HENRIETTE ART

Beauty in nature has long been a common theme in life and in art, and books emphasizing beauty in nature fill large sections of libraries and bookstores. That nature has been depicted and celebrated by so much art and poetry shows the strength with which many people associate nature and beauty. Beyond certain basic characteristics that many philosophers agree about to explain what is seen as beautiful, the opinions are virtually endless

Looked at through the lens of the visual arts, nature and wildness have been important subjects in various epochs of world history. An early tradition of landscape art began in China during the Tang Dynasty (618-907). The tradition of representing nature as it is became one of the aims of Chinese painting and was a significant influence in Asian art. Artists learned to depict mountains and rivers "from the perspective of nature as a whole and on the basis of their understanding of the laws of nature ... as if seen through the eyes of a bird." In the 13th century, the Song Dynasty artist Shi Erji listed "scenes lacking any places made inaccessible by nature," as one of the 12 things to avoid in painting.

In the Western world in the 1800s, the works of the British artists John Constable and JMW Turner turned their attention to capturing the beauty of the natural world in their paintings. Before that, paintings had been primarily of religious scenes or of human beings. Increasingly the valuing of nature became an aspect of Western culture.

 Also in the realm of ideas about beauty in nature is that the perfect is implied through symmetry, equal division, and other perfect mathematical forms and notions.

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Old Bridge