by Angelo Maria Barducci, professor of ESLSCA's Luxury Brand Management MBA
Posted: Sun Jan 12, 2025 6:25 am
Art and Pandemic, it's a perfect blend that has originated the most admired and appreciated masterworks of the entire history of art.
The union of these two entities is effectively an oxymoron : when we think about Art, we have commonly in mind something beauty and harmonious, which is contrasting with the horror and creepiness of a global pandemic event.
But we don't have loan database to forget that the concept of Beauty in Art is deeply rooted with the concept of Mimesis , developed by Plato. This word means "copying" or "imitation" and, for this reason, until roughly the end of the eighteenth century, a work of art was valued on the basis of how faithfully it replicated its subject. A “good and honest” artwork was, for centuries, defined as the representation or replication of something that is beautiful or meaningful. This definition of "good art" has had a profound impact on modern and contemporary artists; as Gordon Graham writes, “It leads people to place a high value on very lifelike portraits such as those by the great masters—Michelangelo, Rubens, Velásquez, and so on—and to raise questions about the value of 'modern' art—the cubist distortions of Picasso, the surrealist figures of Jan Miro', the abstracts of Kandinsky or the 'action' paintings of Jackson Pollock.”
So, during the many pandemic moments which occur in the unavoidable cycle of " corsi e ricorsi " in history ("courses and appeal", as Giambattista Vico wrote) many painters, sculptors, composers felt the need to become reporters and to communicate the tragic reality they were living through something less literal than words but more direct to human sensitivity: colors, volumes, music notes.
And it doesn't matter the language, the style the artists used to express the terror and abhorrence of a war action or a famine, the final result into the eyes of any observer is the same one, even hundreds of years later. " The Triumph of Death ", a detached fresco painting dated at the half of the XV century during the Black Death plague and showcased in Palazzo Abatellis Gallery in Palermo, with its great symbolism and realism is as shocking to the human eyes as " Guernica " of Pablo Picasso, the large 1937 oil painting on canvas exhibited in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and painted
The union of these two entities is effectively an oxymoron : when we think about Art, we have commonly in mind something beauty and harmonious, which is contrasting with the horror and creepiness of a global pandemic event.
But we don't have loan database to forget that the concept of Beauty in Art is deeply rooted with the concept of Mimesis , developed by Plato. This word means "copying" or "imitation" and, for this reason, until roughly the end of the eighteenth century, a work of art was valued on the basis of how faithfully it replicated its subject. A “good and honest” artwork was, for centuries, defined as the representation or replication of something that is beautiful or meaningful. This definition of "good art" has had a profound impact on modern and contemporary artists; as Gordon Graham writes, “It leads people to place a high value on very lifelike portraits such as those by the great masters—Michelangelo, Rubens, Velásquez, and so on—and to raise questions about the value of 'modern' art—the cubist distortions of Picasso, the surrealist figures of Jan Miro', the abstracts of Kandinsky or the 'action' paintings of Jackson Pollock.”
So, during the many pandemic moments which occur in the unavoidable cycle of " corsi e ricorsi " in history ("courses and appeal", as Giambattista Vico wrote) many painters, sculptors, composers felt the need to become reporters and to communicate the tragic reality they were living through something less literal than words but more direct to human sensitivity: colors, volumes, music notes.
And it doesn't matter the language, the style the artists used to express the terror and abhorrence of a war action or a famine, the final result into the eyes of any observer is the same one, even hundreds of years later. " The Triumph of Death ", a detached fresco painting dated at the half of the XV century during the Black Death plague and showcased in Palazzo Abatellis Gallery in Palermo, with its great symbolism and realism is as shocking to the human eyes as " Guernica " of Pablo Picasso, the large 1937 oil painting on canvas exhibited in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and painted