Paul Oskar Kristeller
The Modern System of the Arts:
A Study in the History of Aesthetics
Part I
Journal of the History of Ideas,
Vol. 12, No. 4 (Oct., 1951),
pp. 496-527
[SK's comments]
[minimal excisions in main body]
[many Greek terms dashed out]
I read this a while back, once and quickly. It's good to come back to it. But I would not have thought that it would figure in the Definition Wars, and I'm still not sure that it should.
Yes, different "systems" for organizing the same material can gain acceptance, in light of contingencies. So what? That is where the Definition project begins, not where it ends.
[496]
THE MODERN SYSTEM OF THE ARTS:
A Study in the History of Aesthetics (I)
By Paul Oskar Kristeller
Dedicated to Professor Hans Tietze on his 70th birthday
I
The fundamental importance of the eighteenth century in the history of aesthetics and of art criticism is generally recognized.
To be sure, there has been a great variety of theories and currents within the last two hundred years that cannot be easily brought under one common denominator.
Yet all the changes and controversies of the more recent past presuppose certain fundamental notions which go back to that classical century of modern aesthetics.
It is known that the very term "Aesthetics" was coined at that time, and, at least in the opinion of some historians, the subject matter itself, the "philosophy of art," was invented in that comparatively recent period
and can be
applied to earlier phases of Western thought
only with reservation. ¹
It is also generally agreed that such dominating concepts of
¹ ...
For music: H. Sahlender, Die Bewertung der Musik im System der Kuenste: Eine historisch-systematische Untersuchung (thes. Jena, 1929). ...
[497]
modern aesthetics as taste and sentiment, genius, originality and creative imagination did not assume their definite modern meaning before the eighteenth century.
Some scholars have rightly noticed that only the eighteenth century produced a type of literature in which the various arts were compared with each other and discussed on the basis of common principles,
whereas up to that period treatises on poetics and rhetoric, on painting and architecture, and on music had represented quite distinct branches of writing and were primarily concerned with technical precepts rather than with general ideas.
Finally, at least a few scholars have noticed that the term "Art," with a capital A and in its modern sense, and the related term "Fin Arts" (Beaux Arts) originated in all probability in the eighteenth century.
In this paper, I shall take all these facts for granted, and shall concentrate instead on a much simpler and in a sense more fundamental point that is closely related to the problems so far mentioned, but does not seem to have received sufficient attention in its own right.
Although the terms " Art," "Fine Arts " or "Beaux Arts" are often identified with the visual arts alone, they are also quite commonly understood in a broader sense.
In this broader meaning, the term "Art" comprises above all the five major arts of
painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry.
These five constitute the irreducible nucleus of the modern system of the arts, on which all writers and thinkers seem to agree.
On the other hand, certain additional arts are sometimes added to the scheme, but with less regularity, depending on the different views and interests of the authors concerned: gardening, engraving and the decorative arts, the dance and the theatre, sometimes the opera, and finally eloquence and prose literature.
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The basic notion that the five "major arts"
constitute an area all by themselves,
clearly separated by common characteritics from the crafts, the sciences and other human activities, has been taken for granted by most writers on aesthetics from Kant to the present day.
It is freely employed even by those critics of art and literature who profess not to believe in "aesthetics";
and it is accepted as a matter of course by the general public of amateurs who assign to "Art" with a capital A that ever narrowing area of modern life which is not occupied by science, religion, or practical pursuits.
It is my purpose here to show that
this system of the arts,
which underlies all modern aesthetics and is so familiar to us all, is of comparatively recent origin and
did not assume definite shape
before the eighteenth century,
although it has many ingredients which go back to classical, medieval and Renaissance thought.
I shall not try to discuss any metaphysical theories of beauty or any particular theories concerning one or more of the arts, let alone their actual history, but only the systematic grouping together of the five major arts.
This question does not directly concern any specific changes or achievements in the various arts, but primarily
their relations to each other
and their place in the general framework of Western culture.
Since the subject has been overlooked by most historians of aesthetics and of literary, musical or artistic theories,⁶ it is hoped that a brief and quite tentative study may throw light on some of the problems with which modern aesthetics and its historiography have been concerned.
