부산대학교 도서관

Humanity began its journey about 50,000 years ago by making images in the caves, and then image-making became central to the communities organised around agriculture, from which emerged great civilisations. The image-making continued from Mesopotamia, India, China, Egypt and then to Greece, which laid the foundation of art in the West. And although this trajectory of image-making is seen as the movement of ideas through history, then becoming the basis of art history, this image-making was challenged by the emergence of Islam in the seventh century, offering an alternative way of looking at and representing the world. This shift from seeing the world through images in nature, particularly of living beings, to an abstract level of thinking and imaging, for which geometry became fundamental, is still not considered to be a shift within the trajectory of history. The aim of this article is therefore to look at this shift historically, in the context of ideas of the present in both art and science, particularly in relation to the Arab/Islamic world which, by adopting Western ways of thinking, has lost its connection with its own history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]