>>9244166Most art from the Middle Ages favoured abstraction over realism, and used the ugly and the uncanny to emphasise the existence of sin and suffering and death. In fact the heavy symbolism of medieval painting was a significant influence on modernism, which constituted a breakaway from the Renaissance ideals which had devalued medieval artistic ideas in exchange for classicism. Was medieval art degenerate? The whole Gothic aesthetic would probably be derided by /pol/ as "Jewish" if it emerged today. I have nothing against realism or idealised depictions of nature or the human body, and in fact many beautiful works of art exhibit these traits, but /pol/ has an incredibly narrow range of aesthetic appreciation -- essentially limiting itself to inoffensive examples of 19th century formalism made for bourgeois housewives... all for the sake of a false and myopic idea of what constitutes tradition.
