At the primitive stages of its development, art was characterized by its syncretic character. In ancient times, those elements which later gave rise to music, drama, choreography and other fields, genera and types of art existed in an indissoluble unity in folk rites.
The division of labor, the increase in economic prosperity, and the development of abstract thinking and the human senses in the process of cognizing reality indirectly contributed to the differentiation of various genres in the system of arts.
The differentiation of the fields of art is associated primarily with the difference in techniques and means of reproducing reality. Some of them are able to depict the phenomena of life only at a certain moment, to convey only one state of nature or man. Unlike static arts such as sculpture and architecture, other arts have the ability to convey a change in reality over time. Such “temporal” arts usually include music and literature.
Mime and dance allow to reflect the phenomenon of life not only in time but also in space, so they are called spatio-temporal arts. Sculpture, architecture and painting belong to the group of spatial arts, representing an image in two or three dimensions. Finally, there is an increasingly expanding group of synthetic arts, which includes theater (drama and music), cinema, and television, which use both their own specific techniques and means and those borrowed in a transformed form from other fields.
When classifying, researchers also pay attention to the ability of art to influence certain senses of the reader or viewer who perceives the artistic work. Hence the difference between the art of sound (music) and the performing arts (painting, sculpture, etc.). However, most contemporary arts seek to expand the scope of their impact on the person. In this regard, one can observe not only the growing importance of synthetic arts, but also interesting experiments in the field of color music, the theatricalization of epic, lyrical, and vocal compositions.
Each of the constituent areas of the arts has its own specificity, allowing the most fully and emotionally reflect one or another aspect of existence. It is related to this relationship and their different relationships between them, the nomination in certain historical periods in the foreground of some, the weak development or even decline of others. Finally, each field of art is included in a particular ideological system and is in contact with various fields of extra-artistic activity.
One of the oldest fields of art is architecture. It is still inextricably linked to the satisfaction of material human needs, which, to a certain extent, have been lost, for example, music or choreography. The art of constructing buildings and structures not only fulfills practical tasks, but also expresses social and aesthetic ideals of mankind in its own peculiar language.
Majestic pyramids and grandiose temples of ancient Egypt reflected in aesthetic form the ideas of the ruling elite about firmness and divine nature of power of priests and pharaohs. Architecture of that period to a large extent subordinated all other fields of art. The majesty and solemnity of ancient Egyptian hymns, which were often carved on obelisks, corresponded to the whole style of the Egyptian temples that overwhelmed man.
In ancient Greece and Rome, the performing arts – theater, circus and especially sculpture – came to the fore. The latter area (lat. sculpo – “carve”, “cut out”) allows you to convey in relief the unique identity of the human face and physique, gestures and posture in a three-dimensional, visually perceivable form. The three-dimensional nature of sculptural works makes it possible to expressively capture a single moment from the dynamic process of life.
It is not by chance that Aristotle defined “word and meter” in comparison with marble and paint, and the authors of poetry of his era tried to compete in plasticity of image with the creators of sculpture. The visual expressiveness of the images in the poems of Homer, in the eclogues of Theocritus and in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses was due to this direct dependence on the fine arts during its heyday in the ancient world.
During the Middle Ages, along with architecture, the decorative-applied art (Lat. decoro – “decorate”) was intensively developed. It is associated with the artistic processing of various objects, decorating architectural structures. “Their creators seek to find an emotionally expressive form of an object, its proportions, outlines, rhythm, color relations, such material and texture, such ornamental motive, which together would express a certain state of mind, a certain mood and could infect the viewer with it.