The reader might have noticed by now that this short historical review of theo-ries about artistic creativity and approaches to artistic creation has mainly taken as examples poetry or language-related expressions� This is due to the fact that ancient theories of the arts privilege those artistic forms, including Aristotle who refers more to playwriting than performance when reflecting on theatre� This does not mean that a rich production of artistic artefacts and performances did not exist in antiquity or in the Middle Ages� As the principal world museums bear witness, cultural and artistic artefacts punctuate the history of humanity�
Not always, though, were these practices associated with theoretical reflections�
Visual arts and architecture would begin to be valued during the Renaissance, when practices of individual artists and schools of art or ateliers began to be well known and historically documented� The performing arts of theatre and music would also achieve cultural appreciation during and after the Renaissance, even though their practices had been continuous and socially important during ancient and Christian times (an exception should be made for dance that must await the 19th century to find its full appreciation in aesthetic theories)� Theo-retical approaches to these art forms were to evolve from ideas of crafts pure and simple (implicit in the ancient Greek word for art - tekne as in technical, tech-nique) to meaningful and necessary crafts�
The early Christian philosopher St� Augustine clearly attributed a purpose of religious dissemination to the making of art, despising any artistic form that did not celebrate the one and only true God and consequently failed to elevate the maker’s spirit to heavenly heights (Carlson 1984, p� 29)� Music had special status among the arts, perhaps because of the New Testament’s metaphor of Christ as the “singer” of God’s word, a preference that lives on in some Christian ( especially Protestant) traditions of the Psalms� Late mediaeval churches of-ten eagerly practiced forms of dramaturgical entertainment based on religious themes� St� Francis of Assisi used tableaux vivants (living pictures, a sort of silent, motionless enactment by real people) as a way to instruct poor and uneducated folk about the life of Christ, establishing a long-lasting tradition that survived up to our time in the custom of the Nativity crib�
Mediaeval interest in creativity was very limited, if we look at theoretical con-tributions� Originality and novelty were still little valued as qualities, especially in comparison with ideological values such as respect of tradition and imita-tion� This did not mean that artistic practices were not creative and provocative, for instance in the field of popular theatre or architecture� The traditional view on creativity was to characterise many Christian artists’ or theorists’ reflections throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries� For instance, Spanish painter Francisco Pacheco (1564-1644) wrote in his The Art of Painting, its Antiquity and Greatness that the aim of the painter is to be “a Christian craftsman” and therefore
“could be said to entertain two purposes, one principal and another secondary or subsidiary” (Harrison, Wood & Gaiger 2000, p� 31)� The secondary, less impor-tant, purpose is “to ply his craft for gain or fame or some other reason […]� But this should be governed by the appropriate circumstances of person, place, time, and form”� The principal one is “to attain unto a condition of blessedness through the study and the toil of his profession as undertaken in a state of grace”, for a Christian “has been expressly created for holy things” (Harrison, Wood & Gaiger 2000, p� 31)� This declaration stands between the medieval understanding of art-making as a divine state of blessedness and the Renaissance view of men at the centre of the universe� Pacheco attributes a higher meaning to the art of painting, which should not only aim at transient rewards, although that possibility is con-templated� The fact that these ephemeral or material rewards are included, even as secondary aims, indicates that the writer is a professional painter who well knows that, besides immaterial rewards, material rewards can and should be part of the profession� Interestingly, Pacheco’s distinction of appropriateness, person, place, time and form recalls modern taxonomies of creativity, such as the 4 Ps of creativity (Kozbelt, Beghetto & Runco 2010, p� 24): person, press (place), process (time) and product (form)� Finally, what this reflection owes to the spirit of Re-naissance is the belief that divinity is within human beings� Even though Pacheco does not include all human beings and stresses the fact that he is addressing a Christian ontology, he seems to have fully absorbed the notion of man being in charge, being “expressly created for holy things” (Kozbelt, Beghetto & Runco 2010, p� 24)� Of course Pacheco’s (and the Renaissance’s) being in charge is still within the boundaries of God’s will and moral behaviour� The artist should still exercise his creativity in the service of moral elevation and persuasion�
Taking a step backwards to Renaissance ontology, this is best represented by Leonardo’s Vitruvian man: right at the centre of the universe, perfect ana-tomical proportion and a balance of strength and beauty� The Renaissance was a flourishing cultural period in Europe (truly a re-birth) and Christian ideol-ogy was accompanied by secular approaches to art and knowledge that were to
open the way for and make possible the growth of Enlightenment philosophy�
Neither the Middle Ages nor the Renaissance were exclusively characterised by Christianity – they also gave rise to forms of art that were provocative, anarchis-tic, free-spirited and of extreme fantasy, especially in folklore or popular art (see Bakhtin 1968)� Art forms and artistic practices could include and express a com-plexity that was unknown to the theories of art� As the Academies were founded and quickly spread across all Europe, leading to the forging of the modern scien-tific method and practices, conceptual contributions to creativity were modelled either towards the Christian or the academic-scientific argument� Although the latter initiated few long-lasting debates, a large quantity of artistic production, practices and artists were excluded from these reflections because of their link to popular culture� Runco and Albert (2010) sum up the academic debates that were to “become the bedrock of our present-day ideas about creativity: (a) genius was divorced from the supernatural; (b) genius, although exceptional, was a poten-tial in every individual; (c) talent and genius were to be distinguished from one another; and (d) their potential and exercise depend on the political atmosphere at the time” (p� 9)� As popular culture was left out of the aesthetic discussion, similarly Eastern philosophies remained unknown to the West until the great exhibitions of the nineteenth century� So, the debate about creativity and artistic creativity was biased by the fact that its spokesmen often shared an implicit tax-onomy of the arts and of creative abilities� Academies were the cradle of scientific method and managed to systematise academic peer procedures that are still in force today� In science as well as in art, rules were the subject of reflections on art:
set directions in the use of language, in the use of perspective and verisimilitude�
The artist’s creativity was supposed to adjust to these domain-agreed rules in order to be accepted� If the academic discourse was able to systematise creative works of science and arts, seen as “twin aspects of the same ‘scientific’ interest”
(Goldwater & Treves 1976, p� 13) and give them a “professional” or specialised audience, it was also presenting artists, and creators in general, with the con-striction of a new tradition, not in the name of God but in the name of Science�
However, these tensions enriched the debate around creativity, by focusing on systematic distinctions: was creativity different from genius? What was the role of education? Was talent synonym of genius and originality?
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) formulated one of the sharpest contributions by insisting that creativity was a matter of imagination� “Time and education be-get experience; experience bebe-gets memory; memory bebe-gets judgment and fancy;
judgment begets the strength and structure, and fancy begets the ornaments of a poem” (Harrison, Wood & Gaiger 2000, p� 211)� In this quote taken from Hobbes’ “Answer to Davenant’s preface to Gondibert” is possible to read both
the classicist tradition (the mind is a tabula rasa to be “filled up” with the work of memory and experience) and the enlightened approach (if time and educa-tion can build up the creaeduca-tion of a poem, then it is a skill that can be learned)�
Nevertheless, Hobbes’ view on creativity was dark and gloomy, affected by his political determinism� In Leviathan, published for the first time in 1651, he de-fines creativity as the ability of producing mental images, independently from stimulation of the senses:
For after the object is removed, or the eye shut, we still retain an image of the thing seen, though more obscure than when we see it� And this is it the Latins call imagination, from the image made in seeing, and apply the same, though improperly, to all the other senses� But the Greeks call it fancy, which signifies appearance, and is as proper to one sense as to another� Imagination, therefore, is nothing but decaying sense; and is found in men and many other living creatures, as well sleeping as waking (Hobbes 1914)�
The late eighteenth century epitomised a change: “in both England and France the artist begins to express himself in a less didactic, more individual way, becomes reluctant to attach his art and his aesthetic to any universally acceptable truth and beauty, because he wishes to give more personal expression to his feeling”
(Goldwater & Treves 1976, p� 15)� The Über-myth on creativity, creative genius and creative processes was born and raised in this cultural environment� The sad, troubled, often depressed and psychotic artist was subject to unhappy events and almost sought this unhappiness for the sake of artistic creation� The finest per-sonification of this spirit is Goethe’s Werther, in The Sorrows of Young Werther�
The novel, first published in 1774, depicted its main character as a young man of great hopes and passion, with glorious dreams and love for his beloved� In a plot still largely used in Hollywood’s romantic comedies the romance is broken even before its start: the object of passion was a woman who was already en-gaged and Werther suffered a broken heart� Goethe (1749-1832) lets the reader wander through the character’s intimate world, as this epistolary novel consists of Werther’s letters to his friend� The “I-form” of the narration makes Werther’s passionate attitude towards the world even more touching� As readers we find ourselves in Werther’s head and feel for him, for his unfortunate love and dead-end situation� We do not know if he is an artist, but we know that he feels very strongly about art, poetry, painting and the classics, Homer� He is hypersensitive to the point of madness and indeed his life situation explodes at the end� With an unhappy ending that would become typical of Romantic art and that unfortu-nately inspired many young men to do the same, Goethe let his character take his own life� The Werther stereotype influenced not only all of Romantic culture but also a broader common understanding of creativity, artistic creation and artists, which lasted almost unaltered to the twentieth and twenty-first century� Even