II
The Greek term for Art [-----] and its Latin equivalent (ars) do not specifically denote the "fine arts" in the modern sense, but were applied to all kinds of human activities which we would call crafts or sciences.
Moreover, whereas
modern aesthetics
stresses the fact that
Art cannot be learned,
and thus often becomes involved in the curious endeavor to teach the unteachable,
the ancients
always understood by Art
something that can be taught and learned.
Ancient statements about Art and the arts have often been read and understood as if they were meant in the modern sense of the fine arts.
This may in some
⁶ I have come across only two authors who saw the problem quite clearly: H. Parker, The Nature of the Fine Arts (London, 1885), esp. 1-30.
A. Philip McMahon, Preface to an American Philosophy of Art (Chicago, 1945).
The latter study is better documented but marred by polemical intentions. I hope to add to their material and conclusions.
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cases have led to fruitful errors, but it does not do justice to the original intention of the ancient writers.
When the Greek authors began to oppose Art to Nature, they thought of
human activity in general.
When Hippocrates contrasts Art with Life, he is thinking of medicine, and when his comparison is repeated by Goethe or Schiller with reference to poetry, this merely shows the long way of change which the term Art had traversed by 1800 from its original meaning.
Plato puts art above mere routine because
it proceeds by rational principles and rules,
and Aristotle, who lists Art among the so-called intellectual virtues, characterizes it as
a kind of activity based on knowledge,
in a definition whose influence was felt through many centuries.
The Stoics also defined Art as
a system of cognitions,
and it was in this sense that they considered moral virtue as an art of living.
The other central concept of modern aesthetics also,
beauty,
does not appear in ancient thought or literature with its specific modern connotations.
The Greek term [-----] and its Latin equivalent (pulchrum) were never neatly or consistently distinguished from
the good.
When Plato discusses beauty in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, he is speaking not merely of the physical beauty of human persons, but also of
beautiful habits of the soul
and of
beautiful cognitions,
whereas he fails completely to mention works of art in this connection.
An incidental remark made in the Phaedrus and elaborated by Proclus was certainly not meant to express the modern triad of Truth, Goodness and Beauty.
When the Stoics in one of their famous statements connected Beauty and Goodness, the context as well as Cicero's Latin rendering suggest that they meant by
[500]
"Beauty"
nothing but moral goodness,
and in turn understood by
"good"
nothing but the useful.
Only in later thinkers does the speculation about "beauty" assume an increasingly "aesthetic" significance, but without ever leading to a separate system of aesthetics in the modern sense.
Panaetius identifies moral beauty with decorum, a term he borrows from Aristotle's Rhetoric, and consequently likes to compare the various arts with each other and with the moral life.
His doctrine is known chiefly through Cicero, but it may also have influenced Horace.
Plotinus in his famous treatises on beauty is concerned primarily with metaphysical and ethical problems, but he does include in his treatment of sensuous beauty the visible beauty of works of sculpture and architecture, and the audible beauty of music.
Likewise, in the speculations on beauty scattered through the works of Augustine there are references to the various arts, yet the doctrine was not primarily designed for an interpretations of the "fine arts."²¹
Whether we can speak of aesthetics in the case of Plato, Plotinus or Augustine will depend on our definition of that term, but we should certainly realize that in the theory of beauty a consideration of the arts is quite absent in Plato and secondary in Plotinus and Augustine.
Let us now turn to the individual arts and to the manner in which they were evaluated and grouped by the ancients.
Poetry was always most highly respected, and
***crazy/infantile artists***
(1 of 2)
the notion that the poet is
inspired by the Muses
goes back to Homer and Hesiod.
The Latin term (vates) also suggests an old link between poetry and
religious prophecy,
and Plato is hence drawing upon an early notion when in the Phaedrus he considers poetry
one of the forms of divine madness.
However, we should also remember that the same conception of poetry is expressed with a certain irony in the Ion and the Apology
and that even in
¹⁸ ...
²¹ K. Svoboda, L'esthetique de Saint Augustin et ses sources (Brno, 1933).
E. Chapman, Saint Augustine's Philosophy of Beauty (New York, 1939).
E. Gilson, Introduction a l'etude de Saint Augustin, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1949), 279f.
²² ...
