondered for the first time at their existence.

Botticelli’s Primavera is a painting that we need more than ever today to remind us of the transformative realities of sex and love, with a decidedly more demure and holy looking Venus at the centre of this mythical dance. There is a wonderful mystery at the centre of this painting, and as I pull the thread, the beauty will bloom forth and bring this painting to life in such a way that you will not be able to look at this painting, or spring or desire the same way again. Such is the power of great art.

But how can we decipher this enigmatic painting? What is it about this painting that draws people in and makes them fly across oceans to examine it in person? Do we understand, at some level, the pictorial poem even though we cannot put it into words? Let us begin first, by examining the artist himself. 

Alessandro di Vanni Filipepi is best known by his nickname given to him by his older brother, “Botticelli” which means little barrel, and in 1486, he made one of the most iconic paintings in human history, Primavera. Botticelli began his career as a goldsmith; however, at age eighteen, he decided to change his career to become a painter, a drastic decision in this time period when eighteen year old men were completing their training, not beginning it, as we do today. He trained under Fra Lippo Lippi, a Carmelite monk, and grew to become one of the most influential and famous painters of the Renaissance and certainly in Florence. 

Botticelli was hugely responsible for bringing the values and technique of sculpture into two dimensional painting, which was a radical progression from the often flattened aspects of the byzantine style paintings of his predecessors. We take three dimensional representations of figures for granted today in our visual world, but to think of this visual concept before it had ever been done, is a mark of great genius and creativity. Botticelli was also one of the first artists to introduce movement to painting. Prior to video cameras, it was actually very challenging to capture an image of objects mid movement. It required a perceptive and patient eye for an artist to capture the physical elements of a scarf ruffling in the air, hair blowing in the wind, or a dancer mid choreography. Botticelli’s success, if not perfection, in this regard set him apart as one of the greats.  

To see these visual accomplishments for the first time would have excited and enthralled spectators. But it is fascinating that Botticelli’s work continues to intrigue people, long after we have become saturated with video camera footage and photography in our daily lives. People still gravitate to Botticelli’s representation, despite the fact that more “technically perfect” representations exist. It stands to reason that it was not representation that makes Botticelli’s work great, but something else. I believe that “something else” is the mythology of his images, and the way that the pieces work together like a song.

Because of cameras, we tend to assume that a picture is a frozen tableau that shows one moment in time. The medieval and early renaissance eye was not trained (and perhaps corrupted) by the camera and as such was much more creative with the visual world of the painting. This painting shows multiple events across time, in one scene.

Botticelli made Primavera specifically as an epithalamium, meaning a work of art that celebrates a marriage. This painting was celebrating a Medici marriage. So the theme of procreation, flourishing and life are appropriate to the occasion, but Botticelli goes much further than merely “representing” these ideas, he is a philosopher in the way that he meditates on the meaning of love, desire, flourishing and life itself. This kind of pictorial philosophy is what makes Botticelli an artist and not merely an artisan.

Concinnity is the skilful and harmonious arrangement of the different parts of something. We must do this painting some violent and break it apart into its pieces so that we can appreciate its concinnity at the end. Let us begin with the central story:

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We long for a world that was good not only for the elite man, but also the common man. Few would look to the medieval world for this, and yet it is from that time period that we uncover beautiful art, literature, and architecture. Does beauty and excellence in the arts tell us about the quality of a society? I believe it does, because it is only a society that cares about even its poorest peasant that would care to make the streets beautiful for him, and the public art of a society says a lot about its values. We can confidently assume that a society whose public art showed a reverence for beauty and virtue, would also have been beautiful and virtuous.

We often associate the Renaissance with names like Da Vinci and Michelangelo and Raphael. But the patrons must be celebrated for making the great projects of the Renaissance possible at all. Chief among these patrons is Cosimo de Medici. Modern day Christianity looks down upon wealth and power, but it was wealth and power that permitted the creation of such a glorious culture that people of all religions, backgrounds and cultures today still make pilgrimages to Florence and Rome. And in fact, one may say that it is because good people in the modern world use religion to justify their lack of wealth and power, that evil people fill that power vacuum and have such ineluctable control over modern culture. Imagine if good people were in charge of the film industry, the media, publishing and architecture? Imagine what beautiful, uplifting and glorious things would be created? We don’t need to imagine because this is precisely what the Renaissance was: when good people weren’t afraid to be rich and therefore controlled culture.

The domain of the sacred and the profane often overlapped in medieval Italy.

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Degeneracy, then, is about making sure that everything and everyone is equal, and this spells nothing but destruction for excellence. When every kind of art is “good” then there is no incentive to create actually good art, because there does not exist a standard by which to measure one work of art as better than another. This allows for nihilists to take over a field such as art and annihilate any aspect of excellence from it.

This is why so much of the work that we see in museums and public spaces is mediocre at best and horrible on average. Too many bad artists are not being judged as such. So long as they have the right politics they are encouraged and supported by the establishment. There is something to be said for people who have ugly ideas, also looking ugly and creating ugly things.

This is not something new. This movement of uglification in the arts finds its roots in the nineteenth century.

Most nineteenth century artists that ordinary people are familiar with, include such names as Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Gustave Klimt and Claude Monet. Each of these artists are TERRIBLE posers. This is not my opinion by the way; it the opinion of artists such as Ivan Shishkin, Ilya Repin, William Adolphe Bouguereau, Frederick Leighton and many other greats you will not know by name, but you will have seen their work because their beauty is so striking that once you see it you cannot forget it. If you are not an academic, think of it this way, any artist whose artwork requires a degree to appreciate, is not a real artist. They are a leftist political agent hired to demoralize you and destroy the arts. Real Great Art is very powerful. It can influence people to find the truth. This is very inconvenient for a lying rapacious state that depends on everyone lying to eachother.

The Salon is another word for the Establishment Authority in the Arts. One example of the Salon, is the Royal Academy of Art in England. In 1768, the Royal Academy of Arts was created under King George III. This was unique among all the other art societies in existence in England because its purpose was not to serve the ends of any particular member, but rather, primarily, for the promotion of excellence in the fine arts. Frederic Lord Leighton was one of the most important presidents of this Academy because he revived English painting when its flame was flickering and threatened to go out.

