Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2024 June 27

= June 27 =

East Asian art
Why did the art of east Asia never have a "renaissance" and moved to a high degree of realism like European art did? I would think isolationism and a conformist culture would be an explanation, but during the Edo period of Japan, they did have some foreign influences still, like fabric patterns were adopted by the Japanese that were Indian and European in origin and brought to the country by the Dutch. It seems odd the influence would stop short of painting and drawing though. -- THORNFIELD HALL (Talk) 04:32, 27 June 2024 (UTC)


 * You may be interested in our article on Japonisme. -- asilvering (talk) 05:53, 27 June 2024 (UTC)


 * See also the Hockney-Falco thesis, which holds that the realism in Western Rennaissance art was due to the development of optical instruments. The jury has yet to reach a verdict on that one. Alansplodge (talk) 11:28, 27 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Anyway, one particular focus of Chinese painting was broad panoramic landscapes, often much wider than they were high, and it's doubtful whether an imposed mathematical perspective of viewing the whole scene from strictly one single geometric point would have been artistically beneficial in that case. As William H. McNeill said, "Chinese painters had learned also to indicate space as a unified and unifying whole, but not by means of linear perspective... Chinese landscapes were projected instead from a shifting aerial point of vision" -- AnonMoos (talk) 12:58, 27 June 2024 (UTC)


 * P.S. I can't remember the artist or title, but there's a probably European Renaissance painting of human figures against a background of lines of classical pillars (colonnades) receding into the distance, and while use of perspective did add a certain kind of realism to the scene, it also seemed to flashily call attention to itself, so that viewers were more preoccupied with the geometry than with what the painting was actually supposed to be about (or at least I was). Perspective is a powerful technique in the service of art, but it doesn't follow that an artwork with perspective is automatically better than a comparable one without... AnonMoos (talk) 13:09, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * You may refer to Raphael's School of Athens.  Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 15:00, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks, but that's not flashy enough. The one I had in mind had a line of Parthenon-like columns starting in the left foreground and receding toward the center distance, and another line starting in the right foreground and also receding toward the center distance. AnonMoos (talk) 18:51, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Here are some paintings with flashy use of perspective (though not the one I remembered earlier): File:Melozzo da Forlì - Foundation of the Library - WGA14779.jpg, File:Fra Carnevale - The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple (?) - WGA04253.jpg, File:Thomas Cole - The Architect's Dream - WGA05141.jpg... -- AnonMoos (talk) 18:53, 9 July 2024 (UTC)


 * Keep in mind that it was a renaissance of something (perceived) to have happened before. Renaissance artists took things further, but they were deliberately grounding themselves in what have become known as "the classics" (i.e. ancient Greece and Rome). The Greeks did not use linear perspective in the way that Brunelleschi and others did, but they did know enough about it to use it for effect and they were generally proponents of the concept of "balance". East Asian art has its own concepts of balance and its own classics that it has to push against and be measured against. Matt Deres (talk) 15:22, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Possibly, while Japanese artists would have been technically able to realize "a high degree of realism", this was not considered artistically valuable and therefore not worth aiming at. Consider that the high degree of realism of the wax figures at Madame Tussauds is also not artistically appreciated; the art world prefers unrealistically white marble or dark bronze. --Lambiam 16:20, 27 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Chinese painters could do realism, and had their own perspective system that suited long scrolls - Along the River During the Qingming Festival is a famous, much-copied version. They were also very interested in reviving "classic" styles, but this most often meant the older versions of the scholar-artist or "literati" tradition, supposedly practiced by amateur scholars, where realism was mostly associated with "court painting" by professional but not very highly-educated artists (often hereditary). This also affected Japanese painting. Johnbod (talk) 22:21, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

National Rally–The Republicans alliance crisis
There is something I'm missing in regards to National Rally–The Republicans alliance crisis. What I do understand: Éric Ciotti, the president of The Republicans (LR), attempted to establish an electoral alliance with National Rally for the 2024 French legislative election. Most of the leadership of LR objected to this and voted to remove Ciotti from the presidency of the party and also from membership in the party. Ciotti sued and got a court ruling that he was still the president of LR.

However, the article does not clearly explain why the court found in favor of Ciotti, probably due to translation problems. It says: "The two successive exclusions of Ciotti, by the political bureau on 12 June then by the same body and the national council on 14 June, are considered to have no legal value by the main party concerned. Both were subsequently challenged in court in summary proceedings and suspended by the courts, which ruled on the fact that the lower court must be seized “within eight days” by “the most diligent party”, failing which “the suspension measure ordered will lapse”." What does this mean with the lower court being "seized" by "the most diligent party"? Is this supposed to mean that in eight days (after when?), LR would be allowed to remove Ciotti again? -- Metropolitan90 (talk) 05:27, 27 June 2024 (UTC)


 * The court decision is only a temporary one which allows Ciotti to continue as president of Les Républicains until the underlying issues are decided upon. The issue is whether the party members who voted to exclude him did so in conformity with party rules (normally it would be the party president who calls for an extraordinary bureau meeting such as the one that voted to exclude Ciotti, but obviously, that is not what happened). The anti-Ciotti faction's argument is that an alternative way of calling such a meeting is if a quarter of the members of the national executive request it, which is how they proceeded before voting Ciotti's exclusion. Ciotti may have won the initial judicial battle, but he is clearly in a minority position within his party, and most members have refused to follow him in an alliance with the Rassemblement National. Xuxl (talk) 15:28, 27 June 2024 (UTC)