What’s up with the Renaissance? How did such artistic power open so much inversion?
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We've taken a few looks at the Renaissance now. It started in our first go round with secular transcendence - when we were looking at globalism and architecture. And a lot of appearances in the occult posts. Pretty much anything sinister and inverted that passed through from ancient times came through it. Most recently, we’ve been taking a close look at Renaissance art.
Right now we’re on a large journey through the arts of the West to Modernism. It’s taking forever because we’re doing a lot at once. The idea is to break up the tunnels of discourse and look at how culture is interconnected. But the downside is that we aren’t going very fast.
Marco Battaglini, The Future is in Your Hands, 2010s, airbrush on canvas
What we’re doing. First is the arts of the West. It’s become obvious to the Band and a few of similar perspicacity that our culture got jacked and inverted. And some have begun taking steps to preserve and restore organic growth to it. We’ve promoted everything here from living artists to comic books. We noticed that the fine arts – painting, sculpture, prints, etc. – got jacked so hard that they were extinguished on an official level. Tortured into complete inversion and left to rot like carrion in once-proud halls.
Francis Bacon, Figure with Meat, 1954, oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago
If art is a projection of cultural health...
But one thing about inversion is that there is a logic to the process. Things that get it this bad must be proportionately important to healthy culture. Otherwise there wouldn’t be demonic orgies on the blasted scree of once-hallowed ground. Figuratively speaking. In Minecraft.
That makes it something worth looking into. And that’s been endlessly fascinating and frustrating. So the first thing is to rough map what the arts of the West actually are. Despite the terminal state of the institutions, there are a lot of good resources out there. The other part – when we get there – is to think about a real arts of the West instead of Modernism. The road not taken, with an eye to organic culture in the future.
Hieronymus Hess, The Fool from the Dance of Death, 1834, lithograph
The second is to use the art to trace cultural degeneration. We identified early on that art was linked to elite power and money. It has to be - the first professional artist appeared when someone had surplus resources to hire him. Only the elite offered wages and possibly wealth, lodgings in great homes, sometimes even titles and manors of their own. And he who pays the piper…
The point is that art is what official culture looks like in a sense. It definitely transmits the views and values of the elite client class. The arts of the West also means who, where, and why – the road to modern art is the road to modern culture. It’s a different kind of inquiry from our speculative pieces – less ontological and more historical. But the material world is a lazy river – it doesn’t fit into spiffy thought diagrams.
We wouldn’t be surprised to find that the general pattern fits neatly with de-generation and moral entropy. It’s become clear that the ontological hierarchy is an accurate account of reality. And the Renaissance - for all the awesome talent of the artists - starts the path from Logos.
Jeremiah Humphries, The Last Redoubt
Turns out that all those metaphysically gelded, world fizzling out stories are right. If your world is metaphysically gelded.
The Band is metaphysically whole. So we realized modern culture was on the beast track of entropy and inevitable death, we set out for the alternative. Call it... Awake in the Light.
It started quick enough – we looked at ancient Greece and Rome and found a Logos-compatible working definition of art.
It's just adapted phronesis - the meeting of techne and episteme or technical skill and logos. It doesn't tell you what art forms are the "right" ones or what styles are best. Those are material cultural consideration and depend on historical preference. What matters is that it requires skill and is not false.
Max Kalish, Eternal Springtime, 20th century, private
Logos isn't restrictive - other than being true. There's beauty in the human form and in human love. It's not lewd or voyeuristic. It also may not be for everyone. Material logos comes in cultural flavors. The central question is the relationship to truth.
The Middle Ages showed us how art, aristocracy, and states grew together. Gradually the elites form a parallel, more international culture within their developing nations. This is where something we can recognize as art appears.
So from the start, there is tension within art that should be attended to. Because it takes resources, art is connected to the wealthy. So the health of your art is directly connected to the health of your elites. Look around - it definitely checks out today.
Master of the Dominican Effigies, Christ and the Virgin Enthroned with Forty Saints, leaf from a Laudario, miniature on vellum, around 1340, National Gallery, Washington
Tally it all up. The cost of the hides for a vellum book, the colors - especially the blue and gold, the hours of labor from highly-trained artists, scribes, binders, etc. And the better the artist, the higher the price.
The arts of the West are connected to whatever the "aristocracy" is. They can be fixated on logos and beauty...
Darryn George, The Women of Jerusalem Weep for Jesus, 2008, oil on canvas, private.
Back in 2011, this was estimated at around $6,000-7,000. Also the sort of thing that prices out all but the better off. Like the wider aristocracy in the Middle Ages.
About the cultural Progress! of the elites... At least it's a religious theme?..
