შუასაუკუნეებისა და რენესანსის ესთეტიკურ კატეგორიათა ურთიერთმიმართებისათვის

აბსტრაქტი

სტატიიდან აღებული ავტორის ინგლისურენოვანი რეზიუმე:

Key words: concept of beauty; Medieval aesthetics; Renaissance aesthetics; Dante; Rustaveli.

Since the period of Antiquity the concept of beauty has been considered one of the main factors of aesthetic perception of objective reality. The idea of beauty depends on man’s social position, his way of life and style, peculiarities of the national culture; it is also determined by the level of individual culture and peculiarities of a person’s aesthetic taste. Accordingly, each epoch elaborates aesthetic paradigms unique only to it, which along with political, socio-economical and moral and ethical factors, is undoubtedly a determinant of specific character of historical epochs and cultures. The purpose of this paper is to show how the concept of beauty was understood in the Medieval and Renaissance epochs, what relationship existed between these two cultural paradigms in relation to the aesthetic categories under study from the viewpoint of dependence.

In the early Medieval art and literature the outer beauty was perceived not with its unique meaning but as a radiance of spiritual perfection. This principle is changed in the late medieval period, particularly, in secular literature where along with the personality traits of a protagonist, his portrait strokes come into the fore. This means that artistic image of a personage is created not according to the general model (saint/sinner; positive personage/negative personage) established in hagiography but by maximal shaping of individual traits of a personage and in such way that the appearance of the person would mirror his inner (spiritual) image.

Hence, an extraordinary beauty of these personages, which in the majority of cases is rendered by a metaphor for the sun, signifies their distinctness, dignity, high moral. The paper underlines that it is this tendency that can be considered as the basis of anthropocentricity which is one of the main characteristics of the Renaissance - the epoch that followed on the Middle Ages. It is anthropocentricity that the cult of beauty characteristic to the Renaissance epoch is associated with, moreover that not only special attitude towards beauty characterizes the Renaissance aesthetics but also longing for a beautiful life. A kind of harmony is being created – man satisfies a thirst for beauty in the works of art, hence, it can be said that art is in the service of life, and life is in the service of art.

However, in specialist literature it is emphasized that the desire to present life in this world as beautiful and perfect, the elaboration of a totally new, attractive worldly ideal started much earlier than the Italian quattrocento. In this case it concerns the late Middle Ages which left an immense heritage to the subsequent epoch. Hence, when they talk about the origin of such progressive aspirations as humanism and realism as opposed to “frozen at one point” medieval thinking, they fail to take into account one circumstance – humanistic and realistic tendencies are marked in literary monuments created in far earlier times than the Renaissance epoch.

The evidence of this can be at least particular concern of such great poets as Dante and Rustaveli with the relationship between this world and the upper world, specific palette of artistic images of characters, profound psychologism and individualism of the main characters which make them real people and not schemes, etc. As a conclusion we can say that: 1. The Renaissance aesthetics, on the one hand, is a resurrection of the antique aesthetic principle (as an example it is sufficient to mention the transition of the principle «mens sana in corpore sano» (“a sound mind in a sound body”) characteristic to the antique art), though at the same time it is a “successor” of the preceding epoch of medieval thought, according to which general and individual, ideal and material, external and internal merge with each other into one and indivisible artistic image that in its turn is a precursor of individualism formed in the epoch of the High Renaissance.

2. Accordingly, an aesthetic doctrine formed in the Divine Comedy or Vepkhistqaosani, which displays some principles and trends characteristic to the renaissance epoch, has not yet been such type of thinking which in the history of literature is called quattrocento. All peculiarities of the philosophy and aesthetics of the so-called transition period, individualism, make Dante a creator of the proto-renaissance period and Rustaveli a creator on the boundary between the medieval and renaissance periods.

გამოქვეყნებულია ჟურნალში „სჯანი“, ტ. 14 (2013), გვ. 77–90. ნაშრომის გახსნა