Sir Wyke Bayliss in the book “Five Great Painters of the Victorian Era” states that Leighton was “English of the English, Greek of the Greek and wrought his work amongst men for mankind.” That is Bayliss’ artful way of saying that though Leighton was English in his heritage and Continental in his training, he was a universal man concerned with universal ideas. In fact the ideas he prmulgated in his artwork can be said to occupy the realm of the Platonic Ideal, which glides and hovers above the the grimy realities of human life. It is an idealism that does not denigrate reality but inspires it to cast its eyes upward to Mount Olympus, and remember the divine spark that inhabits the mortal coil.

Leighton was beloved by his students and gave lectures at the Academy. He was a philanthropist and his main goal was to bring art and beauty to more people. He opened an art gallery in a miserable neighborhood in Surrey and built it up with seriousness and care so that the poor of South London would always have the ability to have great art in their lives. It was made to be always free for the poor. He wanted to ennoble the spirit of mankind. His friend Sir Bayliss says that he led a happy life, “Without happiness, I do not think his work could have been accomplished. He was the painter of the Gods, and on Olympus we hear no cries, we hear only laughter”. 

Public Intellectuals such as Jordan Peterson like to assert today that the reason “liberals” are the ones controlling and dominating the art world is because they are higher in trait openness, as one of the big five personality traits. He links the trait of openness both to a propensity to entertain liberal values, as well as to greatness in the arts. However, most of the greatest artists in history have been traditional and conservative by todays’ standards and by their own. Of course, they experimented and innovated within their craft, but they did not show open disdain for the rules of their craft that form its foundation. Rather, they built upon theses rules in new and creative ways. 

An example of this can be found in the work of Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520). He was an excellent artist, an innovator and yet he did not rebuke or subvert the traditions of art that he inherited. He built upon the work of artists who preceded him such as Botticelli and Uccello, but he also added in his own innovative way of understanding the human body and compositions to tell a story. One of his most famous frescoes, The Deliverance of Saint Peter (1514, Stanza d’Eliodoro, Vatican) takes a lesson in fact from Giotto and amplifies and exalts the lessons he learned. Giotto introduced the idea of the serialized form of painting that shows events occuring one after the other with the same characters in multiple scenes. Raphael inherited this idea and enhanced it by making all of these scenes occur in the same piece with architectural elements separating the different frames of time. 

In this fresco, the walls of the prison cell represent not only separations in physical space in the piece but also temporal divisions. The left side of the piece is the beginning of the story, the middle of the piece is also the middle of Saint Peter’s story and the right side is not just to the right of the prison, but also the end of the story. He overalps temporality with spatial divisions to help convey multiple pieces of information at once. He is an innovator. And yet, Raphael does not abandon rules such as perspective, anatomy or colour that were established by the artists before him.

Raphael Sanzio was working under the Pope, a traditional and conservative authority figure if there ever was one. That was his “Establishment”. Sir Frederick Leighton was working with the Royal Academy. When such men were in charge of the estbalishments, the artwork that became public knowledge and dominated the public sphere was of good quality. The artists who were allowed to prosper held traditional values and were working toward beauty, and not attempting to subvert it.

The modern arts establishment is based in degenerate philosophy. This means that it is based in a philosophy that is fundamentally anti-hierarchy, and idolizes equality above all else. There can be no such thing as excellence in a philosophy that is anti-hierarchy because in order for there to be excellence, there must be judgement that one thing is better than another based on some standard. If everything is equal, it is all equally good, it is all equally bad, so the words good and bad are meaningless. Without judgement, there can be no way for an individual artist to improve upon his or her craft. Further, when there is no judgement, when there is not inequality, then good artists are not distinguished from poor ones. The artists who gain the most prestige, money and publicity in such a system, are those that support the philosophy of degeneracy the most. It is for this reason that mediocrity and ugliness pervade book publishing, art museums, mainstream music and public art commissions.

Social media has many benefits for humanity when it is uncensored by either man or algorithm. It allows us to see people are they really are and not the way that the establishment would like us to see them. Although increasingly social media is becoming less free, we can at least see that there are hundreds, thousands if not millions of people creating incredible artwork, music and literature outside of the establishment. Although the Royal Academy is still pumping out horrendous and vile works of “modern art,” independent artists from private atelier’s are creating inspired, innovative and ethereal works of great art even today. One must only have the eyes to see it happening.

This was also true, by the way, in the nineteenth century, when Van Gogh and Picasso and Monet were being celebrated by the academy for creating the first generation of degeneracy, there was another group of artsits creating brilliant, breathtaking work. Here are a few pieces of their work: 

Pietà by William Adolphe Bouguereau, 1876

Detail from Lawrence Alma Tadema’s “Spring”  (1894)

Frank Dicksee, “Romeo and Juliet” 1880, Southampton City Art Gallery

John William Waterhouse, “Odysseus and the Sirens,” 1891

There are hundreds more that I have left out for a lack of space in this article, but the chances are 1) You have likely never heard of these paintings unless you took a personal interest in art history and 2) You find these paintings personally far more compelling, not merely more beautiful, than the major works of Vincent Van Gogh, or Pablo Picasso or Claude Monet. This is because these works of art did not fit in with the degenerate philosophy of modern art as it began in earnest in nineteenth century France.

The power of the establishment, however, is cracking. Artists who are making their money, fame and reputations on social media such as Mark Maggiori, Christopher Remmers, Ksenya Istomina, Annie Stegg, Matthieu Nozieres and many others, are breaking through the malaise. They are devoted to excellence in their craft. I have interviewed artist Christopher Remmers about this in detail and you can listen to the interview here. The establishment controls access to art for the masses. It decides which projects get funded and which works of art are put in front of people and made a part of the collective cultural consciousness. However, social media has fundamentally altered this power structure and I believe there are as many great artists, artists who are not leftists, creating today than there were in the past.

Christopher Remmers, Annicha, 2018

Mattieu Nozieres, Star Stealers, 2021, Haven Gallery

These modern artists, are not political people. They do not create with the purpose of promoting either liberal or conservative values. They are creating because they have stories to tell and have a basic respect for the philosophy of hierarchy, (antithetical to degeneracy) and can therefore pursue excellence. This is true, by the way, of anyone who pursues excellence in any field. You do not need to be political to be a good body builder, athlete, musician, dancer etc, you must simply have an idea of standards by which you judge the quality of your own work and that of others. It just so happens, that this philosophy is more respected by conservatives than it is by liberals.

However, this philosophy is no guarantee for good work on its own. This is where Jordan Peterson’s trait openness becomes relevant. Discipline and a respect for the hierarchies of quality, are prerequisites but not sufficient qualities for excellence in one’s craft. In particular, to be a good artist, one must have a degree of openness to seeing the world with interesting and new perspectives. The absence of this quality in political conservatives who attempt to create art, explains why their work is so often mediocre and lifeless, despite espousing the “right politics”. Vision and creativity must pair with discipline and judgement to create excellent art. This is the prerogative of artists, and not of politicians.

