ISSN 2411-0795
ISSN 2411-0795
Keywords: typology of art, canon, semiotics of art, sign referent, referent image, art history, artistic image, Image of the World, category, artistic culture, self-identification, structure
Koshaev V.B. Canonical Conventions in Art History. // Theory and History of Art. 2023. N 1/2, p.39–71
Canonical conventions are typological spiritual syntagmas of different epochs and presented in the form of "canon / canons", depending on the understanding / reading of the Image of the World by a person, in connections and relations with which he and humanity are, and part of which he and society are. In a generic sense, the Canon in art is characterized by the image of a referent or an object of worship. The canon is established with all the obviousness of the banner. This happens at the turn of great epochs and materializes in a special way in the trinity of factors of the "matrix of being": the social organization of society, the technological level of production, the idea of the spiritual, ideological content of life.
The canon-"morph" in the art of the Paleolithic is expressed mainly in the worship of objects of the biocenosis. In the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Metal Ages, "morph" replaces the canon "morpheme" in the form of a cultural archetype of the Image of the Universe, in which there is a person and an entity that created the world, with which a person is connected with the help of a sacrifice. Such an Image of the World has come down to us in the structure of language, myth, fairy tale. It is deployed vertically and horizontally in the levels of aboveground and underground space and is presented in various mythopoetic models of the created world. This structure persists into the Neolithic and Metal Ages, but is refined in the details of cultural lore. Ancient civilizations preserve the figurative mytho-morphological context of the Universe as a system, but within them a canon-"metamorpheme" is born, in particular, the Abrahamic monotheistic idea of the Image of the World, and in a number of regions and cultures its monastic model, recognizing the existence of only one substance or one type of substances.
In monotheism and monism, the idea of a plurality of mythological worlds is abolished, and the image of the referent changes accordingly - in one case it becomes the Personality of the Creator, and in the other, it becomes an extrapersonal, extra-spatial and timeless "substance", defined in Buddhism by the category "nirvana". The former canonical structures do not disappear, but they are subordinated to the new laws of the objective and subject content of the Image of the World. Since the New Age, a special modality of the medieval canon has arisen — the "anthropomorpheme" as the scientific center of the Picture of the World — a predicate in which a person is recognized as its intellectual center. This figurative line in the 20th century forms the basis of another predicative — the "subject"-canon, a marker of a daring attempt at the subconscious construction of the Image of the World, that is, in the paradigmatic model of its presentation. Today, all canonical forms are present in world culture.