The Body as a Source of Beauty: On the Problem of Perception of a Work of Art

Abstract

The study is devoted to the topic of the human body beauty, which is relevant at all times. Human beauty is an eternal and favorite topic – art, aesthetics, and psychology. It is presented in sciences as a limitless field, accommodating the entire rich history of thinking about beauty as a complex phenomenon combining physics and metaphysics, logical and irrational, conscious and subconscious, including the unconscious. Today, turning to the topic of physicality is a natural reaction to the events taking place, and the changes caused by them in our attitude to the body. Our body loses the necessary connection with the living natural environment, which has always been healing for it. The author presents an individual experience of the works of art based on the recipient’s internal resources: cognitive, perceptual, intellectual. The study purpose was to apply this experience in existential psychotherapy. The study object was fine art, represented by the works of artists of different eras and trends. The study subject was the image of the human body in the artists’ works, presented explicitly or indirectly. To achieve the purpose and solve the tasks, formal-logical, hermeneutical, axiological, phenomenological, semiotic, religious-philosophical, and psychological methods were used. The author used the works of thinkers of different eras, which consider the topic of corporeality: representatives of religious philosophy and the Russian art studies school. As a result of the study, the author concludes that fine art is a full-fledged source of aesthetic knowledge, and can offer us in artistic, often symbolic forms the most important information about human nature. This information is contained in the picture as a unity of the conscious, subconscious and unconscious.