A person who cares about his values, must gain power in society so that he can work for the promulgation of his values in society. When you have money, patronize artists doing work that you truly care about. Shop from etsy. Find artists on instagram to sell you prints or original pieces to decorate your spaces. Be more intentional about the art you consume, and don’t let the degenerate establishment dictate your personal taste. This is how the establishment will lose its power. This is how we win.

Thank you for reading. Please comment below with an artist you have found online, outside the establishment, who you believe is doing excellent work that deserves recognition!

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But first we must discuss…what makes one work of art better than another? To answer this we must consider the purpose of a work of art. John Ruskin argues in his essay “On the Greatness in Art” that the best art is that which conveys the most ideas and in the most potent way possible. This is in contrast to the argument that the best art is that which represents the real world best, because there are so many different dimensions of reality, and most people take “representation” to refer only to the material physical aspects of it.

Quality of representation in art may be considered the standard by which we measure the quality of the artwork, and by extension, compare two different works of art against each other, if we consider representation of all aspects of reality, or at least, the most important aspects of reality.

The Last Supper is a story in the Bible in which Jesus established the Holy Communion. He told his disciples that he would be betrayed and die but that by drinking wine and eating bread, they could remember the sacrifice he was about to make for them. Instead of wine, however, he poured his own blood, a symbol of the new covenant with God.

Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Last Supper” fresco seems to be superior in its material representation of the event it depicts, but Gaston La Touche captures the spiritual dimension.

Let us compare the two:

This is Gaston La Touche’s version

In the painting, there are no definite shapes or objects, except the chalice in the middle. The background is not well defined except for the window. The disciples are not well articulated, and seem to just be floating heads in space, but with distinct facial expressions. In the foreground, is a figure with his back toward us, and it is impossible to see what expression is on his face. A glow seems to emanate from the centre of the painting outward, like the warmth of a sun. Things are clearest at the centre of this light—the chalice—and become less clear as we move outward.

This is Leonardo’s version:

The place that the Last Supper takes place seems to be a nondescript hall just like in the La Touche version, but it is executed with such perfection in perspective that this becomes a focus of the painting itself. In fact, as a work of art, it is often remembered precisely because of the perfect rendition of perspective in the room.

The body language and faces of the different disciples conveys their emotions in a dynamic and dramatic way. This is very different to the way that La Touche’s disciples are merely floating heads and hands. Some may say Leonardo’s version is superior because it shows a better artistic representation of the physical reality of the men who sat with Jesus. Others may argue that in Leonardo’s version, we are so enthralled with the physical dramatism of each of the disciple characters that we forget the real spiritual purpose of the story, which La Touche’s minimalism brings into sharp attention.

La Touche’s painting puts the idea of the sacrifice, and the communion at the centre of his piece. Everything else only has peripheral clarity. This is a better spiritual representation of the story because it is the main purpose of the story. Whereas Leonardo’s version is more about showing off his skill in perspective and representing body language and anatomy.

There is physical light in painting—that which comes from a physical source such as the sun or a candle—and there is figurative, rhetorical light in painting. This rhetorical light can be the glow of an angel, a halo, a divine presence or simply indicate importance in the narrative of the painting. La Touche’s work, after Caravaggio, includes some of the best examples of rhetorical light and his Last Supper is employs some of the best use of it.

Leonardo’s version is a display of magnificence in an artist’s ability to capture the material reality of the world, whereas La Touche’s version captures the spiritual. The light in Leonardo’s painting is a physical light that illuminates each character only as it makes sense from the natural light in the physical logic of the represented space. Whereas La Touche’s painting does not portray physical light, but rather rhetorical light; it emanates from the chalice in the centre rather than from the window above.

You can’t see any faces in La Touche’s work, only expressions. The characters seem to melt into the boundaries of eachother like in a dream. It is interesting that La Touche places one character whose back it facing us. One can only assume that this is Judas, the betrayer, with his face hidden from the spectator. This is a clever way of concealing the villain in plain sight.

Jesus’s face is also occluded. No one really knows exactly what Jesus looked like so this means sense. In Leonardo’s version, the only thing that marks out Jesus from the others is that he is placed at the centre of the painting geometrically. He is materially at the centre so the eye is drawn to him but there is a question whether a geometric “spotlight” is better than a spotlight made from the light that La Touche paints.

The whole painting is like an imprint of the spirit of the event rather than a detailed depiction of the material reality of it. It is like a poem about a war rather than a detailed textbook description of the battle.

Leonardo’s painting is a well-measured and calculated display of perfection in the mathematics of perspective and anatomy. La Touche’s work, however, with its glowing lights and haunting expressions, captures the mystery of the essence of the Bible as well—an ancient text that we can interpret the spirit of, but whose material specifics no one will ever fully know.

Which painting do you think better represents the story of the Last Supper?

And yet they seem alive and quivering

Against my tremulous hands which loose the string

And let them drop down on my knee tonight.”

This is an excerpt from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s (EBB) sonnet 28 from the series Sonnets from the Portuguese. A sonnet is traditionally written from a man’s perspective, about a woman, but EBB has flipped this narrative to write about her love for Robert Browning (then only her pen pal lover).

EBB was the daughter of a wealthy plantation owning family in England, and was a published poet at the age of just eleven years old. However, after falling off her horse at age 15, she suffered from a variety of illnesses and was largely house-bound in her youth. After gaining notoriety for some of the poems she published, she received a letter from Robert Browning, a writer 6 years younger than her, and from 1845-46, they courted one another through letters. The sonnets she wrote are called Sonnets from the Portuguese, because “my little Portuguese” was Browning’s pet name for her.

Speaking about intimacy and sex openly was socially forbidden in Victorian England, especially for women. Some people may call this oppressive, however, this led to a greater reverence for sexual intimacy than we have today because it could not be spoken of flippantly. I believe a lot of our disrespect for it comes from the fact we can talk about it today like eating a sandwhich.

Some people, such as Nietzsche, perceive this reticence to speak about sex and eroticism openly as shamefulness. In reality, it is not shame, but rather a respect for sexuality that it is not spoken of openly. It is simply far more important and personal than the things we speak about publicly and with strangers. This intimacy is evident in EBB’s beautiful poetry.