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the Phaedrus the divine madness of the poet is compared with that of
the lover and of the religious prophet.
There is no mention of the "fine arts" in this passage, and it was left to the late sophist Callistratus to transfer Plato's concept of inspiration to the art of sculpture.
Among all the "fine arts" it was certainly poetry about which Plato had most to say, especially in the Republic, but the treatment given to it is neither systematic nor friendly, but
suspiciously similar to the one he gives to rhetoric
in some of his other writings.
Aristotle, on the other hand, dedicated a whole treatise to the theory of poetry and deals with it in a thoroughly systematic and constructive fashion.
The Poetics not only contains a great number of specific ideas which exercised a lasting influence upon later criticism;
it also established a permanent place for the theory of poetry in the philosophical encyclopaedia of knowledge.
The
mutual influence of poetry and eloquence
had been a permanent feature of ancient literature ever since the time of the Sophists,
and the close relationship between these two branches of literature received a theoretical foundation through the proximity of the Rhetoric and the Poetics in the corpus of Aristotle's works.
Moreover,
since the order of the writings in the Aristotelian Corpus was interpreted as early as the commentators of late antiquity as a scheme of classification for the philosophical disciplines,
the place of the Rhetoric and the Poetics after the logical writings of the Organon established
a link between logic, rhetoric and poetics
that was emphasized by some of the Arabic commentators, the effects of which were felt down to the Renaissance.
Music also held a high place in ancient thought;
yet it should be remembered that the Greek term [-------], which is derived from the Muses, originally comprised much more than we understand by music.
Musical education, as we can still see in Plato's Republic, included not only music, but also poetry and the dance.
Plato and Aristotle, who also employ the term music in the more specific sense familiar to us, do not treat music or the dance as separate arts but rather as
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elements of certain types of poetry,
especially of lyric and dramatic poetry.
There is reason to believe that they were thus clinging to
an older tradition
which was actually
disappearing in their own time
through
the emancipation of instrumental music
from poetry.
On the other hand, the Pythagorean discovery of the numerical proportions underlying the musical intervals led to a theoretical treatment of music on a mathematical basis,
and consequently musical theory entered into
an alliance with the mathematical sciences
which is already apparent in Plato's Republic, and was to last far down into early modern times.
When we consider the visual arts of
painting, sculpture and architecture,
it appears that
their social and intellectual prestige in antiquity
was much lower than one might expect
from their actual achievements or from occasional enthusiastic remarks which date for the most part from the later centuries.³¹
It is true that painting was compared to poetry by Simonides and Plato, by Aristotle and Horace, as it was compared to rhetoric by Cicero, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and other writers.
It is also true that architecture was included among the liberal arts by Varro and Vitruvius, and
²⁹ ...
³¹ ...
R. McKeon, "Literary Criticism and the Concept of Imitation in Antiquity," Modern Philology, 34 (1936-37), 1-35.
³² ...
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painting by Pliny and Galen, that Dio Chrysostom compared the art of the sculptor with that of the poet, and that Philostratus and Callistratus wrote enthusiastically about painting and sculpture.
Yet the place of painting among the liberal arts was explicitly denied by Seneca and ignored by most other writers,
and the statement of Lucian that everybody admires the works of the great sculptors but would not want to be a sculptor oneself, seems to reftect the prevalent view among writers and thinkers.
The term [----------], commonly applied to painters and sculptors, reflects their low social standing, which was related to
the ancient contempt for manual work.
When Plato compares the description of his ideal state to a painting and even calls his world-shaping god a demiurge, he no more enhances the importance of the artist than does Aristotle when he uses the statue as the standard example for a product of human art.
When Cicero, probably reflecting Panaetius, speaks of the ideal notions in the mind of the sculptor, and when the Middle Platonists and Plotinus compare the ideas in the mind of God with the concepts of the visual artist they go one step further.⁵¹
Yet no ancient philosopher, as far as I know, wrote a separate systematic treatise on the visual arts or assigned to them a prominent place in his scheme of knowledge.
⁴¹ ...
⁵¹ ... The ancient comparison of God with the craftsman was reversed by the modern aestheticians who compared the "creative" artist with God.
Cf. Milton C. Nahm, "The Theological Background of the Theory of the Artist as Creator," this Journal, 8 (1947), 363-72.
