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Visual Art — Babel Nexus Index

Literature / Art, Aesthetics & Architecture

A Level II literature chamber of the Babel Nexus Index · 24 primary public-domain works.

What Visual Art argues

  • This is the hexagonal gallery of Visual Art — the literature of seeing: the treatises, lives, criticism, and letters through which painting, sculpture, and architecture came to understand themselves. It is the shelf where art learns to speak in words, from the workshop manual to the philosophy of beauty.
  • It runs from Vitruvius, whose ten books are the only architectural treatise to survive from antiquity, and the medieval handbook of Cennino Cennini, through the Renaissance — Vasari, who invented art history by writing the lives of the painters, and Leonardo, who argued that painting is a science of nature. The Enlightenment adds the philosophy of the beautiful and the sublime (Burke, Lessing) and the birth of art criticism at the Paris Salon (Diderot, later Zola).
  • The nineteenth century brings the great critics and colour theorists — Goethe and Chevreul on colour, Ruskin’s impassioned defence of Turner and the Gothic, Pater’s aestheticism, Blanc’s grammar of the arts — and closes with the modern voices of Berenson, Clive Bell, Louis Sullivan, and the letters of Van Gogh. Each card carries an authentic public-domain likeness of its author where one survives, or a scan of a public-domain edition where none does; all the works are in the public domain.

Primary works in Visual Art (24)

Chambers connected to Visual Art

  • Poetry — Two of this floor’s central works — Lessing’s Laocoön and Pater’s Studies in Art and Poetry — set painting beside poetry, asking what the sister arts can and cannot do. The visual and the verbal have argued across this threshold since antiquity.
  • Letters and Essays — Much of the criticism of art took the form of the letter and the essay — Diderot’s Salons, Ruskin’s lectures, and above all the letters of Van Gogh, one of the great records of an artist’s mind.
  • Writing Fiction and Poetry — Like the craft of writing, the making of pictures and buildings generated its own literature of method — Cennini’s handbook, Leonardo’s treatise, Ruskin’s Elements of Drawing — the meta-literature of how art is made.