The social restrictions of her time made EBB’s sonnets far more beautiful and powerful sensually and emotionally. When something is omitted, it leaves room for the imagination to fill in the blanks, and because the imagination is always imprecise & infinite, it is capable of grander images than language can ever articulate. EBB’s imagery draws negatives, shapes that circle around the main thing but never touch it—a kind of literary seduction. This makes sense for a house-bound invalid to seduce by the only means available to her—words.

In her sonnet, her letters are quivering like a body part, and strings dropping to her knees allude to getting undressed. But she never mentions any of these explicit details, they are left for the reader to imagine through allusion and euphemism. Eroticism engages the imagination, so sexuality that is implicit and inferred allows for eroticism to develop in writing, whereas it can never develop in writing that is too explicit and literal. This is why we call writing that explicitly talks about sex vulgar; it debases what should be intimate by making it public.

The Shape of Love —Sonnet 1

Another beautiful sonnet included by EBB spoke of her surprise that she should receive love at all when life had made it almost certain for her that she would lead a lonely and despondent existence.

“The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,

Those of my own life, who by turns had flung

A shadow across me.”

But then something pulls her by the hair and changes her life and thrusts it into every joy that she thought she could never have: love, romance, seduction and even (though she did not yet know it) motherhood.

“a mystic Shape did move

Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair…

‘Guess now who holds thee?’— ‘Death’ I said. But, there,

The silver answer rang— ‘Not Death, but Love’”

Death and Love are juxtaposed as having the same ineluctable effect on the human life. We cannot escape illness just as we cannot escape Love. And Love, to EBB behaves not like a gentle and well-mannered visitor but a hair-pulling and vivacious spirit that takes her in his arms and sweeps her off her feet. Yet, she does not need to say anything explicitly, she draws a line around him—a Shape—and all is understood.

Elation —Sonet 22

The rapture of love, that combines both physical infatuation and spiritual adoration, is difficult for anyone to describe except a poet. We often hear about these feelings from the male perspective, but there is a paucity of truly good female poets that describe the feminine experience without being crass. EBB has accomplished this in her sonnet.

“When our two souls stand up erect and strong

Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,

Until the lengthening wings break into fire

…Think. In mounting higher,

The angels would press on us and aspire

To drop some golden orb of perfect song

Into our deep, dear silence”

Angst —Sonnet 24

EBB is known for her masterful images that are both visceral and sensual. She describes love like a hand that clasps the knife of the harshness of life, and prevents it from harming the lover. One cannot help but imagine this poem dripping with the sacrificial blood of the lover, an image that comes straight from gothic romances and angsty love stories. Of course this is not the “practical HR approved” expression of love that dorky couples today endorse. It is something much more fun and romantic.

This playful and melodramatic spirit is what makes young love more fun, and I believe a culture that did not speak of love and intimacy so openly, was able to hold on to it better than a culture where “love” has devolved to little more than a material contract with a therapist as the human resource manager. EBB also is not afraid to admit the romance and peace of not only being dependent on a man, but being possessed by him. The only modern artist who has been able to touch this level of eroticism and beauty in love songs, I think, is Lana Del Rey.

“Let the world’s sharpness, like a clasping knife,

Shut in upon itself and do no harm

In this close hand of Love, now soft and warm,

And let us hear no sound of human strife

After the click of the shutting, Life to life—

I lean upon thee, Dear, without alarm,

And feel as safe as guarded by a charm”

Surrender —Sonnet 13

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I don’t know much about music but I love classical music, especially Tchaikovsky, because I recognize so much of his music from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, my favourite fairy tale. I suppose this is what made the concert such a perfect Valentine’s day gift <3 Classical music is often put in the background today, if not in movies then in our own lives. While we work, write, read or clean, it is a safe way to fill the silence with “something nice”. However, when you appreciate classical music as a main character, a piece of art that holds your primary attention, you realize how much this music says that we don’t hear because we were never properly present with it. We often flippantly say that “music is a universal language” and the wordless phrases Tchaikovsky uses to tell a story are a testament to this.

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Modern man is not free. If we really think about what is barbaric and illiterate, the average modern person can certainly read words, but hardly understands them. Modern man’s injustices go unpunished by a bloated bureaucratic anvil that makes justice inaccessible to him but for sale to inhuman corporations. His time is dictated by a job that won’t allow him to speak his mind or go on more than two weeks of vacation per year. He does not own his house. And he is naive if he believes he can contribute to the decisions of his state––democracy is a fairy tale to keep him focused on his bread and his circuses.

Entrepreneurship can free modern man somewhat, but only if the state allows him to keep his own money, as laws dictate how much of his hard earned money must be given to the state for causes he has no say in. To my readers living in “democratic” countries, how often does the government make a decision that you don’t agree with but you feel utterly powerless to change or influence? It’s quite interesting that we believe many of these things are normal. Human Beings are adaptable creatures and there’s nothing the ordinary person adapts to better than injustice.

But there is one answer to all of this, humbly hidden away in the lesser known Italian town of Sienna, where one man has described the crucial elements of a good society. While many essays have been written on the topic, I think it is interesting to look at an essay that has been written in image form, because the image, unlike the written word, is less corruptible.

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― Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion

Modern society often speaks about women’s rights. Female empowerment figures usually mention women who fought for very self-centered goals. Some of these were laudable like the right to own property and the right to go to school. However among them also was the “right” to murder a child when it is inconvenient to you, the right to vote so as to splinter the political goals of families, the right for women to lead increasingly selfish and hedonistic lives and call themselves empowered for it. Today, women celebrate prostitution, obesity, degeneracy and vanity on the internet as a form of “empowerment” and anyone who dares to criticize this behaviour is labelled a misogynist. Standards of any behaviour at all, are conflated with “dehumanization”. This toxic philosophy has brought out the worst in modern woman, and it has also made us forget how noble the nature of woman can be. This essay is about how one magnificent work of art can remind us of what this nobility in the fair sex looks like.

What does Nobility mean? What better place to learn than from one of the most sanctified women in human history: the Virgin Mary. Whether or not you are a Christian, the story is incredible and understanding its power is key to understanding the power of this work of art. 

According to René Girard, sacrifice is what permits mankind to break out of mimetic cycles of violence, that is to say, it permits peace. Mankind’s religions have always included sacrifices and the greater the sacrifice, the more powerful its effects. Any parent understands that more painful than sacrificing one’s own life, is the sacrifice of one’s child, because your child’s life is infinitely more valuable to you than your own. 