Once art becomes a defined activity in Western culture, it starts developing its customs and practices. At first this is unofficial - workshop practices and client tastes by region. Consistencies grow with the international nature of the aristocracy and movement of people within the West. The regional variations and historical phases under a common umbrella is what organic development looks like. There is material logos in the process.
The Renaissance is where this formalizes and where the rules come in. Art goes from "high-end craft that everyone's into" to a Liberal Art. It's a huge change.
Attributed to the Master of Saint Veronica, Enthroned Virgin and Child, with Saints Paul, Peter, Clare of Assisi, Mary Magdalene, Barbara, Catherine of Alexandria, John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, Agnes, Cecilia, Margaret of Antioch, and George, 1400-1410, oil and gold on panel, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Art starts as something that develops between artists and clients fumbles towards a general sense of Beauty. Bottom-up finite material pursuit of an abstraction that can't materially exist in itself.
There's a Gothic look to a painting like this, but not Gothic laws or rules. It's the feeling of the artist figuring it out, the joy of bringing beauty into the world - even for money. Everyone has to eat - what you do to earn that matters.
It's this bottom-up pursuit of beauty that registered to later observers as naivety or lack of self-consciousness. That's crazy to think of - a painter like this was very conscious of his art and its effects. What they were picking up on was lack of "Art" as they understood it. Some set of cultural rules and judgments other than what makes a picture beautiful. The "it's a nice picture, but is it art" retardery that gives people who want you erased authority over your values.
The problem was the earlier secular transcendence of Academic Art. Precursor to Art! Where "society" pretended cultural authority arising a set of beliefs was still authoritative if the beliefs were flushed. What happened is that the official arts were linked to official everything in 19th-century Europe and swept away by modernism.
Unidentified (British?) artist, A Life Class, early 19th century?, oil on canvas, Royal Academy of Arts
Art class at the Cincinnati Art Academy, around 1900, photo, Cincinnati Art Museum
A lot of questions around this one - the RA site said it was thought to have been by the 18th-century master Hogarth but is now believed to be later. The artist is unknown and the style deliberately old-fashioned. Basic life drawing didn't change for over a century.
Academy artists were very well-trained technically. But institutional rigidity severely limited the ability to connect this to reality.
The strength of Academy training was the techne. But they had legitimately become a problem. The thing about Academies is that they are misrepresented by the beast narrative, but not totally so. Academies and modernism is kind of like the last czar - not a dream leader, but abstract-level infinity times better than the replacement.
We will get to the Age of the Academies - we don't want to get sidetracked here. Also we aren't far enough in our rethinking to jump ahead. Proceeding methodically through history seems the best way to avoid secular transcendence or rash emotion-driven conclusions. So a couple of things to keep in mind for now.
In the beast narrative, "the Academy" is sort of like "the Man" in the 60s. A vague reference to traditional cultural authority and the institutions associated with it.
No one can really define it - just that it is linked to institutions and hates "freedom".
The way the story usually works starts with finding a particularly egregious example of stilted academism. This can be removed from any context and held up for scrutiny and rificule. More dishonestly, is is misrepresented as something "all artists were forced to do".
Like a "classical history" whose sole purpose is to titilate with exotic sexuality and perversion. They called it "Orientalism". Elite culture for the nation.
Alexandre Cabanel, Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners, 1887, oil on canvas, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp
Alexandre-Auguste Hirsch, Night, 1875, oil on canvas, private
Hugues Merle, L'Abandonnée, 1872, oil on canvas, private
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Holy Family, 1863, oil on canvas, private
Weird sexuality permeates late academic art. Myth, social issues, even the Holy Family could be eroticized in ways running from creepy voyeurism to blasphemous pedophilia. These are relatively mild. But modern eyes are have been trained with graphic horrors - consider the messaging...
Now look at the dates and think of beast cultural manipulation.
The moral emptiness of Academic art gave it nothing to oppose Modernism with. Because they couldn't admit that it was nothing more than dopamine without blowing the whole game. So the beast-huffers conga-ed on, only now sensual allure is bad. And even the art that wasn't compromised like a "family values" preacher with a taste for gay hookers was stilted and out of touch. Easy prey for cunning liars.
History painting was the top of the Academic heap. The idea was to promote the endless supremacy of Greco-Roman culture while teaching "timeless" values.
Lionel Royer, Germanicus Before the Remains of the Legions of Varus, 1896, oil on canvas
It's a good painting and packed full of possible lessons. But it was easily pilloried as out of touch. That's the late French Academy - clearly past its sell-by date, but hardly a case for cultural destruction. So "the Academy" is a straw boogieman of the type globalist "historians" always drum up. A way to cover Satanic rebellion and Sorathic atavism.
