A Comparative Analysis of Aesthetics of Sky Landscape Reflected in the Ancient Domes and Images of Contemporary Age

Through the evolution course of history, the sky has been loaded with meanings, mysteries, and secretes in many nations. Since the time of mythology, it has signified different meaning such as boundlessness, wideness, benevolence, mysteriousness, extension, and inaccessibility. In addition to the sky, the sun, the most original source of light and endlessness, has reinforced this idea that the gods are in the sky. In Iran, this belief was introduced by the Zarathustra school and appeared in a different form in the Islamic era. The sky and its associated concepts have been used in arts, literature, philosophy, and applied arts, architecture and other disciplines. Many descriptions for this term (e.g. in various forms of text, image and etc) has been the corollary of such applications. The sky and its wide aspects, the inseparable parts of nature, have been rooted in human nature. Designing the sky and its concepts in the arts by the human is known as the aesthetics of sky landscape. The sky landscape as an objective-subjective phenomenon is one of the most frequent, dynamic, and most diverse and beautiful natural scenery that influence human’s perception of the landscape. In this paper, we attempted to compare the aesthetics of the sky landscape throughout the history with its feature in the contemporary era. To this end, we explored the reflections of the aesthetics of the sky landscape in the ancient art samples, the motifs under the dome and the porches. Such reflection in the modern era was captured by investigating the aesthetic features in the images found through Google search engine. To this purpose, we used Google data tree to cluster the Google images associated with the sky on based on their content then we compared our database with 15 samples of domes and in terms of sky elements such as the sun, the cloud, stars. The results of the study showed that these elements play a key role in the aesthetics of the sky landscape. However, the aesthetics of the sky landscape has undergone changes in its characteristics throughout history. The changes are associated with human’s perspective which de-emphasizes the subjectivity of arts and underscores its objectivity.