Michelangelo’s Pietà is enigmatic and enthralling for a simple, yet powerful reason. The sculpture portrays a deep and mature expression of grief, one that is usually found on the face of an old woman, on the face of a teenage girl. Her son has been killed and yet, she does not wail or cry out, neither is she cold and detached. She is, in some ways, still mothering as she cradles her child, as a new mother might hold a baby in her lap. The strap over her heart, bearing the name of il miglio fabbro, bunches the fabric around it to indicate its tightness, as though it is holding her heart in place lest it shatter in a million pieces at the pain. 

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It is said that realistic art has lost its appeal because the exercise of rendering the real world became futile when a camera could not only do it faster, but with greater efficacy. The camera has indeed replaced something, but it is not the artist, it is the technician.

This is the type of work that often gets called “Art” today. The first is a copy of a photograph and the second is a copy of a master painting, which is no better than a photocopy (and perhaps not even as good as one). The people who make these are not artists, they are technicians. They are human beings who have suppressed their human abilities in order to degrade themselves to the functions of a machine. With the proper training, these people too could be artists, whereas a machine can never be trained to do what a real artist can do. But in order to do that, we must remember what it is that a real artist does.

The humanities did not always include the fine arts. In fact, for much of human history, the fine artist did not exist--he was merely an artisan. The humanities were invented at the beginning of the Renaissance, and it is here we must travel to also understand the invention of the artist. The lay person has been corrupted so deeply by Marxism that he has given up believing that there is a definition of “ART” at all, and devolves everything to subjective opinion. Nevertheless, we all feel that lack of awe and wonderment when we see fake art today and we find it expressed in full spectacular power when we make pilgrimages to see real works of Art from the Renaissance. Artists like Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo were real artists. What made them real artists?

In this essay, I will explain exactly what is missing from the work of modern politicians and technicians who call themselves artists and hopefully capture that quixotic figure of the “Real Artist”.

The Invention of the Artist

The Humanities were the study of those things that didn’t offer utilitarian value, but were rather related to the higher faculties of human beings. They included subjects like moral philosophy, mathematics, rhetoric, poetry, history and literature. The Fine Arts such as painting and sculpture in the 13th and 14th centuries were considered low-brow trades, similar to the work of blacksmiths and cobblers for example. Indeed, the medieval artist’s main role was copying existing images for utilitarian ends such as Church altarpieces.

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) was one Renaissance writer who led the charge in creating the concept of the Artist. In his treatise On Painting (1434) he compared painting to the study of language, mathematics and history. The composition of a painting was not merely a mirror to reality, but required an intellect to compose the story that would be represented. The interpretation and visual rhetoric involved in this endeavour set painting apart from other artisanal pursuits. Painting was not merely a representation of reality on a two dimensional surface, it also told stories. Stories, by definition have a point of view, a conflict, a beginning, middle and end, they have eternal truths and illusions.

How can a fixed image possibly tell a story except by using the conventions of a comic book? Consider this painting of Pope Innocent X by Diego Velasquez (1650). The painting is simple, and the ring and costume tell us that this is the Pope, but the way that the face is designed tell us what he was like. This is something that a machine cannot perceive and therefore cannot translate. The furrow of his brow and the annoyance at the corner of his nose would be smoothed out in the split second that a photograph would have been taken. But Velasquez who likely watched him for hours captured the famous enigmatic expression that could be impatience, demure-ness, curiosity or frustration! Capturing the complexities of his personality and the story of the man painted here comprise a formidable intellectual task.

Disegnio: the Human Quality that Separates Technician from Artist

Florentine artist Cennino Cennini (1370-1427) wrote a manual for artists which many of the budding geniuses of the Renaissance would read and learn from. Cennini wrote about the concept of Disegnio which at once means to draw and to design. For Cennini, to draw was to combine the imagination with the skill of the hand. He wrote, “In order to discover things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural objects and to fix them with the hand, presenting to plain sight what does not actually exist.”

Where there is imagination, there is intellect; where there is design, there is philosophy. It follows that where there is both imagination and design, there is an artist and not merely a technician.

Cennini believed that artists could learn technical skills from copying the master drawings and paintings of masters, but in order to make real art of their own they would have to draw from nature. In the 1430s, paper became more easily accessible and affordable, so the artist’s sketchbook was born.

Notice that these writers did not discard the importance of technical skill in creating artwork, but rather added an intellectual layer on top of technical mastery. Technical mastery suffers under photo-realism and copying because the technician who merely copies, does not understand the lines and colours that he puts to paper. As such, if he makes a mistake, as the hand is ought to make, the piece will break from reality, and not from design or purpose, but from clumsiness. To understand the curve of a line from the bottom of an ankle to the middle of a woman’s leg is to have watched that leg move in real time, studied anatomy and know that muscles and fat that build up that structure.

Technicians who copy can be replaced by machines because machines do not invent, think or design. In a world where machines become better and better at their tasks, it is more important than ever to remind ourselves of what human beings can do that can never be replaced. Of course, this means we must study the humanities.

“The painters after the Romans...always imitated each other, and from age to age, continually brought their art into decline. After these came Giotto, the Florentine, who (not content to imitate the works of Cimbaue, his master) and being born in the solitary mountains inhabited only by goats and similar animals, and being guided by nature towards his art, began to draw upon the rocks the actions fo the goats of which he was the keeper. After much study, he surpassed not only the master of his own age, but all those of many centuries past. After this, art receded because all imitated existing paintings and thus it went on from one century to the next until Tomasco the Florentine showed by perfect works how those who take for their guide anything other than nature--mistress of the masters--exhaust themselves in vain.”

Leonardo Da Vinci, On Painting

Imitatio Christi and a New Way of Telling Stories

Medieval thinkers distinguished two different categories of picture: the historiae, which depict stories from the Bible and were used as manuscript illustrations, and the imagines, which depict images that don’t really have a story, but are images that one may use to focus prayer and adoration. Neither really altered the conventions of the iconic image and the painter was merely a technician who increased the number of copies for use.

In the mid 1400s, the most widely read book after the Bible was called “The Imitation of Christ” by Flemish theologian, Thomas Kemphis. In his book he encouraged readers to not look for sophisticated symbols in religious narratives but to practice devotio moderna, that is, to immerse themselves emotionally in stories and connect themselves with the protagonists and the ideas therein. This idea eroded the boundaries between historiae and imagines and formerly iconic and stagnant compositions were subject to inventive and creative variations. Painters and sculptors thought of new ways to tell the same stories, thus invigorating them with new life. By adding intellect and design on to their technical skill, these artisans became artists. 

An excellent example of this is a portrait by Antonella da Messina, “The Annunciate Virgin” (1476). The image of the annunciation usually follows the formula of showing the Virgin and the angel Gabriel from the side so that they are both in the frame. In this image, it is as though we are standing next to the angel Gabriel and looking at Mary as she receives the news. 

Because the spectator can examine the scene from this perspective, he can engage with Mary’s emotions rather than just with the plot of the story itself and consider the significance of her character through her response. The black background also emphasises the focus on Mary’s face and hands, where her emotions can be best read. This piece of art shows technical mastery in the shadows on Mary’s face and the foreshortening of her right hand, but also shows an intellect that considered how best the story behind this scene could be told. In this way, Antonella da Messina was one of the first Renaissance Artists.

Leonardo Da Vinci on how realism gives power to strategic abstraction

Leonardo Da Vinci’s invention of colour theory further revolutionised the artist’s ability to tell a story and practice the art of rhetoric in his representations. There are nine values of colour intensity, ranging from almost white to almost black. Each colour can be mixed with different amounts of either white or black pigment to create the whole range of values. Leonardo did something radical when he mixed his colours: he mixed each colour with the exact same ratios of white and black to create the seven values. In this way, each colour in his palette had the same intensity at the same value. The technical term for this is that the tones were unified. 

As a result, when he painted the effect of a certain light source in a painting, all the colours in the subject would respond in the same exact way to the light, thus making the light seem more realistic because of its consistent effects on the environment in the image. We can see this in the portrait by Leonardo, “La Belle Ferroniere” (1496). The subject’s dress and skin all respond in a consistent way to the light source on the left, making it more realistic.

But does this realism consist an intellectual exercise that makes Leonardo an artist as opposed to a technician? Indeed modern cameras and digital art are much better at the task of rendering light than a human hand. Look closely...there is something that Leonardo does with light that is unnatural and is precisely imperceptible because the rest of the execution is so perfect. 

The artist executes the light perfectly except at crucial points on the face such as the corners of the mouth and the eyes. He blurs together colours and obscures lines that would normally be clear, and thus abstracts the physical reality in order to capture the spiritual one better. This is called the sfumato technique. Its effect is to obscure the emotions of the portrait sitter so that her expression becomes more enigmatic. This tells us a different story about the sitter than if just her one static expression had been captured at one moment in time as a camera does. The artist captures multiple expressions and distills them into one using abstract techniques that become powerful through the perfection of the realistic ones.

Toward an Objective Standard

The humanities are about the things that human beings have to say about the world. The real artist has something to say, some story to tell, that a machine simply does not because it has not and cannot live. This is why real art also takes courage: you must capture something real that has never yet been captured in physical form—you must make corporeal the imagination.

The Italian Renaissance Masters and Scholars teach us that if we want to distinguish the machine from the artist, we must simply look for design and rhetoric. Some may argue that an unmade bed or a pile of garbage can “tell a story” as well, but these works always require an essay in accompaniment to tell their story because they cannot tell the story themselves, except one that we may project onto it. This is what makes it politics and not art. An objective standard for real art is that it can stand alone.

And of course, there is an element of beauty to art. Even as it tells harsh and ugly truths about the world, it does so with a flare that often makes the deepest tragedies somehow beautiful. But that is another essay, for another day.

What follows is a guest post written by one of my Art Club students whom I have worked with for many months. This is an essay he wrote about two very important paintings that depict an eternal problem for man: how to move forward when all seems lost. Perhaps you will find through his words some recognition, and some inspiration for your own problems and how art can guide you out.

If you would like to send Mr. Haboush comments about his work, you can contact him at: rhett.haboush@gmail.com

Megha Lillywhite

Art jostles us out of our daily stupor and leads us through a pathway of beauty and narrative. In art there is myth, and in myth we find meaning and structure to life, its challenges and their resolutions. One of these problems is the insurmountable challenge which seems impossible to resolve with action. In our action-centered western world, we believe that only solutions that involve reason and action are useful. The eastern world reminds us that action is not the only way to solve problems and that surrender and pause, too, are important tools for a warrior to master. Two paintings describe this dilemma in a powerful way: Knight at Crossroads by Viktor Vasnetsov and The Sentry by Carel Fabritius.

In Viktor Vasnetsov’s ‘Knight at Crossroads’ we see a warrior on horseback facing a desolate wasteland. There are skeletal remains and stones scattered across the landscape, eerily resembling a graveyard. He is reflecting on a foreboding message inscribed on the stone before him. “If you go straight ahead, there will be no life; there is no way forward for he who travels past, walks past or flies past.” The warrior is dejected and hunched on his horse. Even his dispirited horse lowers her head in performative defeat. He has lost the will to even hold a weapon, his lowered spear pointing directly downward at the bones of another man and another horse, victims of the terrible despair he is now facing and perhaps foreshadowing his future. There are ominous ravens animated from his arrival. The time is twilight, an enchanted moment of transition when day shifts to night or when night shifts to day, adding to the allegorical significance of this moment.

Viktor Vasnetsov was part of a group of Russian painters known as ‘The Wanderers’ who were interested in establishing an authentic and nationalistic Russian identity through their artwork. Vasnetsov turned to fairy tales, for ‘fairy tales tell us a lot about a culture and how they view the world’ and fairy tales are a unique expression of a culture’s identity. In this painting he portrays the legendary Russian epic folklore hero, Ilya Muromets, in a trying moment on his journey. Ilya Muromets faces an insurmountable problem. The fairytale Vasnetsov depicts in his painting serves as an allegory for what we may face in our own lives. What does one do when faced with an insurmountable obstacle where all hope is seemingly lost and death is the only answer? Do you despairingly resign or do you lift your spear and charge onward, ignoring the message? Both choices lead to death. But there is a middle way: the way of stillness and humility. 

Carel Fabritius’s painting, ‘The Sentry’ depicts another desolate young man, a Dutch soldier slouched on a dirty street. His disheveled military uniform, which he still wears with his helmet and rifle, creates a dissonance between him and his civilian environment. The city around him is architecturally out of order. The structures make no functional sense: a staircase that leads to a door that seems to lead nowhere, a misplaced arch and column, a tunnel leading toward an unusual and impassible level change. There is a stone etching of what might be a monk or a priest standing over a pig, but we only see his legs and the meaning is disjointed from the painting’s subject. Fabritius also paints a civilian walking in the background, but we also only see his legs, further adding to the sense of disconnection between this soldier and his society. There is a small black dog sitting attentively beside him, as if saying, “wake up, there is work to do!”