This is the high art version of the low culture de-moralization and inversion we saw in the t.v. era. They aren't exactly the same because they had different targets and places. But it's the same pattern. A cheap and logos-less but appealing husk of secular transcendence masquerades as actual culture. It is then turned into a straw man and blowtorched for its legit failings. Only the replacement is utterly abhorrent in comparison.
Quick aside on Sorathic evil.
In the last speculative post we considered Sorathic evil as an abstract endpoint opposite the Good. Absolute zero and true infinity. If one extends from the energies of Creation, the other necessarily opposes them. Sorath or pure Evil qua Evil seeks to undo the fundamental Created order.
Each act of moral or cultural atavism - each rejection of the objective order implicit in the causality of Creation - inclines towards Sorath. It is as pure and utter evil as can be imagined. No matter how "certain" the moron of their cause.
In reality - Academies begin in 1600s from even older roots. The 17th century French Academies are the most famous since they were the first. And they were culturally oppressive because they were part of Louis XIV and Colbert's system of Absolutism. But this goes with Louis. The reality is that the Academies are always tied to official high society, but change with time.
Claude Lefèbvre, Allegory of Louis XIV, protector of the Arts and Sciences, 1670-1672, oil on canvas, Versailles
Academies were are government sanctioned and funded and so reflect the government line more or less. But all the different movements in 18th and early 19th-century Western art manage to take place within them. And different national academies have different flavors even at the same time. The problems were that the model was formulaic and connected to nonsense aristocratic ideologies.
Consider that we just spent multiple posts on a complete transformation of the arts of the West in a way that unified the Classical and Christian pillars. Without academies.
Academic techne was high-level, but the most stunning and creative painting of the 19th century wasn't coming out of the French freakin' Academy. It was in the wealth of regional schools and styles that made up the arts of the West before the Modern flood of effluent. Things like the Romantic sublime of the Dusseldorf School and all its offshoots. The American versions of the Hudson River School. Russian geniuses like Shishkin. English picturesque and magical realism. The wonders of Scandinavian painting... It goes on and on.
Many of these artists belonged to their national academies. Other bodies like the Dusseldorf school applied Academy-level techne with different visions of what art could be. Others like the Hudson River School formed loose alliances for individual growth under a shared umbrella. At no point had Western art ever been as wide ranging in style and subject. And improving photography was making it available to people like never before.
Herman Herzog, A Shepherd With his Flock, 19th century, oil on canvas, private
Take a painter like Herzog. A German member of the Dusseldorf School who painted breathtaking scenes of his native countryside and traditional life.
He eventually moved to America where he joined the Hudson River School. Whittridge, Church and others had studied in Dusseldorf so there was a connection. His style definitely fit.
Hermann Herzog, View of Niagara Falls in Moonlight, 1872, oil on canvas
One of his Hudson River School period paintings. He improved his handling of light and atmosphere and his range of subjects.
The Hudson River School wasn't a school you studied at, but a group of professionals that shared values and encouraged and pushed each other. Hersog kept growing because he doesn't assume one perpetual artistic truth. Other than Truth.
Ever heard of Herzog?
Now consider this. We are immersed in a-holes who would dismiss Herzog whether they like him or not. Because a liar they've never met told them to and other liars agreed. Self-styled "smart" NPCs are the worst - lips adhered to the beast teat as they multiply lies to critical mass. Where does this impulse come from - is collective mental flight from reality a symptom of materialist mouse utopia?
We've known for years that beast media in it's full range is controlled by a small handful of colluding globalists. It is not an end in itself at all - let alone one that seeks to inform. It is a talon on a massive claw that integrates corporate, financial, and government power. And when you act on it's genocidal mendacity, you are complicit in the erasure of your own place in reality.
But, but, the glowing screen offers "different" points of view. And social media allows each of us to control our information feeds...
Superficial differences over a common structure will bamboozle stupid people. But if there is a synapse or two firing, it's obvious from the structure that media is a complex fiction crafted by the handful of colluding elites to further the aims that actually occupy the bulk of their focus.
Beast narrative creation is multi-stage. Whatever orchestrates the clown show - the inner circle, the beast, the high table, Satan - sets the overall direction. One world order and depopulation have been overtly stated elite goals for several generations. Then "content" is produced for the platforms that name drops real things while narrating a false world view. Other tentacles - corrupted science, medicine, academia, policy institutes - suddenly reinforce the new false message in a broad-spectrum blitz. And it's all integrated - the media reports the fake experts, the fake experts get cover and subconscious signal boosting from the media.
Question - does magic thinking actually transform the physical nature of the universe if enough voices mouth the words? Think about it. What is your understanding of the nature of reality?
