Aureola Aureola An aureola or aureole (diminutive of Latin "aurea", "golden") is the radiance of luminous cloud which, in paintings of sacred personages, surrounds the whole figure. In Neolatin languages (as Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French) the noun Aureola is usually more related to the disc of light surrounding the head of sacred figures and that in English is called Halo or Nimbus. In the earliest periods of Christian art it was confined to the figures of the persons of the Christian Godhead, but it was afterwards extended to the Virgin Mary and to several of the saints. The aureola, when
What Is Art? "vagueness, mysteriousness, obscurity and inaccessibility to the masses". Tolstoy lambastes such works, insisting that art can and should be comprehensible to everyone. Having emphasised that art has a function in the improvement of humanity - capable of expressing man’s best sentiment - he finds it offensive that artists should be so wilfully and arrogantly abstruse. One criticism Tolstoy levels against art is that at some point it "ceased to be sincere and became artificial and cerebral", leading to the creation of millions of works of technical brilliance but few of honourable sentiment. Tolstoy outlines four common markers of bad art: