LITMIR.BIZ

      The Parthenon (fifth century BCE)

      In the first century BCE, the Roman poet Horace (65–8 BCE) wrote Ars Poetica, an extremely influential epistolary poem in which he advises young poets on the art of drama and versification. Ars Poetica provides a crisp outline of maxims that poets should consider as they compose their versified dramas. Among these are the need for unity and simplicity, calculation in the face of emotional, intellectual, and/or stylistic extremes, clear distinctions between poetic/dramatic genres, a well-honed sense of decorum with regard to language and character, and a strict adherence to a five-act structure.

      Horace also believed that the purpose of poetry (read Art) is “to delight and instruct.” Notice that Horace includes a didactic component (instruct) alongside the more obvious aim of entertaining (delight) an audience or reader. Without either, the implication being, the work is not worthy to be deemed Art.

      Horace also advised that the dramatic narrative should begin “in medias res,” Latin for “in the middle of things,” meaning that the action should start when the characters are already in, or close to, crisis mode, rather than “ab ovum,” Latin for “from the egg,” or the very beginning, meaning the moment of a protagonist’s conception. Horace’s advice on this point would be echoed about two thousand years later by the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), who wrote that “a drama is not designed to tell the entire story of a man’s life; but, rather, to place him in a situation in which his entire being becomes clear by the way he unties the knots.”

Classical sensibilities regarding the nature and value of Art began to erode with the creeping advent of a proselytizing Christianity. In approximately 200 CE, the Christian theologian Tertullian (ca. 155–240 CE) composed a series of epistles entitled On the Spectacles, which is a scathing indictment of the moral depravity of the theatrical presentations that were both common and extremely popular in Ancient Rome. Tertullian argued that the sensual pleasures enjoyed by people attending these theatrical events (which included everything from mock naval battles in the Coliseum to bloody bearbaiting to the most brutal of gladiatorial combats) were an affront to God and a vulgar misuse of God’s gifts to man. By drawing connections between contemporaneous forms of public entertainment and myriad pagan rituals, Tertullian emphasizes the moral, ethical, and spiritual implications intrinsic to the creation, presentation, and reception of the dramatic arts.³

      Following the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire in approximately 475 CE, the burgeoning Byzantine Empire codified the central tenets of Christian doctrine, and the Church began to emerge as the primary spiritual, civic, social, and governmental force in a Europe now devoid of the concentrated and unchallengeable authority of Imperial Rome. The Medieval World, therefore, would be informed and governed by Christianity in general, and the hierarchical structures of both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches in particular. While a secular tradition remained intact, the dominant currents of artistic output were decidedly religious in nature, and their aesthetic sensibilities were dictated and enforced by the Ecclesiastical authorities. It was an aesthetic that was very strict in determining the manner in which religious content would be conceived and executed by artists, and one that anticipated the responses of a largely illiterate lay community that received its theological indoctrination largely through ritual and visual imagery. Religious iconography, for example, especially with regard to depictions of Jesus, embraced an abstract quality that emphasized Christ’s divinity rather than his humanity.