The soldier looks dead, but it is his spirit that is dead. He lives in a society that rejects him. The Anglo-Dutch war had just ended and it turned out very badly for the Dutch. Not only was his class superfluous, they were used as scapegoats by the government for their own foolishness, and for the failure of the commanders to achieve a better outcome. So these soldiers became “a depressed and forgotten class in the community,” idling about and purposeless in their lives.  

How many men today, born to be heroes of their own lives, find themselves in desolate conditions of heart and mind? Look at the man, confused and striving for purpose, who just can’t find ground to step on, blaming his society, maybe justifiably so. Or look at the incel, afraid to let a woman see and love the real him. Or look at the drug addict. How often do you see miserable men wasting their entire opportunity at life, turning to drugs to escape the despair of their failed journeys?

The Knight and the Sentry relate to the common modern man, silently facing the ostensibly ‘unsolvable riddle’ of his existence. We can turn to art, to myth, and find that we aren’t alone in our problems.

In the Sentry’s state, our healthy instinct is to get up and put one foot in front of the other. But look at the world displayed around him. Where would he start? Where does he plant his foot for the first step toward a better life when the next step has no ground under it and when the environment has no sense to it? Like the Knight in Vasnetsov’s painting, there is no sensible course of action that the Sentry could take.

The best thing to do is...nothing. In the ancient spiritual tradition of Taoism, one of the highest virtues was called ‘wu wei’ which means, ‘sitting quietly doing nothing.’ This allows you to find a transcendent place beyond the thinking mind, the mind that has no clue on how to work out this problem. More importantly, wu wei helps us transcend and reset the mind that is dejected and has given up even trying to solve the problem. This is meditation and it releases the congested psyche to reveal solutions it couldn’t before to see insights that you couldn’t before. Your thinking becomes original and inspired.

Looking at this painting, I put myself in the knight’s position. I take a deep breath. I pet my horse. I look out. I sit and do nothing. I feel softly into things. I might access something deeper, wiser in me. I might not. How do you think Moses parted the Red Sea? This knight, if he is true of heart, perhaps can access a secret and unique path, through the impassible death field, but only if he accesses the secret path within himself first.

And if I, the Sentry, adopt the same virtue. I lift my head. I take a deep breath. I see the dog and pet it. I make contact with reality. And I sit and do nothing. My field of vision broadens. My perspective shifts. I might notice the warm sunshine. I might notice what an odd predicament I am in. Then I might start harmonizing my vibe with God. Then my environment might start making sense. Then I might know the first step to take.

By doing nothing, they detach from the problem, and a solution might appear to the Knight or the Sentry. He can better observe his surroundings and calculate what the next step is. In an inspired state, solutions might appear to him that he may not have thought of. As Archimedes found the solution to measuring the density of gold when he sat in a warm bath to relax. As Julius Caesar figured out how to defeat Vercingetorix and capture Gaul by simply reposing and realizing he could build a wall while surrounded by the enemy. Some similar solution may come to the hero, who is courageous enough to lean into stillness rather than fester in feverish despair.

Artists have a wonderful position of being able to express an image without having to explicitly explain its meaning. This invites the viewer to participate in deciphering it. They get to see an image, capture its essence, and let it soak into their imaginations and enrich their lives with its unique significance for them. Did Vasnetsov think of a young man’s journey in life when he painted the Knight? Surely he did. He was thinking of the Russian identity and the struggle for manhood. Did Fabritius do the same with his Sentry? I’d say so. Without telling us how to think, artists paint an image rich with beauty and meaning, enthralling the viewer’s heart and mind to take it in and articulate its meaning with their own unique, and yet universal, life experiences. 

These paintings are relevant today because they inform us that the solution is not going to be found in the problem.They remind us of the ancient and even mythological counsel that you have to step out of the problem so you can see it from a different perspective, often a physical shift in perspective, but more often an inner shift of perspective. A lot of life feels hopeless today. There seems to be a lot of obstacles and sabotage in the world, communally and globally. But also within our own psyches.

These paintings wake us up and out of the apathy begotten by spiritual fatigue by giving ground and meaning to the hopeless free fall of illusion and resignation we feel living in a sloppy world. They give us ground to organize our own psyches, to refrain from the maddening momentum that only drives us further down a hole of confusion and thwarted growth. We may leave our own self-absorbed obsession with the unfair hopelessness of circumstances, within and without, looking at these paintings and seeing ourselves in the subjects. We have left our mind. We have found a new perspective. Then we may get a glimpse of ‘sitting down doing nothing’ and then we may do it consciously, leaving the level of thinking we were wasting our time with, and find a deeper wisdom to see clearly where we are, what we want, and what we can do, being revived back into the center of our lives, on the path of growth and resolution.

Real art exists in conversation with the world. It consistently reinvigorates our ideas about humanity and nature, like a calibrating ground that reminds us of higher things, when we are too caught up in the daily functions of survival to look up from the grimy ground we have been treading.

Today’s essay is a case study that illustrates just this effect with two paintings depicting the same event: The Pardon in Brittany. It is a religious custom in Brittany, Northern France that includes a mass followed by a procession around the church. Many artists were fascinated by the mysticism of the centuries old spectacle that seemed to persist in the modern day world. During the procession, it seemed as though the world had returned to its medieval past.

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When a vocation is starved of the most talented and vital members of a generation, it will degenerate, as an untended garden or an abandoned house does. The house of the Arts is covered in cobwebs and overtaken by locusts today. The artists that our era boasts, are people like Cardi B, and our most famous images are pornographic advertisements. But how exactly did this happen? The blame, as usual, is the C word...Capitalism. 

Anatomy of the Heart, 1890, Enrique Simonet, Museum de Malaga, Andalusia, Spain

A System that Nurtured Genius

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Through this essay, you will learn how this is a mistake that a machine may make, but a human being can not. The difference between a nude in pornography and a nude in real art, is quite simple to explain. This essay is not about the imperceptible feelings of a “cultured person” digging her heels in to defend Bouguereau but condemn Kardashian. It is about the dual nature of the human being and the ways in which our representations can capture the obscene, or the ideal. 

Art is not Representation

There exists representative art, however, all art is not representative and, in fact, the faithfulness of representation does not make a piece art. Art is also not merely something that is created with paint on a canvas, or charcoal to paper, or a form carved out of a marble, or pigments captured on photo-paper with a camera...although art may be made of such things. In other words, just because a piece is made of a particular medium, does not make it a piece of artwork. 