today, several practitioners, for instance in the educational sector, hold the belief that creativity is the act of a genius with special talents, that to be creative one must do something artistic, that creators and artist in particular are eccentric and often outcasts� Even though there is “a grain of truth” (Simonton 2010a, p� 219) in this deeply rooted belief, the idea of mad genius ignores the vast research into creativity of the last century, is hard to challenge and calls for more systematic re-search and dissemination of knowledge about creativity� However, the attention that Romanticism paid to inner feelings, emotional wisdom, artistic inspiration, extraordinary qualities of artists and creators, contributed to an increase in spe-cific reflections on creativity and artistic composition� Unfortunately, Romanti-cism overruled the Renaissance’s holistic unity of science and arts, substituting the schism between science and art� In this dualistic perspective, scientists be-came wise representatives of rationality, logic, and practical scientific thought�
Artists were spontaneous, mad people, prey to their feelings and characterised by genius and extraordinary talent� The Apollonian as opposed to the Dionysian:
Apollo, the God of light and sun, bearer of all harmonies, in symbolic opposition to Dionysus, the God of grapes, harvest and wine, depicted in orgies and irregu-lar conduct� In the reflections of eighteenth-century artists on art, the concept of genius was valued as opposed to the praxis of the artisan, with the stylistic consequence that “both the formal treatise and the technical handbook disap-pear, except where they are directed exclusively to the student and the beginning amateur” (Goldwater & Treves 1976, p� 16)� According to Goldwater and Treves (1976, pp� 16-19) who collected texts written by visual artists on art since the fourteenth century, the cultural environment of the eighteenth century brought two different approaches to reflections on art: on the one hand, the first exam-ples of public arts-advocacy with Barry (1741-1806), Blake (1757-1827), Courbet (1819-1877) and Whistler (1834-1903) or the political use of art as by David (1748-1825), on the other hand, the later introspective tendencies of Impression-ism, where writings on art were essentially of a private nature, such as letters or diaries� The introspective-private tendency was to experience a new develop-ment with the new century, when the reflective artist was not seen with mistrust, as Goethe had sanctioned “Artist, create, do not talk” (Goldwater & Treves 1976, p� 16), but generated a new wave of interest in theoretical reflections on art and its creative processes� The Avant-gardes throughout the whole nineteenth cen-tury played with theoretical concepts, to the point of founding the movement of Conceptual Art and stimulating a new reunion of the arts with science (Wilson 2010)� Artists of all art forms made their lives, methods or processes public, pub-lishing essays, autobiographies or articles, or finding new channels of dissemina-tion in new media such as radio, later television and film� Strangely, the more
artists wrote or talked about their art, the less we heard about creativity� On the other hand, the science of creativity was being established against a background of specific needs and collection of specific knowledge� Runco and Albert (2010, pp� 11-16) identify in Adam Smith (1723-1790), Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), Charles Darwin (1809-1882), William James (1842-1910) and Francis Galton (1822-1911) the ancestors of this field: Smith because of his recognition of the fundamental need for a science of human behaviour, Malthus for his connecting human behaviour with socio-political actions, Darwin for his evolution theory and focus on the role of adaptation in the survival of species, James for foreseeing the concept of divergent thinking with his understanding “the rarity of ideational complexity” (Runco & Albert 2010, p� 13) and finally Galton for his longitudinal studies on hereditary genius� These theorists, not being artists, did not investigate the domain-specific area of artistic creativity exclusively� In contrast to them, art-ists or art connoisseurs who might have been interested in artistic creativity and working processes largely showed attitudes of reticence or “shyness” (Goldwater
& Treves 1976, p� 7) when they openly reflected on their own working processes and creativity� Probably, this shyness is a legacy of Romanticism, due to the cen-tury’s sharp contraposition of rationality and feelings� The shyness myth, which our work aims to invalidate, has prevented artists for centuries from looking at their creative processes or making their personal reflections public, thereby con-tributing to the broader creativity debate� Our conversations with artists show a completely different approach to self-reflection and communication of creative processes� And rising interest in creativity has enhanced scholarly and artistic reflections on the phenomenon� During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was sustained hunger for knowledge on creativity� Experts in this field were answering to very specific needs, translating the turbulences of the beginning of the century and World War II into the necessity of knowing more about human beings, their behaviour and their potential� Socio-economic structures focused on the exploitation of human potential and its optimisation� This led to the boom of scientific studies on creativity and to a variety of methodological approaches, well summarised in Kozbelt, Beghetto and Runco (2010)