The Sources and Meaning of the Term Decency in the Writings of Prince Dmitry Golitsyn on Fine Arts

Abstract

The author focuses on one of the most important terms of normative aesthetics and art, decency, which occupies a prominent place in the writings of Prince Dmitry Golitsyn (1734–1803), devoted to the issues of architecture and fine arts. A detailed study of the origins of decency and the meaning of this concept leads to the identification of three stages in its development, consistently considered with the involvement of both source texts and the works of modern scholars. The first stage was the flourishing of classical ancient Greek art, which corresponds to the concept of τὸ πρέπον, formed in the consciousness and rhetorical culture of Athens. In relation to the fine arts, its importance cannot be overestimated, since decency was not conceived without an adequate and eye-catching external expression of typical images, including their social status and ethical content. Under its influence, a system of canons of European art was born in ancient Greece. The second stage is associated with the Renaissance, when the idea of convenevolezza arises. It was focused on the Classical Antiquity and the appropriate iconographic tradition and therefore had a pronounced retrospective character. Finally, the classicism of the Enlightenment era, or neoclassicism, the time of Golitsyn’s life and work, picks up the baton of the norm in art and the deviations from it made by nature itself. Golitsyn’s interpretation of decency in his treatises and its correct understanding by art historians are important, since these works formed the basis of the Russian doctrine of normative, primarily academic art. Decency in the understanding of the ancient Greeks, Italians of the Renaissance and enlighteners of the 18th century did not completely dissolve in the works of the great and ordinary masters of those distant times. It is invariably revived when it comes to the visualization of traditions, proprieties and various norms within artistic culture, about the artist’s service to the model, the canon.