Humanities

The humanities are those academic disciplines which study the human condition using methods that are largely analytic, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural and social sciences. Conventionally the humanities include ancient and modern languages and literature, history, philosophy, religion, visual and performing arts (including music). Additional subjects sometimes included in the humanities are anthropology, area studies, communications and cultural studies, although these are often regarded as social sciences.

Arts

    Main articles: Visual arts and Performing arts

The arts are usually considered as part of the humanities. These include visual arts such as painting and sculpture, as well as performing arts such as theatre and dance, and literature. Other humanities such as language are sometimes considered to be part of the arts, for example as the language arts.

Visual arts

History



The great traditions in art have a foundation in the art of one of the ancient civilizations:

    * Ancient Egypt,
    * Greece and Rome,
    * China,
    * India,
    * Mesopotamia,
    * Mesoamerica.

Ancient Greek art saw a veneration of the human physical form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty and anatomically correct proportions. Ancient Roman art depicted gods as idealized humans, shown with characteristic distinguishing features (i.e. Zeus' thunderbolt).

In Byzantine and Gothic art of the Middle Ages, the dominance of the church insisted on the expression of biblical and not material truths.

The Renaissance saw the return to valuation of the material world, and this shift is reflected in art forms, which show the corporeality of the human body, and the three-dimensional reality of landscape.

Eastern art has generally worked in a style akin to Western medieval art, namely a concentration on surface patterning and local colour (meaning the plain colour of an object, such as basic red for a red robe, rather than the modulations of that colour brought about by light, shade and reflection). A characteristic of this style is that the local colour is often defined by an outline (a contemporary equivalent is the cartoon). This is evident in, for example, the art of India, Tibet and Japan.


Religious Islamic art forbids iconography, and expresses religious ideas through geometry instead.

The physical and rational certainties depicted by the 19th-century Enlightenment were shattered not only by new discoveries of relativity by Einstein [1] and of unseen psychology by Freud, [2] but also by unprecedented technological development.

Increasing global interaction during this time saw an equivalent influence of other cultures into Western art.

Media types

Drawing is a means of making an image, using any of a wide variety of tools and techniques. It generally involves making marks on a surface by applying pressure from a tool, or moving a tool across a surface. Common tools are graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoals, pastels, and markers. Digital tools which simulate the effects of these are also used. The main techniques used in drawing are: line drawing, hatching, crosshatching, random hatching, scribbling, stippling, and blending. An artist who excels in drawing is referred to as a draftsman or draughtsman.