The problem is that it doesn't even have to be everyone. Critical mass is enough to sway the herd and the outliers become helpless spectators in the tide. The Academies did not equal art before Modernism. The academies dominance was limited in their own countries. In fact, ambient social change had already sent the retarded antiquity obsession to a well-earned place in the dustbin. So why, if you do the most basic googling of Modernism do you keep getting the moronic Academy-as waxed-moustache-straw-man?
The truthiness of the Modernist lie needs the
Academy to be a repressive force.
Otherwise, it's harder to bury questions about why "embracing the modern world" meant degenerating into technical infantilism.
Kazimir Malevich, Black Circle, motive 1915 / painted 1924, oil on canvas, Russian Museum
It's easy to look at a limited hack like Malevich and understand why he jumped at the opportunity to cash in without skill. In any normal world, clown-frauds like this remain obscure. But his talentless atavism had value for the beast - with what we know, it's just as easy to see why Art! would fluff scum like this.
Now consider this quote from Malevich on his "movement" - from Infogalactic.
Under Suprematism I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist, the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.
This solipsistic clod and his idiot-babble screamed for someone to say "who cares". Demented ravings describing something other than what art is. Ravings that by his own admission has nothing to offer. But this was the consequence of Art! - that despite millennia of logos and techne, of the good, the beautiful, and the true, of expressing hears and soul of peoples - was now playground for sociopaths and narcissists. Click for a beast narrative summary.
The thing is, Simple google searches show the variety of 19th-cenury art. And why the beast hates it.
Alfred Guillou, Arriving at the Pardon of Saint Anne de Fouesnant at Concarneau, 1887, oil on canvas, private
Art that reflects culture also records culture. The beauty of Breton faith as as something to aspire to. Note how modernism denigrates tradition. That is only possible when you can't see the alternative for yourself.
Antoine Chintreuil, The Sun Drinks the Dew, 1873, oil on canvas
Stay French, since that's Modernism ground zero. How about sunrise awakening Creation in color, while nature looks on? The profundity here is of a different kind. As is the beauty.
Pierre-Auguste Cot, Springtime, 1873, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Art captures more primal human realities too. Like the electrifying overlap of love and attraction in a beautiful girl.
Can art compensate for lack of social success? Obviously not, but knowing what generative love and beauty look like helps smoke out the degenerative inverse.
Albert Lorieux, Solitude, 1898, oil on canvas,
Maybe something more suited to deep thoughts or religious meditations? Art can create an environment or set a mood when the real version isn't available.
A tranquil seascape?
Jean-Léon Gérôme, A View of the Gulf of Aqaba, oil on canvas
We could go on, but you get the point. Note that these all do things like explore form and color that Modernism claimed was necessary. But they are also beautiful in ways that tie us to logos. Basic truths about man, nature, and spirit in visuallly pleasing forms. Logos plus techne. Art.
So how does a historical parody of the original 17th-century French Academy become a stand-in for art in the 19th?
Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid
Easy. It's a simplistic myth promulgated by functional retards. Foucault made up some things about perception and interspersed them with random mentions of Velazquez. If you want to see the marriage of pathological narcissism and missing the point, it starts on page three.
Art! cut art off from society and corrupted the places that served it. Wicked institutional leadership purged what truth-facing rank and file there were. It's not hard - push inversion and they leave on their own. The masses had their "low-brow" culture that didn't seem to change as much - that could be coopted more slowly once the top was rotted out. And how were Ma and Pa Kent going to oppose proclamations of "world-renowned" critics, curators, scholars, reviewers, etc.? Just consider how good people you know are at resisting beast lies.
Pompeo Batoni, Aeneas fleeing from Troy, 1753, oil on canvas, Sabauda Gallery
At this point, best to gather what you need and get you and your as out of the way as possible because it's not going to be a soft landing.
So "The Academy".
In theory, academism could maintain uniform standards of excellence and morality in the arts. The technical training was certainly high - competitive and easy to wash out. In reality, it had inherent problems - centralization and periods of creative sterility.
The centralization is the main one and will be dealt with by the rest of this post. The sterility took different paths. For one, training to skewed to rote and sucked the life and energy out of the art. Stagy expressions and stock poses where the models could only be more obvious if the sheets they posed on were added in. Techne is more than mastering pencil exercises. In includes the ability to move the viewer emotionally and involuntarily.
Bernard Picart, Male Nude with a Lamp (Diogenes), 1724, red chalk on laid paper,30.9 x 45.7 cm, National Gallery of Art
Is he looking for an honest man, or flexing like a poseur in a nightclub?
The problem the Academy had was that it bought into the earlier secular transcendent lie. That art was an abstract entity that existed in ideal form external to the humans that defined and made it. Retardation to the point where it becomes annoying to even mention it. And the motivations were appropriately immoral. Promoting the beyond self-evidently moronic lie that art is independent of human agency allowed the Academy absolute authority in that imaginary world. Still enjoying the bottom-feeders hand-outs from the power-elite. But pretending to be Olympian arbiters of culture.
