[1] Hence called _cognizor_; the other party, the purchaser, is the
_cognizee_.
FINE ARTS, the name given to a whole group of human activities, which
have for their result what is collectively known as Fine Art. The arts
which constitute the group are the five greater arts of architecture,
sculpture, painting, music and poetry, with a number of minor or
subsidiary arts, of which dancing and the drama are among the most
ancient and universal. In antiquity the fine arts were not explicitly
named, nor even distinctly recognized, as a separate class. In other
modern languages besides English they are called by the equivalent name
of the beautiful arts (_belle arti_, _beaux arts_, _schone Kunste_). The
fine or beautiful arts then, it is usually said, are those among the
arts of man which minister, not primarily to his material necessities or
conveniences, but to his love of beauty; and if any art fulfils both
these purposes at once, still as fulfilling the latter only is it called
a fine art. Thus architecture, in so far as it provides shelter and
accommodation, is one of the useful or mechanical arts, and one of the
fine arts only in so far as its structures impress or give pleasure by
the aspect of strength, fitness, harmony and proportion of parts, by
disposition and contrast of light and shade, by colour and enrichment,
by variety and relation of contours, surfaces and intervals. But this,
the commonly accepted account of the matter, does not really cover the
ground. The idea conveyed by the words "love of beauty," even stretched
to its widest, can hardly be made to include the love of caricature and
the grotesque; and these are admittedly modes of fine art. Even the
terrible, the painful, the squalid, the degraded, in a word every
variety of the significant, can be so handled and interpreted as to be
brought within the province of fine art. A juster and more inclusive,
although clumsier, account of the matter might put it that the fine arts
are those among the arts of man which spring from his impulse to do or
make certain things in certain ways for the sake, first, of a special
kind of pleasure, independent of direct utility, which it gives him so
to do or make them, and next for the sake of the kindred pleasure which
he derives from witnessing or contemplating them when they are so done
or made by others.
The nature of this impulse, and the several grounds of these pleasures,
are subjects which have given rise to a formidable body of speculation
and discussion, the chief phases of which will be found summarized under
the heading AESTHETICS. In the present article we have only to attend to
the concrete processes and results of the artistic activities of man; in
other words, we shall submit (1) a definition of fine art in general,
(2) a definition and classification of the principal fine arts
severally, (3) some observations on their historical development.