E. Kris and O. Kurz, Die Legende vom Künstler (Vienna, 1934), 47ff.
⁵² ...
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If we want to find in classical philosophy a link between poetry, music and the fine arts, it is provided primarily by
the concept of imitation
[-------].
Passages have been collected from the writings of Plato and Aristotle from which it appears quite clearly that they considered poetry, music, the dance, painting and sculpture as different forms of imitation.
This fact is significant so far as it goes, and it has influenced many later authors, even in the eighteenth century.
But aside from the fact that none of the passages has a systematic character or even enumerates all of the "fine arts" together, it should be noted
that the scheme excludes architecture,
that music and the dance are treated as parts of poetry and not as separate arts," and
that on the other hand the individual branches or subdivisions of poetry and of music seem to be put on a par with painting or sculpture.
Finally,
imitation is anything but a laudatory category,
at least for Plato,
and
wherever Plato and Aristotle treat the "imitative arts" as a distinct group within the larger class of "arts," this group seems to include, besides the" fine arts" in which we are interested,
other activities that are less "fine,"
such as sophistry, or the use of the mirror, of magic tricks, or the imitation of animal voices.
Moreover, Aristotle's distinction between
the arts of necessity
and
the arts of pleasure
is quite incidental and does not identify the arts of pleasure with the "fine" or even the imitative arts, and
when it is emphasized that he includes
music and drawing
in his scheme of education in the Politics, it should be added that they share this place with
grammar (writing) and arithmetic.
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The final ancient attempts at a classification of the more important human arts and sciences were made after the time of Plato and Aristotle.
They were due partly to
the endeavors of rival schools
of philosophy and rhetoric
to organize secondary or preparatory education
into a system of elementary disciplines [-- --------].
This system of the so-called "liberal arts" was subject to a number of changes and fluctuations, and its development is not known in all of its earlier phases.
Cicero often speaks of the liberal arts and of their mutual connection, though he does not give a precise list of these arts, but we may be sure that he did not think of the "fine arts" as was so often believed in modern times.
The definitive scheme of the seven liberal arts is found only in Martianus Capella:
grammar,
rhetoric,
dialectic,
arithmetic,
geometry,
astronomy, and
music.
Other schemes which are similar but not quite identical are found in many Greek and Latin authors before Capella.
Very close to Capella's scheme, and probably its source, was that of Varro, which included medicine and architecture, in addition to Capella's seven arts.
Quite similar also is the scheme underlying the work of Sextus Empiricus.
It contains only six arts, omitting logic, which is treated as one of the three parts of philosophy.
The Greek author, Sextus, was conscious of the difference betwen
the preliminary disciplines
and
the parts of philosophy,
whereas the Latin authors who had no native tradition of philosophical instruction were ready to disregard that distinction.
If we compare Capella's scheme of the seven liberal arts with the modern system of the "fine arts," the differences are obvious.
Of the fine arts only music, understood as musical theory, appears among the liberal arts.
Poetry is not listed among them, yet we know from other sources that it was closely linked with grammar and rhetoric.
The visual arts have no place in the scheme, except for occasional attempts at inserting them, of which we have spoken above.
On the other hand, the liberal arts include grammar and logic, mathematics and astronomy,
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that is, disciplines we should classify as sciences.
The same picture is gained from the distribution of the arts among the nine Muses.
It should be noted that the number of the Muses was not fixed before a comparatively late period, and that the attempt to assign particular arts to individual Muses is still later and not at all uniform.
However, the arts listed in these late schemes are the various branches of poetry and of music, with eloquence, history, the dance, grammar, geometry and astronomy.
In other words, just as in the schemes of the liberal arts, so in the schemes for the Muses poetry and music are grouped with some of the sciences, whereas the visual arts are omitted.
Antiquity knew no Muse of painting or of sculpture;
they had to be invented by the allegorists of the early modern centuries.
And the five fine arts which constitute the modern system were not grouped together in antiquity, but kept quite different company:
poetry stays usually with grammar and rhetoric;
music is as close to mathematics and astronomy as it is to the dance, and poetry;
and the visual arts, excluded from the realm of the Muses and of the liberal arts by most authors, must be satisfied with the modest company of the other manual crafts.