Henri Adrien Tanoux, The Next Commission, 1898, oil on canvas
It's the same story with vanity and greed-driven cucks everywhere. In their hurry to sell out for short-term rewards, they have nothing to stand on when the demons come for them.
The irony was that earlier 19th-century attacks on the Academies linked them to Modernism. The Gothic Revival, the Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts Movements, the Nazerene painters - all looked to the past for with a mix of social and art reform. The Industrial Revolution had already begun the destruction of organic community and atomization that the beast system is built on. These retro Utopianisms were supposed to point back to organic culture.
James Archer, The Death of King Arthur, around 1860, oil on canvas
Scottish painter influenced by the Pre-Raphalites shared their interest in non-Classical themes and the less "arty" approached of the time before Raphael.
The Archer is a nice painting. The long-haired girl is exceptionally pretty and the whole scene works. And it doesn't look like French Academy painting. But you can already see the problem all these movements have...
They weren't organic.
Franz Pforr, Rudolf of Habsburg and the Priest, 1810, oil on canvas, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main.
The Nazarenes pictures were consciously archaic. Deliberately copying early Italian Renaissance styles with no logical, cultural, or historical connection to them.
"Primitives" seemed like an alternative to a de-moralized and de-humanized Industrial Revolution hellscape. But it didn't mean anything. These Germans were tourists and historical dilettantes. LARPing the Renaissance with zero meaningful connection. And equally little to offer the 19th-century German people. Cowardly flight into sterile retro. Might as well try and reboot Western culture by dressing Auntie John like Guinevere. The transformation of an angel into a coddled harlot would be appropriate.
And this brings us to the bigger problem that has only gotten worse. Centralization.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, View along the Via del Corso of the Palazzo dell'Accademia, established by Louis XIV, King of France for French students of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture..., engraving from Vedute di Roma, part I, around 1750–78
The Academic system is based on central control of cultural production and taste. It sets the styles and subjects and trains the artists to make them at the same time. It sets the permitted materials, models, symbols, canons - all the crap that non-producing parasites critics have been "proclaiming" essential since the first one wasted his first breath.
It is structural.
The Academic Age sets the idea that the thing called "art"
is definable by government institutions.
Bringing us to old friend the Philosophical Bait and Switch - when something contingent, temporary, and circumstantial is falsely passed off as timeless. It's an expression of secular transcendence - the fake timelessness is secular transcendence - the Bait and Switch is the particular lie. The act of passing the secular off as transcendent.
Hubert Robert, Development Project for the Grand Galerie du Louvre, 1806, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum
Academic painter who managed to take over the Louvre Museum conversion for the Revolutionary Government.
Somehow the "Royal" Academy kept on trucking without the royals...
There's nothing "timeless" about Academic Art. We know all the players - the founders, funders, influencers, artists - the whole historical fiction. And all the timeless change. When the Roman satellite was founded to create new links to timelessness. When the Revolution replaced timeless royal values with timeless Republican ones. When Napoleon and restored monarchy brought the royal ones back. And then modernity. A timeless history of constant change. And evidently a breeding pen for mental deficients.
Lay down the marker. The original artistic authority of the Academy was based on "the Renaissance". The same Renaissance we just explored and the concept of the Renaissance as perfect art. Put it against the definition of art.
Quick reminder - the technical skill is material-level logos. There are practical methods and formulas that are difficult to master but deliver material-level beauty. What these are depend on material-level details. It's how we have cultural preference. Don't forget to differentiate allure from beauty too. We're fallen creatures with animal drives - there are all kinds of things that can be pleasing to look at that aren't tapped in to Beauty.
Hans Dahl, The Geiranger Fjord, Norway, 19th century, oil on canvas, private; Belle-Verrière Window, Chartres
Logos - alignment to Truth - is how a stained glass window and landscape can look nothing alike but be recognizable as "artworks". It's in the name - works. A verb. Technical skill and logos coming together to give something truthful artful form. Form that strikes the heart and soul as well as mind.
Art doesn't have to be overtly "religious". But it does have to offer some artful truth. Skill and logos. The Academy starts off with the commitment to technical skill. A formula based on masters of the Renaissance and the following century. But there was no capital-L logos. The artists were the "logos", then this is replaced by theorists. All the while claiming the changing tastes were the same timeless art. The Academies went the same way as "The Liberal Arts Education", "The Great Books", "Manifest Destiny", and every other house of beast tissue paper self-fluffers have used to justify self-fluffing.
It's why all the bastions of timelessness folded faster than origami ninjas.
