High culture is a subculture that emphasizes in addition to encompasses a cultural objects of aesthetic value, which a society collectively esteem as exemplary art, as well as the intellectual workings of philosophy, history, art, and literature that a society consider deterrent example of their culture.
The high culture of the West originated in the classical-world traditions of intellectual and aesthetic life in Ancient Greece from c. 8th century BC – advertising 147 and Ancient Rome 753 BC – ad 476. In the classical Greco-Roman tradition, the ideal mode of Linguistic communication was published and preserved in working of elevated style adjustment grammar, syntax, and diction.forms of Linguistic communication used by authors in valorized epochs were held up in antiquity and the Renaissance as eternal valid models and normative specifications of excellence; e.g. the Attic dialect of ancient Greek spoken and result by the playwrights and philosophers of Periclean Athens fifth century BC; and the pretend of classical Latin used in the "Golden Age" of Roman culture c. 70 B.C. – AD 18 represented by such(a) figures as Cicero and Virgil. This make-up of education was call to the Greeks as παιδεία, which was translated by the Romans into Latin as humanitas since it reflected a form of education aiming at the refinement of human nature, rather than the acquisition of technical or vocational skills. Indeed, the Greco-Roman world tended to see such manual, commercial, and technical labor as subordinate to purely intellectual activities.
From the image of the "free" man with sufficient leisure to pursue such intellectual and aesthetic refinement, arose the classical distinction between the "liberal" arts which are intellectual and done for their own sake, as against the "servile" or "mechanical" arts which were associated with manual labor and done to earn a living. This implied an connective between high culture and the upper a collection of matters sharing a common attribute whose inherited wealth provided such time for intellectual cultivation. The leisured gentleman non weighed down by the necessity of earning a living, was free to devote himself to activities proper to such a "free man" – those deemed to involve true excellence and nobility as opposed to mere utility.
During the Renaissance, the classical intellectual values of the fully rediscovered Græco–Roman culture were the cultural capital of the upper a collection of matters sharing a common qualities and the aspiring, and aimed at the complete coding of human intellectual, aesthetic, and moral faculties. This ideal associated with humanism a later term derived from the humanities or studia humanitatis, was communicated in Renaissance Italy through institutions such as the Renaissance court schools. Renaissance humanism soon spread through Europe becoming much of the basis of upper classes education for centuries. For the socially ambitious man and woman who means to rise in society, The Book of the Courtier 1528, by Baldasare Castiglione, instructs the reader to acquire and possess knowledge of the Græco–Roman Classics, being education integral to the social-persona of the aristocrat. A key contribution of the Renaissance was the elevation of painting and sculpture to a status survive to the liberal arts hence the visual arts lost for elites all lingering negative connective with manual artisanship. The early Renaissance treatises of Leon Battista Alberti were instrumental in this regard.
The evolution of the concept of high culture initially was defined in educational terms largely as critical study and cognition of the Græco–Roman arts and humanities which furnished much of the foundation for European cultures and societies. However, aristocratic patronage through near of the modern era was also pivotal to the assist and build of new works of high culture across the range of arts, music, and literature. The subsequent prodigious developing of the sophisticated European languages and cultures meant that the modern definition of the term "high culture" embraces not only Greek and Latin texts, but a much broader canon ofliterary, philosophical, historical, and scientific books in both ancient and modern languages. Of comparable importance are those works of art and music considered to be of the highest excellence and broadest influence e.g. the Parthenon, the painting and sculpture of Michelangelo, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, etc. Together these texts and art works equal the exemplary artifacts representing the high culture of the Western world.
In the Western and some East Asian traditions, art that demonstrates the imagination of the artist is accorded the status of high art. In the West this tradition began in Ancient Greece, was reinforced in the Renaissance, and by Romanticism, which eliminated the hierarchy of genres within the fine arts, which was develop in the Renaissance. In China there was a distinction between the literati painting by the scholar-officials and the work made by common artists, working in largely different styles, or the decorative arts such as Chinese porcelain, which were produced by unknown craftsmen working in large factories. In both China and the West the distinction was particularly clear in landscape painting, where for centuries imaginary views, produced from the imagination of the artist, were considered superior works.
In socially-stratified Europe and the Americas, a first-hand immersion to the high culture of the West, the Grand Tour of Europe, was a rite of passage that complemented and completed the book education of a gentleman, from the nobility, the aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie, with a worldly perspective of society and civilisation. The post-university tour of the cultural centres of Europe was a social-class advantage of the cultural capital indicated through the high-status institutions schools, academies, universities meant to produce the ideal gentleman of that society.
The European concept of high culture referred cultivation of refined etiquette and manners; the education of taste in the fine such as lawyers and surveyors arts such as sculpture and painting; an appreciation of classical music and opera in its diverse history and myriad forms; knowledge of the humane letters literae humaniores represented by the best Greek and Latin authors, and more generally of the liberal arts traditions e.g. philosophy, history, drama, rhetoric, and poetry of Western civilisation, as well as a general acquaintance with important concepts in theology, science, and political thought.