Surâsul Giocondei

Abstract

The present article is an extension of its author’s attempt to understand the paradigm shift, produced in the context of the beginning of the modern era, which led to the emergence of art. To understand the “birth” of art, it is necessary to understand that images and artifacts created in pre-modern eras are mistakenly assumed by art history to be art, having for those who created them a completely different function and meaning than the aesthetic one. Considering the conclusions reached more recently by art history and anthropology, attention is drawn to the fact that these images and artifacts had a fundamental sacral-religious purpose and that only with the entry into the modern era does a new category of images and artifacts appear, whose purpose will be a strictly aesthetic one. Leonardo’s Gioconda is a very good example of this new category of objects created by an artist, according to certain rules, with the purpose of offering the viewer an aesthetic experience, an experience that is radically new and different from the previous sacral-religious experiences offered in the pre-modern eras

Keywords

• art
• the “birth” of art
• pre-modernity
• modernity
• art history
• anthropology.