Supervisor: Mgr. Vojtěch Märc, Ph.D.

Plato is often remembered as hostile toward visual art, perhaps even as “the greatest enemy of art that Europe has ever produced” (Nietzsche). Where did this image come from? Is there a specifically Platonic reason behind it, or is it merely the general tendency of philosophers to undermine and restrict artists (Detienne, Danto)?

The dissertation proceeds in two stages. First, it analyzes Plato’s “offer” to artists within his political project in The Republic: to participate in the education of citizens through the depiction of exemplary characters. It also considers why such a role may have been difficult for contemporary painters to accept.

The second part focuses on Plato’s own powerful art of image-making. The images in the dialogues (such as the Allegory of the Cave) can be understood as “didactic”, mathematical (mathēma in Greek is „teaching“) in contrast to ordinary images that are “imitative”, mimetic. I argue that Plato regarded his own images as intermediary stage of art between mimetic creation and the teachings of philosophers and scientists.

The project also reflects on the contemporary context of artistic research and education in the arts, where the relation between art and philosophy continues to be renegotiated, perhaps merely as a variation of the “old quarrel”. One question is whether images themselves can think (having an intelligible framework), or whether they merely serve as tools for thought.

Plato’s imagery tended toward parables and models of the world as a cosmos, the totality of all that is perceptible. I focus on several such images, especially the Spindle of Necessity in the Republic and the cosmological myth of the Timaeus, where the world is seen as a gigantic work of art. The aim is to examine role of these images in cosmology—whether propaedeutic, methodological, or merely cosmetic—as well as their place within Plato’s conception of art and their inspirational value for visual artists of the period. All these concerns are encompassed and brought together by the cosmographic method in the broad sense.

In a narrower sense, cosmography refers to the actual practice of creation of second-level graphic images in the Platonic sense, or their reconstruction based on literary examples. I develop such images through scroll-based formats, drawing on the ancient practice of graphikē—writing, drawing, painting, and engraving—and also inventing new graphic forms. Particular emphasis is placed on figurative diagrams, understood as an intermediate and concilatory medium between conceptual discourse and mimetic representation (figurative depiction of cosmogony). Yet some controversy cannot be avoided, quarrel is deeply rooted in the nature of the world, which was apparently deliberately designed by the philosopher so that artists are left out of the picture.

The dissertation project reevaluates Plato’s relationship to artists and art, including his own image-making; on the one hand, it justifies the philosopher’s nuanced and conditional favor toward painting, and on the other, it proposes the integration of cosmography into a Platonic image of the world. The practical outcome will be a cycle of interconnected graphic scrolls.

MgA. Karel Pivoňka,

Studio:

Dissertation: The Thinking Image – graphic interpretation of Timaeus

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