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Lyle Rexer's avatar

It needs to be said and said again: not truth but meaning (and, meaning for us as well!). If we go back to Lascaux, it seems pretty clear that human beings have been able to render whatever it was they found meaningful in ways that conveyed that significance. It was never a matter of capability or technique. Similarly, you could ask how Cycladic sculpture could have been done "better." Since the Renaissance, art and history (in the West) have been seen as a ceaseless overcoming, where the past stays that way and the future shines brightly ahead. So everything that has come "before" is necessarily regarded as primitive or prologue. When I was young, Duccio and his Sienese contemporaries were routinely referred as Sienese "primitives." Nobody mentioned the fact that when the Maesta was transported from the workshop to the church, a huge crowd gathered to watch it make the trip, like a Macy's parade. Did they think the work was kind of, you know, limited? Artists themselves, however, don't necessarily subscribe to that view. They tend to take whatever they can from the past with gratitude -- and often with envy.

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George's avatar

PS: This superb essay illustrates your approach to meanings in the Visual Arts poignantly through the analysis of the City States portrayed in multiple perspectives of Duccio painting, as though the roving eye of God sees all. This emphasises the comparison with the uniform single individual POV in renaissance perspective that fixes the picture. The comparison points out how such different meanings are carried to the viewer, and enforces your approach that neither is Truer or Better.

Even more so, because it is a fresh comparison that illustrates your significant contribution to thinking about Visual Art.

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