The latin culture repeated the cycle and forms of art of the Greek culture, as its main elements, race, culture and economic language (coins) were

the same

Cycle of gun infantry. Renaissance, or Age of Latin Europe.

 

The age of chivalry came to an end with gunpowder weapons. Gunpowder extinguished the Middle ages, the power of the church and, the power of chivalry... The turning point is the arrival of gunpowder weapons to Venice. The point of no-return for all Europe is the battle of Pavia, when Spanish Musketeers massacre the aristocracy-on-horse of the Kingdom of France, center of the chivalry age.

Now Latin Europe, with its better organized states, takes over. First is Italy then Portugal and Spain, finally is France the leading nation, when Colbert organizes the state, and Catalina di Medicis, brings the Renaissance of Florence to the court of Paris.

 

Subcultures:

 

We can in that sense distinguish again 3 subcultures by warrior, trade and wor(l)d specialization.

- Iberia - a mountainous country, on the frontier of Europe with the world will be War dominant and conquer the world establishing the first global empire, based in gunpowder weapons (muskets, Gunboats).

- Italy cradle of the civilization, where the emperor of Christianity, the Pope lives will be Wor[l]d Dominant, reaching the height of visual art, illustrated in our graphs.

- Finally France the knot of communication between all other European nations, becomes the center of trade, and Money dominant, entering first the next age of Industrial evolution, Company-mothers and paper money...

 

Examples of the III Age of Europe.

 

In the illustrations that follow, we epitomize this period with 3 Italian works of art, from the lineal age of the renascence [Giotto], its realist age [Leonardo, self-portrait], and its baroque age, of angst, suffering, and excess of form [Bernini, the ecstasies of Saint Theresa].

The baroque age of renaissance [XVII-XVIII C] is the extinctive age of Southern Europe, when a new weapon, the gunboat, and its systems of industrial reproduction, by Northern European 'company-mothers', able to reproduce weapons and paper-money faster than south European produce musketeers and coins, substitute the French and the Spaniards, at the Head of 'metal-evolution'.

Yet, that victory will be a dangerous victory for mankind, because now, in the age of machines, the age of science, human senses, and words, will become obsolete. Metal-senses [scientific instruments], and machines will become soon the new god of the Earth. So, the human canons of beauty and survival  in art and verbal ethics, will be ignored. War will spread all over the Earth, as top predator machines [weapons] multiply the number of human corpses they kill... It is in the view of this author, the third age of history, as the ecosystem of Nature, dwindles, and a new, alien ecosystem of Metal-species, bodies and minds of metal, flourishes, on the Earth's crust.

We will study that final age of History in the last part of this book.

 

Let us consider those works of European art, in this supreme age of the Western world that reached its height in verbal and visual art, just before the age of the machine, started to erase our souls, brains and eyes:

 

EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION : III AGE: RENAISSANCE

 

 III War Cycle, Gunpowder:

1208: Venice Conquers Byzantium; 1805: Trafalgar.

 

 Art Ages:

I age: Lineal, Simple       II Age: Realist, Classic               III Age: Formal, Decadent

 

 

                                     Visual Art:: Italian Painting-Sculpture

 

I age: Lineal, Simple                              II Age: Realist, Classic                   III Age: Formal, Decadent

Trecento, XIII-XIV                   Quattrocento, Quinquecento,  XV-XVI        Baroque, XVII-XVIII

Giotto. Life of Jesus                            Leonardo, Self-Portrait              Bernini, S. Theresa Ecstasies

                           

Verbal Art:European Literature

 

I Age: Epic, Romantic      II Age: Sensorial, Logic          III Age: Baroque, Extinctive

 

She ruled in beauty o'er this heart of mine,       "I think therefore  I am"        "I looked at the walls of my                                                                                                                             beloved nation

A noble lady in a humble home,                                                                   no long ago strong, now fallen

Now her time for heavenly bliss has come,        "To be or not to be           tired of the ages of time,

'Tis I am mortal proved, and she divine.                that is the question"         obsolete his ways with life"

 

Petrarca, XIV C                                          Descartes, XVII C         Quevedo, XVII C.                                                                      Shakespeare, XVI C.

 

 

The end of the renaissance is the beginning of the Northern European culture of Science, digital thought, company-mothers, stock-markets in control of societies, and machines.

