The Fine Art Of Human Activities arts sculpture music painting
poetry nature architecture imitation pleasures time THE FINE ART
OF HUMAN ACTIVITIES is the abstract or collective name given to
the results of a whole group of human activities • the
activities themselves which constitute the group being severally
called the FINE ARTS. In antiquity the fine arts were not
explicitly named, nor even distinctly recognized, as a separate
class. In other modern languages besides English they are called
by the equivalent name of the beautiful arts (belle arti, beaux
arts, schone Kiinste). The fine or beautiful arts, then, are
those among the arts of man which minister, not to his material
necessities or conveniences, but to his love of beauty (using
the word beauty in its widest sense); or if any art fulfils both
these purposes at once, still as fulfilling the latter only is
it called a fine art. Thus architecture, in so far as it
provides shelter and accommodation, is one of the useful or
mechanical arts, and one of t