The Harmony Peace Prize 2023
Art Competition
The Harmony Peace Prize 2023 is a unique international art competition that honours Harmony and Peace in areas where conflict becomes a way of life. From Colombia, through Ukraine to Sri Lanka and Burma/Myanmar, the competition aims to encourage international artists to capture the expression of harmony. The artworks will reflect the importance of integrating diversity, respect and prosperity.
Harmonic Approach in Arm Conflict
The theme of the art competition, “The Expression of Harmony”, was inspired by the legendary Lorenzo de Medici, the ruler of Florence who neutralised Naples and Rome’s military threat.
When Lorenzo came of age, Pope Sixtus IV imposed an embargo on Florence and excommunicated the city magistrates as well as Lorenzo, the new political leader.
The ban involved the prohibition of military security, which meant the Florentines were limited to defend themselves against the imminent conquest. Florence then become an easy defeat for the annexation of neighbouring ciy-states.
But Lorenzo De Medici, an outstanding diplomat, was also an advocate of harmony. Not surprisingly, he succeeded to divert the invasion of Naples and Rome implementing the harmonic approach. By using the principles of diversity, respect and prosperity, Lorenzo proved how “treating friends well and enemies badly” was simply a narrow view of tyrants, for wise men strive to bring prosperity to all.
Like his tutor, Marsilio Ficino, Lorenzo believed that conflicts should be harmonised, mainly because the best political order leads to harmonious unity in which all members of society are allowed to flourish without violence or tyrannical aggression.
In 1480, Lorenzo signed the Naples peace treaty neutralising the feared aggression of Florence. His soft diplomacy served to shape Florence as the hub of the art world, an independent and safe citystate.
Lorenzo came to be known as the Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, taming Naples, the centaur, a mythical creature half beast, half human. The allegory was immortalised by Sandro Boticelli showing the triumph of virtue and wisdom over lust and greed.
As an idealist, Lorenzo advocated that for states to be fit for survival they must organise themselves in ways where citizens fulfil their sense of duty, in which justice becomes a harmonious strength rather than an excuse to create conflict.
These were the teachings of Plato and Plotinus which Lorenzo’s grandfather, Cosimo de Medici made accessible to the Western European elite. Lorenzo put the ideals into practice, and eventually influenced the entire Italian Renaissance movement shaping the artistic world forever.
The Innate Human Desire For Beauty
In the platonic school, beauty was regarded as a transcendent ideal, a super natural force that transforms the human experience like a striking thunder. Beauty was regarded as self evidence of measurable harmonious proportions. Beauty, according to Plotinus, holds the goodness of two basic elements, proportionality and harmony.
We ourselves possess beauty when we are true to our own being…knowing ourselves,
we are beautiful; in self-ignorance we are ugly.
Plotinus’ reasoning on beauty had a major impact in much of the Roman architecture. During the 1st century BC, the Roman father of architecture, Vitruvius, was convinced that to reach beauty, buildings had to reveal the ideal proportions of the human body. He applied the platonic principles of beauty, the key to the grandeur of his buildings. This is how harmony, as a matter of beautiful proportions, became the epitome of perfection in ancient Rome, a principal of measurement to achieve the ultimate perfection.
Likewise, the Renaissance man sought to follow the ultimate perfection to solve intellectual, artistic, political and social problems with humanistic ideals.
For Lorenzo de Medici, art was an illusion of the ideal form, an entertainment with the potential to motivate and transform people’s lives so they could thrive in harmony with their natural surroundings.
The goal of The Harmony Peace Prize 2023 is to make a difference in people’s lives by bringing harmony to their surroundings, for without harmony, as Lorenzo de Medici would say, “rationality turns bitter and leads to chaos, the source of human suffering.”
International artists and architects are encouraged to participate. Cash prizes and no entry fee.
Closing Date November 15th. Winners will be announced on 27th November.
For registration, terms and conditions please contact: ipd-law@outlook.com
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