Art, Culture and Nature

From Art History to World Art Studies

by John Onians

Book cover: Art, Culture and Nature

Extent: 586 pages

Publisher: Pindar Press

Subjects: Art & Art History

Language: English

(Paperback) (Published)

(December 2006)

ISBN: 9781904597513

Price: $38.00

In stock

(Hardback) (Published)

(June 2006)

ISBN: 9781899828951

Price: $120.00

In stock

Collected essays, editorials, and conference papers by John Onians, who has worked to expand and deepen the field of art history for 30 years. He explores art as an aspect of culture, the link between art and human neurobiology, and his efforts to renew art history and encourage similar developments in the field.


For thirty years John Onians has been trying to expand and deepen the discipline of art history. His books, Art and Thought in the Hellenistic Age (1979), Bearers of Meaning. The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (1988) and Classical Art and the Cultures of Greece and Rome (1999), sought to extend the understanding of art as an aspect of culture, while his current project, A Natural History of Art, is designed to show how that understanding can be further enhanced by the recognition that art, like all of culture, is based in human neurobiology, and so in nature. He has also been active as a founding editor of the journal Art History in 1978, in setting up the World Art Research Programme at the University of East Anglia in 1994 and becoming the first Director of Research and Academic Programs at the Clark Art Institute in 1997. The present volume gathers together a selection of the editorials, articles, conference papers and essays, though which he has furthered his own attempts to renew art history and participated in those of others. They reflect the influence of many personal contacts built up during three decades of teaching and lecturing in many countries in Europe, America, Asia and Australia.

Theory. Art history, Kunstgeschichte and historia Art and ritual. The biological connection Architecture, metaphor and the mind I wonder... A short history of amazement World Art Studies and the need for a new natural history of art
Architecture and painting: the biological connection Inside the brain: looking for the roots of art history Gombrich and the biological explanation of art Prehistory. The origins of art The biological and geographical bases of cultural borders: the case of the earliest Palaeolithic art Ancient world. From the double crown to the double pediment Tabernacle and Temple and the Cosmos of the Jews War, mathematics and art in Classical Greece Idea and product: potter and philosopher in Classical Athens The Greek temple and the Greek brain Quintilian and the idea of Roman art Abstraction and imagination in Late Antiquity Renaissance. Alberti and Filarete Brunelleschi: humanist or nationalist Leon Battista Alberti: the problem of personal and urban identity How to listen to Renaissance art The biological basis of Renaissance aesthetics Alberti and the neuropsychology of style China. Chinese painting in the Twentieth Century and in the context of World Art Studies The Nature of art in Lin Fengmian's China: a neuropsychological perspective Additional Notes Index

  • By (author) J Onians