Artistic idealism

(Neoclassical aesthetics is a paradigmatic example of idealistic art: The Oath of the Horatii, by Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) .)

The idealism in art is an artistic approach that seeks faithful representation of reality (mimesis), to equal the artistic realism; but contrary to artistic realism, it does so through a purified fidelity of the vulgar through the sensibility of the artist. The representation of this reality is abstracted to eliminate any lack of refinement and show only the beautiful. For this, the scene is often captured by choosing different elements, taking only the best of each one and bringing them all together in the same set. The idealist art is an art linked to academic laws and, in Western art , to the foundations established in Greco-Latin antiquity. The idealistic aesthetic works aim to achieve aesthetic values such as elegance, measure, balance and closed composition, trying to avoid vulgarity, excesses, violent contrasts and all kinds of imbalances.

Idealism, in the field of art theory and aesthetics, affirms the imagination and tries to realize mental conceptions of beauty and patterns or canons of beauty, in opposition to the aesthetic positions of naturalism and realism.

The subjection of art to rules, starting from the academicism of the 18th and 19th centuries (Classicism and Neoclassicism), fixed aesthetic values, which brought as negative effects the stagnation and repetition of models by mimesis, either imitating nature or examples considered “classical”, especially Greco-Roman art. As a reverse reaction, the search for freedom in art took place in the 19th century.

Idealistic artistic periods and styles