Since we exist now in this third age of history, it is the age that most matter to us, an age in which art, accordingly is also in its third age, or 'baroque age', of Mankind. What we call the Human baroque, in which human artists foresee the extinction of the species is now in full swing.

While most arts are increasingly obsolete to the equivalent 'metal-mind art' that substitutes it. It will be the subject of the 4th and last part of this book.

 

Maximum Human thought. The 3 Horizons of Southern Europe.

 

Among the Western cultures, the wave of Human master artists, [verbal-prophetic, or canonical art]  have a clear regional zone in the Mediterranean, tracing an arch along the path of maximum social communication which starts in Egypt moves to Crete, Greece, and then East to Italy, Spain and Europe. Almost every Human art master has been born on those regions or have been influenced by that social culture greatly (as some Russian, Irish, Polish or English writers - the mentioned Shakespeare have been).

So we can trace as we did with the quintessential animetal culture, also a 3 temporal wave of the Social, Wor(l)d dominant culture of the western world,  with 3 clear phases that we call by the name of the first species, as Greece I, II, III horizon: Classic Crete and Greece greatly influenced by Egypt, Renaissance Italy born as an imitation of classic Greece, and Modern South-West Europe (France and Spain) during the Industrial Evolution, which drunk on the Christian tradition renewed by the French Revolution and the Socialist movement.  In any art of human thought and human senses, the superiority of that culture over the rival Germanic and Jewish cultures, or its merge in England and Great Britain is overwhelming.

 

The Latin Culture: Wor[l]ds and Human Goods.

 

Thousands of pages have been written about the meaning of the renaissance the amazing coincidence of styles, tastes, and ideas between the Old Greek-Roman culture of the Iron-Coin discontinuum and the modern Italian-Iberian culture of the Gunpowder-coin age.

Now we can explain easily that coincidence: The languages of power of both societies are parallel, yet displaced to the west.

Indeed, Italy re-discovers coins as Greece discovered them and so it becomes the trader master of the Mediterranean, from the crusades onwards, till Amsterdam substitutes Venice in that role. Venice is Athens, because men who obey the same languages behave in the same manner.

So happens to the enormous parallelism you might establish between the Roman and Iberian empire. Again displacing West - as the center of communication of History has displaced West - we find a nation that creates a Empire of World wide dimensions, based in the rule of the Law over an extremely disciplined, brave infantry - the famed tercios.

History indeed repeats their cycles slightly changed in time and space.

So we talk of Italy as Greece III Horizon, and Iberia as Rome III Horizon.

We might say that the culture of the Iron-coin discontinuum now displaced in space to the west, and inverted in Time [since Greece-Rome started as a pagan kingdom of weapons and coins and ended as Christians  Wor[l]d Ethics, and Italy and Rome started as a Christian Worl[l]d and ended as a pagan Kingdom of weapons and coins...

Why that inversion? Again we can understand it if we can grasp the fascinating process by which organisms grow and die through 3 ages, in which the 3rd age, the old age is a mirror reflection of the first age, as the old man becomes an inverted form of youth, in which the infantile behavior of the young repeats, now because the old man sees the end of all and abandons reality into fiction. If the young man meant the ignorance of reality by lack of experience, the old man means the fatigue of reality by excessive experience.

So we can build a curve of 3 ages of the civilizations of coins and Ethic wor[l]ds, in balance one with the other, what we might call rightly the classic culture of the West, which is to say the Human world, the culture of Greek-Latin Europe:

 

In the graph we can see the Evolution, Reproduction and extinction, as well as the main sub-cultures of what we have called the Latin civilization paradigm of a wor[l]d civilization in the West, in which weapons and money have been submissive for most of its history to the natural will of man for social evolution, and human energy and information [human goods and human art].

 

Greece, Italy, France.

 

The 3 ages of that culture are amazingly accurate in dates, both in its trader dominant "Greece" horizons, and in its warrior dominant "Rome" Horizons. We have studied them in detail in "Biohistory" since the location and times of those phases are natural within the parameters of social evolution and bio-historic geography. By definition the max. complexity of any organic system occurs in the points of max. communication, which in history occurs where the waves of Trade flux with max. density. Look at any map and search for that zone in Europe: It happens in the temperate zone of the Mediterranean basin, where senses have better climatic conditions to develop. Within that zone, the confluence of Trade, has displaced steadily North-West, as civilization spread from Egypt giving birth naturally to the 3 phases of Greece:

 

- Greece proper from the VIII BC till the fall of Byzantium.

