Selected phenomena of the art of the Renaissance and the changes in the self-knowledge of a modern man as seen by Charles Taylor

Abstract

This article aims to discuss Charles Taylor’s views included in Sources of the Self, concerned with the changes in European art during the Renaissance presented as an outcome of the changes in the understanding of human identity. The author’s significant assumption is a thesis that historical changes in human self-knowledge find a reflection in art, especially in the construction of a painter’s plan, the position of an observer, the manner in which the observed object is presented. The answers to the questions: Who is looking? Where does the perspective open? etc. are vital for analyzing works of art treated as exempla of anthropological and epistemological problems. Important points of reference next to Taylor’s Sources of the Self are H. Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History, N. Elias’s Involvement and Detachment and Ch. Taylor’s Diálogos Taylor y Bernstein.