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Tam Nguyen Ngan Luu
Dr. Christopher Carney
HUMA 1301, Tues. 11-12:30PM
March 6, 2017
Connecting Humanities Response 1
Individualism is a kind of philosophy that highly estimates the personal achievements of
each individual. In the field of art, individualism plays an important role because it shapes the
styles of the artists. In company with the development of art, individualism gradually evolves
throughout the history and affects the art. This essay will examine how the development of
individualism affected the evolution in art in Pre-modern world and Modern world- two eras in
which the individualism appeared and began to be popular.
In the Prehistoric world, individualism did not exist. Community is more important than
each individual and each member of the society was required to comply with the community.
This rule is the result of the moral values in this time. In the video “What Modernism Is”,
Stephen Hicks discusses the ethics of people in the Prehistoric world. He believes that people are
bound by duties; for example, wives had to obey their husbands, families had the responsibility
to be submissive to the king. Moreover, everybody was required to be willing to renounce things
that prevented them to fulfill their duties. This kind of ethics profoundly affected the style of art
in this time; most of the works of art depicted gods or social activities.”Standard of Ur” on the
royal tomb was one of the works of art in that style; the decoration on the tomb represented the
military victory and a cult ritual. They are social activities in which individual was not
emphasized on and the authors of this panel represented the events without showing their
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feelings or perspectives toward the events. This is the result of the society where people were not
aware of the demand of expressing their emotion in their works of art.
From the Prehistoric world to the Ancient era, individualism still did not exist. Until the
late Pre-modern world, individualism started to appear in works of art. People in this era started
to be less dependent in the gods; instead, they based more on their sense and their thoughts to
make any decisions. It is the foundation for the less religious reliance in the Modern world
mentioned in the video “The Enlightenment Vision” of Stephen Hicks. “Sacrifice of Isaac” by
Filippo Brunelleschi is one of the works of art at that time. It was a competition relief
commissioned for the doors of the Baptistery. The competition was held in Florence in 1401
aiming to “choose a designer for a pair of bronze doors for the north entrance to the city’s
baptistery.” (Sayre 210) In his panel, Brunelleschi placed Isaac- the main character in “the center