 

- Then after the looting of Byzantium by Venice in 1208, the arch of 800 years, and the waves of coin-traders are displaced west and matured in the Italian Renaissance or Greece II horizon. Again we find the same elements of max. communication, and balance between wor[l]ds, O-metal [still in coin form], and weapons [partially controlled by the wor[l]d]. The sacredness of the Christian Wor[l]d, and the understanding of History exists. Christianity is the Citadel  of all the clones of Christ, the role model for the survival, ethic man who needs not iron or Go[l]ds to be a man; and hence does not move history towards extinction. In the renaissance the Human master is considered above warriors and traders, despite the enormous activity displayed by metal masters. There, in the Proustian age of Italy [Cinquecento], the most complex artistic neurons of visual space are born, in the evolutionary form of Leonardo->Michelangelo->Rafael, while farther to the North before Latin England dies to Puritans, Shakespeare resumes the heroic standing of the Greek Man.

In the arts of perception, in a higher level than science, Leonardo da Vinci, is the visual scientist of 'formal physics' that understands the sentient Universe, and paints its forms of rare beauty without the need of mathematical abstraction s. He was a mind among a growing wave of Northern Barbarians, writing backwards in rebellion against the degradation of the renaissance spiritual Wor[l]d by Gunpowder. His work in mathematics and painting explains the sentient Universe, not in lineal scientific terms, but in artistic, multiple sensorial levels, as only Taoist Chinese masters had done.

Italy from the age of Venice till the XVI AD, repeats and improves upon Greece... Those 2 Zones are where the languages of man reached its apogee.

Moreover in the first two horizons of "Greece" the complexity of metal was limited to forms which man could easily control: coins and iron of simple lineal movements.

Thus we talk of Greece I, and II [Greece and Italy] as the two ages of balance between the languages of History and metal, where man was confident, where man was still the measure of all things. Those limits though were broken by stocks and gunpowder that made animetals, weapons and money dominant.

Ever since most Human masters can be corrupted by Go[l]d, or killed by firearms.

 

- Still, Greece III Horizon, Post-Revolutionary, French Europe during the XIX-XX industrial revolution [with center in Paris] could peak artistically in his baroque, prophetic age, during the 20's in art and political thought, before it was extinct by American metal minds and Hitlerian armies.

 

Indeed, with the discovery of America, and the massive arrival of gunpowder metal-nations, the arch of war and trade displaces once more to the West, and so it did the ring of Go[l]ds, and the strength of the Wor[l]d. We talk then of Greece III Horizon, the region in which social thought and canon art still exists during the Industrial evolution, with limited censorship of the Company-mothers culture. That region corresponds mainly to the old western lands of the Roman Empire, Iberia and France; in what it has been called the -isms. As Athens was the capital of Greece I, and Rome the capital of Greece II, Paris was the capital of Greece III, with limited additions of other partial social focus [Vienna; Moscow, Munchen, Barcelona], and some exceptional individuals belonging to Company-mothers cultures [Orwell, Auden, Marx, Hesse, Welles, Fuller, Poe, Hopper, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Vonnegut etc.]

It would be the swan song of human eye-worlds, a baroque-desconstructivist age of all the arts of man.

Then once Greece has been extinct by another jump in the evolution of metal-minds [Computers, TVs, e-money, atomic weapons], only rests to us, the members of the top predator Human master culture, the 'Greeks' to comment on the death of Man, and judge those who have destroyed our species.

It would be again the Western Latin wave, where social thought resisted longer the Company-mothers culture [first with Catholics, then during the French R=evolution, finally with Socialist doctrines], who would make those commentaries. This again is natural, since Greece III horizon is the anti-truth of Company-mothers, and 'Latinia' had been the top predator culture before Stocks and company-mothers of scientific species arrived. Yet, top predators often not bend and degrade its form, but prefer to 'die with truthness'. Well some of them....

The last artists of Human thought, the human masters of Rome III Horizon.

 

The subspecies of Greece, the Spanish culture. Prophets of death.