Thus classical antiquity left
no systems or elaborate concepts
of an aesthetic nature,
but merely a number of scattered notions and suggestions that exercised a lasting influence down to modern times but had to be carefully selected, taken out of their context, rearranged, reemphasized and reinterpreted or misinterpreted before they could be utilized as building materials for aesthetic systems.
We have to admit the conclusion, distasteful to many historians of aesthetics but grudgingly admitted by most of them, that ancient writers and thinkers,
though confronted with
excellent works of art
and quite susceptible to
their charm,
were neither able nor eager to
detach the aesthetic quality of these works
of art from
their intellectual, moral, religious and practical
function or content, or to use such an aesthetic quality as a standard for grouping the fine arts together or for making them the subject of a comprehensive philosophical interpretation.
Is
able
the right framing?
Does the "ability" to make this
detachment
represent
any kind of
advance?
any kind of
Regress?
Or
is it just
different
without being
better
or worse?
Is
it an "ability",
or just a (pre)disposition?
(Were 'all things not possible at all times'? Or were certain things quite possible, but just so happened not to be realized? And then . . . What's the diff?)
Perhaps "detachment" itself has a
function;
and then, again and again,
some will suggest that this case of 'inventing what we need' could only be a response to perverse needs arising out of untenable circumstances. But (right now) we won't talk about
those
people.
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III
The early Middle Ages
inherited from late antiquity
the scheme of the seven liberal arts
that served not only for a comprehensive classification of human knowledge but also for
the curriculum
of the monastic and cathedral schools down to the twelfth century.
The subdivision of the seven arts into the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) and Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music) seems to have been emphasized since Carolingian times.
This classification became inadequate after the growth of learning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
The classification schemes of the twelfth century reflect different attempts to combine the traditional system of the liberal arts with the threefold division of philosophy (logic, ethics and physics) known through Isidore, and with the divisions of knowledge made by Aristotle or based on the order of his writings, which then began to become known through Latin translations from the Greek and Arabic.
The rise of the universities also established philosophy, medicine, jurisprudence and theology as new and distinct subjects outside the liberal arts, and the latter were again reduced from the status of
an encyclopaedia of secular knowledge
they had held in the earlier Middle Ages to that of
preliminary disciplines
they had held originally in late antiquity.
On the other hand, Hugo of St. Victor was probably the first to formulate a scheme of seven
mechanical arts
corresponding to the seven liberal arts, and this scheme influenced many important authors of the subsequent period, such as Vincent of Beauvais and Thomas Aquinas.
The seven mechanical arts, like the seven liberal arts earlier, also appeared in artistic representations, and they are worth listing:
lanificium,
armatura,
navigatio,
agricultura,
venatio,
medicina,
theatrica.
Architecture as
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well as various branches of sculpture and of painting are listed, along with several other crafts, as subdivisions of armatura,
and thus occupy a quite subordinate place even among the mechanical arts.
Music
appears in all these schemes
in the company of the mathematical disciplines,
whereas poetry, when mentioned, is closely linked to grammar, rhetoric and logic.
The fine arts are not grouped together or singled out in any of these schemes, but scattered among various sciences, crafts, and other human activities of a quite disparate nature.
Different as are these schemes from each other in detail, they show a persistent general pattern and continued to influence later thought.
If we compare these theoretical systems with the reality of the same period,
we find poetry and music among the subjects taught in many schools and universities,
whereas the visual arts were confined to the artisans' guilds, in which the painters were sometimes associated with the druggists who prepared their paints, the sculptors with the goldsmiths, and the architects with the masons and carpenters.
The treatises also that were written, on poetry and rhetoric, on music, and on some of the arts and crafts, the latter not too numerous, have all a strictly technical and professional character and show no tendency to link any of these arts with the others or with philosophy.
The very concept of "art" retained the same comprehensive meaning it had possessed in antiquity, and the same connotation that it was teachable.
And the term artista coined in the Middle Ages indicated either the craftsman or the student of the liberal arts.
