Spiral in art

Title : The spiral in art. Aesthetic, ethical and political aspects. Abstract : In this work, we built up a collection of the different works of art in which the spiral form appears, in order to seize the symbolic meaning associated to this form particularly recurrent in Occidental art. We analysed its metamorphoses in different arts -architecture, painting, music, film, etc. - and its different roles, from its apparently ornamental role in the Ionic order, to its more immediately conceptually-loaded role in Renaissance painting or Baroque architecture: the comparison of these occurrences of the spiral in art led us to put into light a shift in the way men looked at nature, the Greek artists electing the spiral because of its sober regularity, the Renaissance painters or the Baroque architects putting emphasis on a power, characteristic of the logarithmic spiral, to evoke « nature's » prodigality in the display of forms - the spiral being only one among them - and the mysterious, to some men and artists even miraculous, character of the appearance of life and the growth of living beings. We therefore focused on the study of the motives that appeal on this symbolic in art. We were particularly interested in the motif of the shell, its many variations leading us from the cornucopia and the representations of..