The claim of fake objectivity allowed centralized control of something organic. At first it meant training artists in formulaic ways. But ultimately the institution itself could be erased once Art! truly had an undead "life" of its own. And if there's no logos, what need for techne? And that's the part of Art! that hasn't changed. It's still centralized. Go try and get some foundation money or try and show your work somewhere as a random person.
The beast system has to be centralized because what it offers is so hideous. No one would choose it if given other options. First it subverts, then it inverts, and to do that, it needs a system that it can assume control of. And then artists have to play the game if they want to rise. The alternative is what actual artists have to do - cultivate clienteles and sell around the beast.
Brent Cotton, Power and Light, 2015, oil on canvas, private
This artist is immensely talented - blending traditional beauty with an original style. If you're good enough, you can make a living this way. But there'll be no recognition from any beast orifice. Unless a ticket is offered.
The Art! Philosophical Bait and Switch worked like this. A set of evolved organic cultural practices had became known as art. This gets folded into the larger secular transcendences of post-Enlightenment inversion. And the idea that culturally-contingent artistic practice could be a timeless idea? That comes from the Renaissance. There's no "meritocracy" - that's a term used by dupes who confuse beast propaganda with beast reality. The upper levels require ticket-taking. Like any other beast hierarchy.
The process is like abstraction - pull observations out of what is really happening and make a simplified account out of them. It will map onto reality, but omit all the details that you don't want. You've now "defined" art based on real art, but in the terms you think it should reflect. Anything you don't like gets written out. It's the same process we broke down in the history as telling stories posts. Real facts as the foundation for a story that may not be factual at all [click for link]. Here's the graphic
Gerrit Dou, A Scholar Sharpening his Quill, 1633, 25.5 x 20.5 cm, The Leiden Collection
What you're getting isn't what happened, but it isn't exactly fiction either. You can already see the room for abuse.
Continuing from that post - history can be easily falsified because of the storytelling level. The narrative. We can look at Paleolithic stone structure, project modern helplessness and ineptitude on it, and pretend "aliens" had to build it. Or we can reverse engineer techniques that used known Paleolithic tech levels to explain how to do it. One employs retard fantasies to as a crutch for personal weakness. The other proceeds empirically as humans always do when deriving real solutions.
This is why "sticking to the facts" does sweet eff all for historical accuracy. The most dangerous lies are crafted at the story level anyhow.
Now pretending a bunch of period customs are eternal truths takes more than just a story. Especially on the level of the official apparatus of the arts of the West. You needed something exceptional - epochal even - to serve as the Timeless! bait.
That's where the Renaissance masters come in. Their whole world view was based on the pretense that they were making the world a better place improving culture. It was a comical claim overall, but in some areas it was an easier sell. Consider the artists...
The Donatello and Brunelleschi generation brought new levels of techne. But they also brought that humanist secular transcendence.
If you were going to pitch the idea that Florence was the bleeding edge of a new era, the art was probably your best argument.
Botticelli, The Birth of Venus
Verrocchio, Equestrian Statue of Colleoni, 1481-95, gilded bronze, Venice
The next generation consolidate and advance the new vision. Botticelli's is one of the most famous paintings ever. Verrocchio puts Donatello's living figures into motion.
And then the High Renaissance guys blow the lid off that.
There's never been a collection of this many apex talents in one place before or since. Historical anomaly - has to be a peak in any historical distribution. Like "% future Hall of Famers" on DiMaggio's Yankees or Russell's Celtics. Raphael is probably the greatest painter to ever live. Several others are in the all-time pantheon tier of world artists. Leonardo invents Western painting. Michelangelo defines the idea of tormented genius. Titian and the Venetian painters use paint like never before. A wave of organic innovations in art that still echo. Progress and genius. Just circumstantial.
This was seen then too. People were well-aware that they were living in a time of extraordinary creativity. It's how 16th-century "thinkers" like Giorgio Vasari could claim that art had been "perfected". And once there was a written template to go with the genius artworks, there was a linked package of art and ideology. Rules and examples in a tight formula.
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, The Virgin Adoring the Host, 1852, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ingres was the greatest 19th-century French champion of Raphael in the Academy. He's an excellent technician. But note how his porcelain figures lack the life and vital energy of Raphael's. It's the difference between an organic vital art creating a new vision and self-conscious application of retro formulas.
One has a future.
Not picking on Ingres - he's a heck of a painter and a lot of his work is really good. Nothing wrong with historical homage to a giant of the tradition. The problem is that honoring the past has to come with creating for the future or else it gets sterile. Ironically, that's what really stood out in the Raphael post. How he could draw so effectively on his influences while always creating new directions. Academic art fails because it cripples the future by overrating the past. Then Modernism fails because it underrates it. And both happen because of the self-evidently-false-in-every-way myth that abstract perfection is possible in a Fallen world of entropic change. Either fake "timeless" standards or fake future "perfection".