Neither for Dante nor for Aquinas has the term Art the meaning
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we associate with it,
and it has been emphasized or admitted that for Aquinas shoemaking, cooking and juggling, grammar and arithmetic are no less and in no other sense artes than painting and sculpture, poetry and music, which latter are never grouped together, not even as imitative arts.⁸³
On the other hand,
the concept of beauty that is occasionally discussed by Aquinas⁸⁴ and somewhat more emphatically by a few other medieval philosophers is not linked with the arts, fine or otherwise, but
treated primarily as
a metaphysical attribute of God
and of his creation,
starting from Augustine and from Dionysius the Areopagite.
Among the transcendentals or most general attributes of being, pulchrum does not appear in thirteenth-century philosophy, although it is considered as a general concept and treated in close connection with bonum.
The question whether Beauty is one of the transcendentals has become a subject of controversy among Neo-Thomists.
This is an interesting sign of their varying attitude toward modern aesthetics, which some of them would like to incorporate in a philosophical system based on Thomist principles.
For Aquinas himself,
⁸³ ...
G. G. Coulton, Art and the Reformation (Oxford, 1928), 559ff.
⁸⁴ ...
I. Chapman, "The Perennial Theme of Beauty," in Essays in Thomism (New York, 1942), 333-46 and 417-19.
...
⁸⁵ ...
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or for other medieval philosophers, the question is meaningless, for
even if they had posited pulchrum as a transcendental concept, which they did not, its meaning would have been different from the modern notion of artistic beauty in which the Neo-Thomists are interested.
Thus it is obvious that there was
artistic production
as well as
artistic appreciation
in the Middle Ages,⁸⁷ and this could not fail to find occаsional expression in literature and philosophy.
Yet there is no medieval
concept or system
of the Fine Arts, and
if we want to keep speaking of medieval aesthetics, we must admit that its concept and subject matter are, for better or for worse, quite different from the modern philosophical discipline.
IV
The period of
the Renaissance
brought about many important changes in the social and cultural position of the various arts and thus prepared the ground for the later development of aesthetic theory.
But, contrary to a widespread opinion, the Renaissance
did not formulate
a system of the fine arts
or
a comprehensive theory of aesthetics.
Early Italian humanism, which in many respects continued the grammatical and rhetorical traditions of the Middle Ages, not merely
provided the old Trivium with a new and more ambitious name (Studia humanitatis) but also
increased its actual scope, content and significance in the curriculum of the schools and universities and in its own extensive literary production.
The Studia humanitatis excluded logic, but they added to the traditional grammar and rhetoric not only history, Greek and moral philosophy, but also made poetry, once a sequel of grammar and rhetoric, the most important member of the whole group.
It is true that
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries poetry was understood as the ability to write Latin verse and to interpret the ancient poets, and that
the poetry which the humanists defended against some of their theological contemporaries or for which they were crowned by popes and emperors was a quite different thing from what we understand by that name.
Yet
***crazy/infantile artists***
(2 of 2)
the name poetry, meaning at first Latin poetry, received much honor and
⁸⁷ M. Schapiro, "On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art," in Art and Thought, Essays in Honor of A. K. Coomaraswamy (London, 1947), 130-50.
⁸⁸ ...
[511]
glamor through the early humanists,
and by the sixteenth century vernacular poetry and prose began to share in the prestige of Latin literature.
It was the various branches of Latin and vernacular poetry and literature which constituted the main pursuit of the numerous "Academies" founded in Italy during that period and imitated later in the other European countries.
The revival of Platonism also helped to spread the notion of
the divine madness of the poet,
a notion that by the second half of the sixteenth century began to be extended to the visual arts and became
one of the ingredients of
the modern concept of genius.
With the second third of the sixteenth century, Aristotle's Poetics, along with his Rhetoric, began to exercise increasing influence, not only through translations and commentaries, but also through a rising number of treatises on Poetics in which the notions of Aristotle constituted one of the dominant features.
Poetic imitation is regularly
[512]
discussed along Aristotelian lines, and some authors also notice and stress the analogies between poetry, painting, sculpture and music as forms of imitation.
However, most of them know that music for Aristotle was a part of poetry, and that he knew other forms of imitation outside of the "fine arts," and hardly anyone among them is trying to establish the "imitative arts" as a separate class.
Musical theory retained during the Renaissance its status as one of the liberal arts, and the author of an early treatise on the dance tries to dignify his subject by the claim that his art, being a part of music, must be considered as a liberal art.