Artwork is any material creation by a human that tells a story about humanity, without using symbols. When symbols are used to tell a story, that is called writing, because symbols are the primary unit of language. Art may be distinguished from symbols (and language) because the form itself tells the viewer something, regardless what it may symbolise. For example, you would still understand the essence of the story of Cinderella regardless what font it was written in. The story would not change if the font changed. However, if the shape of the lines in the Mona Lisa were to change, or the colours in the ever famous Klimt’s Kiss were to change, then the story would be entirely changed.

The dual nature of a human being: the animal and the spirit

Human beings exist in an exalted state on Earth. We have both an animal nature and an angelic one; we have a material nature and a spiritual one. Consider the mouth as a perfect illustration of this duality of man. The mouth can sing beautiful songs, and recite wonderful and moving poetry, but it can also swear, eat, burp and vomit. The former consists of the spiritual because a song or a poem has no material “proof” of its existence. Any poem that is written down only makes sense because the symbols in the language mean something to us. Whereas the swearing, eating, burping and vomiting are aspects of our material nature. We must do these things because they serve in the basic material functions of the human body. Even swearing can be equated to an animal’s growls and grunts that defend its territory or signal pain. They do not mean things as a poem or a song may mean something.

We may extrapolate this dual nature of the mouth to the whole human body, and in particular the female body. The female body is a very precious thing in the animal kingdom. The proliferation of a species hinges upon the males being able to access and use the female body to impregnate her and have her carry his offspring. In fact, female farm animals are more precious because they can make more livestock for the farmer. When this same treatment is done to human women, we somehow feel discomfort and unease. If I told you a story about a woman being bought and sold for their breeding abilities, it would cause unease and you might even call it obscene. This discomfort is at the core of understanding the whole difference between art and pornography.

Anything that reminds us of the material aspects of human nature that efface the spiritual aspect, is something obscene. For example, when someone talks while eating, it is obscene to us because it reminds us of the human as a body, rather than the human spirit that resides within that body. We do not wish to see a mouth doing what it does for its primary material purpose such as eating, coughing or vomiting. Similarly, we do not wish to see the female body in a way that reminds us of its primary material purpose: sex. 

Aspects of a Nude

In a pornographic nude, the female body proportions are usually incorrect and exaggerated to accentuate sexual features. No one thinks about the woman when they see such a picture; they think mainly about how the body may be consumed. In an artistic nude, however, the female body is not exaggerated and the proportions are more faithful to life. By this I do not mean that they are more faithful to the average frumpy fridge-shaped woman with disturbed hormones, I mean a perfectly formed, natural human woman. 

For example, the width of the rib cage in proportion to the waist, the size of the breasts and where they sit on the torso, the size of the arms and the articulation of the musculature are all accurate in an artistic nude. These proportions are always off in a pornographic nude because the purpose of the pornographic nude is to de-identify the woman as a human being. If the proportions were correct, it would be more challenging to forget she is a person, especially in a photograph or a hyper-realistic painting.

These aberrations in proportion may be challenging for the modern spectator to appreciate because modern “beauty” is simply a pornification of the human body. The Kardashian standard that enlarges the breasts and lips to horrifying proportions, and chisels the nose and cheeks to inhuman aesthetic, is not the woman, it is the trans woman. These proportions and alterations make a woman look pornographic no matter what pose or picture she takes because the exaggeration aspect of the pornographic image is affixed to her always. 

Men who suffer from gendere dysphoria, who attempt to become women through surgical changes, never look like women, they look like pornographic objects. The entire endeavour is an extension of the way that homosexuality is merely a performance of sex for its material pleasures, divorced from its spiritual aspects such as connection, love and procreation. Obscenity is the worship of the material divorced from, and to the exclusion of, the spiritual.

A Lack of Innocence 

In a pornographic nude, the women in the nude lacks innocence. She performs for the camera or for the painter. There is a look in her eyes that she knows what the purpose of the piece is and it is entirely sexual in nature. There is no chance at all that there may be love, that is, a connection with the viewer on any spiritual level other than the physical. An excellent example of this feature of a pornographic image is the painting “Cherry Ripe” by John Everett Millais, which caused a sensation when it was printed. The painting depicts a fully clothed little girl with her hands in her lap, looking up at the viewer with eyes that know too much. The little girl knows the power she has over the viewer, what he may want from her and finally how she may manipulate him to get it. This look is obscene primarily because it highlights the animal aspect of the body while simultaneously effacing the spiritual. For this reason, a picture does not have to be nude to be pornographic. Pornographic images share this lack of innocence in their pictures.

Pornography Exposes the Body, Art Exposes the Spirit

There is a common misconception that simply because something is a photographed nude, it must be pornography and that just because something is a painted nude, it must be art. This is incorrect. What makes a nude pornographic is not the medium of its execution, but rather the execution itself. If the nude separates the material aspect of the female body from its spiritual aspect and puts the material on display, it is, by definition, pornographic. 

What I have described here is something that any person, regardless his level of education or age may recognise. This distinction is impossible for an artificial intelligent machine to make because it is only material in nature and can therefore only recognise the material aspects of the images it evaluates. It sees an exposed breast and does not care if it is on a Botticelli painting or on a instagram hoe prostituting herself online; the machine treats them both the same

The Purpose of the Female Nude

The woman’s personality is not the purpose of the nude. The nude in art, like in pornography, is still about the female body and not the woman in particular. But unlike pornography, the nude in art is not about the body in particular, but about an eternal image that happens to shine through that body. The perfection of the female body in the prime of its youth, is an eternal image of beauty and the eternal object of affection and obsession. One does not write sonnets to porn stars...one writes them to Aphrodite. This is because the porn star is not beautiful, she is sexy, to be consumed and discarded, a mere mortal. Aphrodite lives forever because she is the symbol of beauty, a quality that is eternal, and that each woman may borrow for a short time.

The female nude in art is itself an ekphrastic ode to the eternal spirit of feminine beauty that may embody a woman for a few brief years of her life, until it is taken away and passed on to the next generation. Art captures, not the particular woman, but an eternal concept, which is also called an ideal. The ideal in the female nude is beauty in the female form. Pornography does not capture this eternal quality, it captures only the ephemeral moment of consumption. It is obscene to us because it reminds us of a bodily function, a mortal pleasure, and a mortal end. The female nude in pornography is a corpse, whereas the female nude in art is living symbol, that will live, indeed, forever.

If you would like to learn more about Real Art and Arts Concepts they do not teach in mainstream education anymore, sign up for the Classical Ideals Art Club:

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