The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler

Author:Arthur Koestler [Koestler, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: History, Non-Fiction, Philosophy, Psychology
ISBN: 9780091282707
Publisher: Hutchinson
Published: 1963-12-31T13:00:00+00:00

Motion and Rest

That pattern is in fact our old friend, unity-in-diversity; or rather unity implied in diversity, for here the 'law of infolding' asserts itself with a vengeance. If a work of art strikes one as hopelessly dated, it is not because its particular idiom dates from a remote period, but because it is spelt out in a too obvious, explicit manner. The Laocoon group is more dated than the archaic Appollo of Tenea in spite of the vastly superior representational skill of the Hellenistic period -- which the sculptor displays with such self-defeating ostentation. Pollaiulo's delight in the recently discovered laws of perspective, and the resulting over-emphasis on geometrical structure has a somewhat chilling effect; the same could be said of Ucello's 'The Rout of San Romano'. Again (as Eric Newton has pointed out), the triangular scaffolding in Raphael's treatment of the Madonna and Child theme is a shade too obvious. To discover the principle of unity hidden in variety must be left to the beholder's imagination. Leonardo has given a 'formula' how to draw trees: if you draw a circle round the crown of a tree, the sections of all the twigs must add up to the thickness of the stem; the bigger the radius of the circle, the more twigs it will cut, but because the sections get thinner, the result is the same. Though the law is not exact, it holds the secret which lends unity to the tree drawn in its full foliage, and implied symmetry to its irregularly shaped branches and twigs.

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