Universal Principles of Art

22 CREATIVITY

ANALYZING THE PROCESS OF MAKING SOMETHING NEW

Creativity, the generation of new ideas, insights, and previously unimagined images and artifacts, is usually thought of as central to the making of art. It is a surprisingly recent idea. Greek philosophy regarded the visual arts as largely imitative, while inspiration for poetry was provided by the Muses or the Gods. It wasn’t until the Renaissance that creation began to be seen as a characteristic of human beings, and not until the beginning of the Romantic era that any serious thinking was applied to the function of the imagination. Any useful consideration of the creative process did not emerge until the end of the nineteenth century, and the first good attempt at analyzing it only ...