Typically, the numerous anthologies of literature and art history present the history of the arts as a sum total of different periods, seemingly randomly combined, to form a balanced cultural whole. The realization of this idea, reckons O. Krivtsun, could eliminate subjectivity in the approach to art history. The author draws a distinction between such basic notions of art history as the art cycle, the civilizational cycle, and the general culture cycle. The temporal nonconcurrence and differences of chronological scale in the development of these cycles throughout history are obvious. Whenever an experiment with the language of painting, music, literature or architecture can be said to point in roughly the same direction as another such experiment, a new type of artistic vision is in the making.
Artistic vision is expressed primarily in the form and structure of an art work.
These means of expression reveal that artists' attitudes to their subject matter and to reality are ultimately predetermined by history and are not the whims of their creators. The problem, as he sees it, is not in pinpointing the very instance of borrowing and continuity of lexical form, but in finding the many invisible ties between the art language and the cultural and historical soil from which it has sprung. Not simply a sensuous effect produced by a musical intonation, or by an image's composition and lexical framework, this language is capable of expressing the entire wealth of the period's meaning. In this connection, the author suggests a concept of the basis and source of relevant art forms. Krivtsun shows how the language of music, painting, and literature in the seventeenth through twentieth centuries can exemplify the evolution of various types of artistic vision that shed light on the history of each period's outlook, perception, and sensuousness.