| Title |
A Study on the Meaning of Design and its Evolution in the Renaissance Period |
| Keywords |
Art Theory ; Renaissance ; Design ; Idea ; Representation |
| Abstract |
This paper presents a study on the art theory which was conceived and practiced during the Renaissance between the 15th and the 16th century. Here we mean the art theory by the fundamental disciplines shared by the Renaissance artists for the object perception and the work production. The art theory in this period represented two different concepts, i.e., 1) a speculation process and 2) a realization methodology. This paper intends to discover how these two concepts were related to each other and how they became to be separated. The most important part of this study is to elaborate the meaning of the concepts exhibited in the artistic treatises published during the Renaissance period. The summary of the paper is as follows: The artists in the early Renaissance valued all aspects of physical Nature as well as the classical antiquities which they used as models to study and apply in their works. In the early 16th century, the compromised coexistence between the subjective and objective concept from the early Renaissance became complicated. In the beginning of this period, the term `design' meant a drawing project for an architect and a sketch for a painter. The term 'ideal' described by Alberti contained a subjective concept as a result of the speculation process. With the idealistic art theory of the 16th century, the meaning of 'design' evolved into two different categories of `concept' and `presentation'. |