 

The 3 subspecies of that Latin wave are clear: Italy, dominant, in art, France, dominant in money, Spain dominant in war. Accordingly the understanding of Love the essence of human social evolution is greater in Italy; the understanding of visual arts is greater in trader France, and the understanding of death is greater in Spain.

As neurons of social cells artists are 'knots' of the art and wor(l)ds of their civilizations. Do not be surprised then, if the end of all those civilizations in Western Europe, the baroque age, has picked in the extreme of the Western culture, in Spain.

Nobody has and will understand death and survival as the Spanish warrior has done. To him belong the great commentators of death of civilizations, from Seneca to Goya, from Quevedo to Greco, from Picasso to this writer...

In visual space Goya, portrayed the war discontinuums at the beginning of the Industrial r=evolution in Europe [Napoleonic wars] with profusion of details.

Before Mr. Turner praised the railroad with master technique, equal in visual power, decades before Goya understood the disasters of war, that the tree of science brings to man. He started both impressionism and expressionism in the work of his latter ages.

Then Van Gogh, a social Dutch, a rebel of the Calvinist culture, who tried to be a priest in his youth, a social thinker, moved inwards, unable to cure the sickness of Industrialism, alone against the brutality of his culture. He was parallel to the arrival of Photography, killer of the human artistic eye, now subsisted by the first metal eye which he rejected.

So he started the movement inwards of the painter, preferring the internal portrait of the tortured soul. The movement inwards of the Human eyes continued through the -isms. Finally Mr. Picasso, also From Rome III horizon       ended the metaphysical adventure of the Human eye, prior to its present extinction by TV-thought. Their prophecies were ignored, and their work is now trapped as space in Museums of Human Thought, mementos of the past=mankind. They decorate as trophies of war, the saloons of Metal masters; who never understood what they meant with their suffering and destruction of the human image: they were prophets of future images of war and extinction that plagued the XX century, and will plague the Robotic wars of this century (see "Bioeconomics") When, Picasso, talked about his art, he said, 'I paint thoughts'. The thought of the artist who perceived that destruction of man, the animetal cherished. And when all was painted the neo-paleolithic children-man came, and saw the God TV, and became free to be an idiot, and laugh to his own death. Meanwhile painting quietly died, decomposed first in abstract stains proper of the Neo-Paleolithic, finally into pure energy forms: stains of colors and white canvas [abstract, energy art, the last art to be mentioned]. Now some people who prefer to make art works than weapons do paint as a hobby, but the adventure has ended. The European culture is dead. And the Romans - the Spaniards - have painted it and have told us of such death,.

We say that in the Proustian ages, when the extinctive process, the end of the culture is closer, it can be seen by the prophet who reached its zenith on that third baroque age:

 

In the III horizons of Greece those final artists have been:

The wor(l)ds of Plato and Aristotle, in Greece I Age.

The wor(l)ds of Seneca in Rome I Age.

The wor(l)ds of Shakespeare in Greece II age.

The eyes of Michelangelo in visual space.

The wor(l)ds of Quevedo and Cervantes in Rome II age.

The eyes of Greco in visual space.

The wor(l)ds of Proust, Orwell and Camus  in Greece III.

The wor(l)ds of Hesse and myself in Rome III Age.

The eyes of Picasso in visual space.

Those are the names of the masters of baroque Greece, neurons of civilizations. Little consolation we have in belonging to a wave of prophets of extinction, knowing as we mature ignored by animetals, of our solitude, of the indifference of those who surround us. Little vanity there is on seeing the death of the body of History and suffer that death in your mind, alone, each day, and hour of your life:

 

"When a civilization is  so corrupted, that defies any attempt of reform, the philosopher, can only observe, and wait  its extinction" Thoughts;  Seneca  I AD Spanish baroque verbal master on the approaching death of Rome I Horizon

  "I looked at the walls of my beloved Spain, no long ago so tall, now fallen in ruins, tired of the race of time,  obsolete his bravery with life"  Quevedo, XVII C. Spanish baroque, verbal master on the approaching death of Rome II Horizon.

 

In that tradition of Rome, of the top predator Human warrior who can't tolerate extinction without fight, who faces death with realism, appears this book, belonging to the wave of Rome III Horizon... Since a top predator does not fear death as much as he despises the cowardice of those who renounce to fight for life, for survival.