And once you've misplaced objectivity into secular transcendence, inversion is already underway. The degeneration is mathematical at that point. Hence the importance of Logos.
The giants of the Renaissance - for all their failings and faults - truly believed. Their artiness is real, but also organic. Their craving for fame is real, but also their visual praise to God. Even their talents were considered divine gifts.
Raphael was a charming, handsome genius who flashed across papal Rome rewriting the arts of the West. It is true he took advantage of this to satisfy a lustful nature. But his alignment with Beauty and Logos is undeniable. It's visible. He never spirals into debauchery and dies with heart and mind on Jesus. Did he sin? Of course. He's fallen.
Michelangelo restored by Tiberio Calgagni, The Deposition (The Florentine Pietà), 1545-1555, marble, Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence
Michelangelo lived in tormented chastity for maybe all of his existence. Whether he died a virgin or tried something appears to be a question among some historians. It's irrelevant. He's fallen. What matters is that he doesn't sink into debauchery either.
This was intended for his own tomb before he decided it ruined and tried to destroy it. A student of his fixed it as best he could. Michelangelo carved his own face on Nicodemus as a sign of love and prayer for salvation.
The irony is that the Renaissance artists who are soon held up as ideals didn't have human idols. They were looking up.
This is what makes the Renaissance such a two-edged sword. We got side-tracked into the big names because their organic creativity is incredible. Some time ago we compared them to the Noldor - now you can see why.
Any future arts of the West has to take them and their accomplishments seriously. And there's so much available - we could gather and post stuff for ages. Obviously we can’t - so just remember this -
It was the workshop tradition that produced all the Renaissance guys. And Academic Realism never produced another.
Yes, there are other giants. There are members of the Pantheon from every era but Modernism.
John Atkinson Grimshaw, Silver Moonlight, 1886, oil on canvas, private
They just weren't Academic realists.
Now we need to collect the important observations High Renaissance guys and move on. Bringing us back to the beast system tentpole – centralization.
Organic culture is bottom up. Customary ways form, but through a sort of natural selection. If not fetishized into secular transcendence, it's sort of how the free market works. The constant churn of ideas and solutions keeps culture moving.
Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520-1523, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London
Even in the Renaissance, Titian and the Venetians' textural oil paints and velvet surfaces were a very different alternative to Raphael and the Romans.
Organic cultures create options. People still prefer one or the other.
Bottom-up organic culture means that if something sucks, you pick something else. And the idea of an artist who insults his clientele is suicidal. Obviously images always have some kind of slant - artists are people. It different from actively reviling basic beauty and morality.
To force beast hideousness, you need top-down control. Taking away any alternative has splattered the walls of once-lofty institutions with effluent. The result is as expected - the general public is cut off from the entire historical traditions of the arts of the West. Associations are made between "art" and degeneracy and pretension. People don't look deeper because why would they? All the big museums, culture ministries, universities, foundations, etc. say the same thing.
Quick aside
The Band has come to view all the metastases of secular transcendence as variations on the same death drive. Like some sort of existential virus created by sustained turning from logos. The metaphysics are simple enough - straight out of the last post on the opposition between the Good and Sorathic evil.
and lower-case g good and beauty the fallen material echoes of these...
Then opposition to lower-case good, beauty, and truth as moral directions in the material world is by definition evil.
We see this in the gray goo endpoint, but consider the modern globalist left. Every major position or policy they advocate is literally collectively suicidal in come way. As in, if implemented, terminally alters the existing culture or society.
Unilateral disarmament has to be exhibit A. A polity is dead when its own citizenry votes to die.
Presumably the argument would be that the old must die to remake the new. Put aside ideologies. With a voracious enemy at the gates, you have no say in the new. Hence death-drive.
If we had to guess, it comes from a mix of mouse utopia's unearned largess and loss of logos. Without higher Good as a guide, the fallen world inverts human nature into self-destruction. Need to think more on this.
The materialist death-drive in Art! followed the same pattern we see in the Renaissance - just aimed in the opposite metaphysical direction. Look at recent works, abstract out some generalities that support whatever point you want to make, and declare it History. The fake Conclusions! may or may not align with reality - that's up to the morality of the generalizer. That's something central to history - the narrative level around the facts.
Inversion takes time - so when we look back into history, we look for trailways. Pathways that will make inversion possible. Try not to get dazzled by the details and lose sight of the big picture. We got a little lost in the weeds with the Renaissance painters - it was worth it if it doesn't get too frequent. Here's the pathway.
