Loosely defined, the term humanities refers to the arts – the visual arts such as

architecture, painting, and sculpture; the performing arts such as music, dance, theatre
or drama, and literature. They are the branches of learning concerned with human
thought, feelings and relations.

The term art comes from the Italian word, artis, which means “craftsmanship,
skill, mastery of form, inventiveness, and the association that exist between form and
ideas and between material and techniques;” from the Aryan root ar which means to
join or put together; from the Greek words artizein which means to prepare, and
arkiskein, meaning to put together. Art then suggested the capacity to produce an
intended result from carefully planned steps or method. When a man wants to build a
house, he plans meticulously to get to what the prototype promises and he executes the
step to produce the said structure, then he is engaged in art.

It was only during the Renaissance period that the word reacquired a meaning
that was inherent in its ancient form of craft. Early Renaissance artists saw their
activities merely as craftsmanship, devoid of a whole lot of intonations that are attached
to the word now. It was during the seventeenth century when the problem and idea of
aesthetics, the study of beauty, began to unfold distinctly from the notion of technical
workmanship, which was the original conception of the word “art.” It was finally in the
eighteenth century when the word has evolved to distinguish between the fine arts and
the useful arts. The fine arts would come to mean “not delicate or highly skilled arts but
“beautiful arts” (Collingwood, 1938).