Nardo di Cione, Madonna and Child, with Saints Peter and John the Evangelist, and Man of Sorrows, 1360, tempera on wood, National Gallery of Art, Washington
Filippo Lippi, Madonna and Child, 1455, tempera on panel, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Raphael, Madonna of Foligno, 1511, oil on wood, transferred to canvas, Vatican Museums
The Renaissance cherry-picked certain aesthetic achievements that tell the story of a certain kind of artistic progress. You might prefer Nardo or Lippi - the Gothic Revivalists and Pre-Raphaelites did respectively. And that's the point. It's not that there isn't a progression in effect. It's that progression based on cherry-picked details becomes definitive of "how art works". And once you've created the practical reality that art is a string of cherry-picked plot points...
Modernism cherry-picked the inverse.
Édouard Manet, The Old Musician, 1862, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art
Manet lacked the skill to succeed as an Academy painter so peddled hackwork to "progressives". His de-moralization and crude technique are narrative building blocks. He flushed any heritage for banal "modernity" and his crap techne became "resisting" Academy norms.
Charles Laval, Going to Market, Brittany, 1888, oil on canvas, Indianapolis Museum of Art
Relative nobody with ties to bigger "Post-Impressionist" names shows degeneration along Manet's path.
For a fun exercise, compare this to Guillou's image of Breton piety from up above. Consider the dates, and who got written into the narrative.
Wassily Kandinsky, Cossacks, 1910-1911, oil on canvas, Tate London
And another giant of Modernism. The date here brings us to the Armory Show of 1913.
This is obviously a totally different story from the Renaissance Progress! one. But it's written the same way. A destination is chosen that suits the current agenda and the stepping stones are laid to get there. The morality of the storyteller becomes obvious. But what we are interested in is the centralization of "art" that makes stories even possible.
The Beast loves Cezanne. His made his weird smudge paintings with an obsessive-compulsive monomania - like most Modernist heroes, he exhibits signs of mental ill-health. That's fine in and of itself - who cares if someone wants to obsess over smudges? It's only a problem when the smudge-obsessed is presented in virtually every venue as an indispensable trailblazer of art. And all other alternatives are memory-holed under retard words like "sentimental" and "representative".
It's a lot clearer when you can see what was erased to make atavism "genius"...
Peter Mork Mönsted, Evening View of a Stream with Two Anglers, 1897, oil on canvas, private; Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibemus Quarry, 1897, oil on canvas, Baltimore Museum of Art
In 1897, Danish genius Mönsted was using simplified brushwork to create real presence - like evolved Impressionism, if art stayed organic. Recombinating the optics back into beauty.
Was this intentional? Who knows. Mönsted isn't in the books - no theory or serious bio easily available. The beast needed space for some smudge work. Or "grandiose force" according the site we got it from.
This stuff happens so fast too. The Renaissance posts show a wholly new set of ideas created and imposed between art and people in a few generations. Because it is an organic local development - artists make the splash, the crowd responds, and the next wave builds. And the critics worm their way in from the outer dark.
Consider how centralization works. We often picture totalitarian governance structures, which is part of it. But in the arts, there isn’t a sudden conquest or overthrow like a political régime. Well, there is in a way, but it isn’t sudden and does come from natural roots. Humanistic sycophants and partisans praise progressive advancement by real genius - the natural roots. But they set up the pretense that "art" is something outside the people making it.
Horace Vernet, Pope Julius II Ordering Bramante, Michelangelo, and Raphael to Build the Vatican and Saint Peter's, 1827, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum
It's no coincidence these clowns hover around the Medici and popes in the Renaissance. Or the King of France and the French Academy in the 1600s. And somehow the theory goes from commentary to calling the shots.
This kind of jacking is only possible if the system is centralized. And in the Renaissance, the very idea of art writing and criticism is brand new. Anyone that follows necessarily follows in their footsteps. One of those places where accepting their terms means accepting their terms. Other regions could have told the Italians to pound sand. But they didn't, because their culturati wanted to be "up to date".
Again - it isn't an overnight switch. The workshop system survives into the early 1700s - much longer for artists that don't become names.
Peter Paul Rubens, The Descent from the Cross central panel, 1612–1614, oil on panel, Antwerp Cathedral
Curiously, Rubens didn't study at an academy or follow the blatherings of critics. Neither did his best student Van Dyck. Or any other of the myriad successful artists to come out of his shop.
Renaissance art shows the initial intellectual and cultural transition from Logos to secular transcendence. Popes sponsoring "Christian" humanisms and painting pagan sibyls in the holiest chapel in papal Christendom. Leading armies into direct combat with monarchs. And appropriating the symbolism of secular empire.
Until the Reformation changed perspectives a little...
Michelangelo, Last Judgment, 1536-41, fresco, Sistine Chapel
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