It seems that the prac-
[513]
tice of the Improvvisatori as well as the reading of classical sources
suggested to some humanists
a closer link
between music and poetry than had been customary in the preceding period.
This tendency received a new impetus by the end of the sixteenth century, when the program of the Camerata and the creation of the opera brought about a reunion of the two arts.
It would even seem that some of the features of Marinismo and baroque poetry that were so repulsive to classicist critics were due to the fact that this poetry was written with the intention of being set to music and sung.
Still more characteristic of the Renaissance is the steady rise of painting and of the other visual arts that began in Italy with Cimabue and Giotto and reached its climax in the sixteenth century.
An early expression of the increasing prestige of the visual arts is found on the Campanile of Florence, where painting, sculpture, and architecture appear as a separate group between the liberal and the mechanical arts.
What characterizes the period is
not only the quality
of the works of art but also
the close links
that were established between
the visual arts, the sciences and literature.
The appearance of a distinguished artist who also was a humanist and writer of merit, such as Alberti, was no coincidence in a period in which literary and classical learning began, in addition to religion, to provide the subject matter for painters and sculptors.
When a knowledge of perspective, anatomy, and geometrical proportions was considered necessary for the painter and sculptor, it was no wonder that several artists should have made important contributions to the various sciences.
On the other hand, ever since Filippo Villani,
the humanists,
and their journalist successors
in the sixteenth century looked with favor upon the work of contemporary artists and would lend their pen to its praise.
From the end of the fourteenth century through the sixteenth the writings of the artists and of authors sympathetic to the visual arts
[514]
repeat the claim that painting should be considered as
one of the liberal,
not of the mechanical
arts.
It has been rightly noted that
the classical testimonies
in favor of painting, mainly from Pliny, Galen and Philostratus, were
not as authoritative and strong
as the Renaissance authors who quoted them in support of their claim believed or pretended to believe.
Yet the claim of Renaissance writers on painting to have their art recognized as liberal, however weakly supported by classical authority, was significant as an attempt to
enhance the social and cultural position
of painting and of the other visual arts, and to obtain for them the same prestige that music, rhetoric, and poetry had long enjoyed.
And since it was still apparent that
the liberal arts were primarily sciences
or teachable knowledge, we may well understand why Leonardo tried to define painting as a science and to emphasize its close relationship with mathematics
The rising social and cultural claims of the visual arts led in the sixteenth century in Italy to an important new development that occurred in the other European countries somewhat later:
the three visual arts,
painting, sculpture and architecture, were for the first time clearly separated from
the crafts
with which they had been associated in the preceding period.
The term Arti del disegno, upon which "Beaux Arts" was probably based, was coined by Vasari, who used it as the guiding concept for his famous collection of biographies.
And this change in theory found its institutional expression in 1563 when
in Florence, again under the personal influence of Vasari, the painters, sculptors and architects cut their previous connections with the craftsmen's guilds and
formed an Academy
of Art (Accademia del Disegno),
the first of its kind that served as a model for later similar institutions in Italy and other countries.
The Art Academies
followed the pattern of
the literary Academies
that had been in existence for some time,
and they
replaced
the older workshop tradition
with a regular kind of instruction
that included such scientific subjects as geometry and anatomy.
[515]
The ambition of painting to share in the traditional prestige of literature also accounts for the popularity of a notion that appears prominently for the first time in the treatises on painting of the sixteenth century and was to retain its appeal down to the eighteenth:
the parallel between painting and poetry.
Its basis was the Ut pіctura poesis of Horace, as well as the saying of Simonides reported by Plutarch, along with some other passages in Plato, Aristotle and Horace.
The history of this notion from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century has been carefully studied, and it has been justly pointed out that the use then made of the comparison exceeded anything done or intended by the ancients.
Actually,
the meaning of the comparison
was reversed,
since the ancients had compared poetry with painting
when they were writing about poetry,
whereas the modern authors more often compared painting with poetry
while writing about painting.
How seriously the comparison was taken we can see from the fact that Horace's Ars poetica was taken as a literary model for some treatises on painting and that many poetical theories and concepts were applied to painting by these authors in a more or less artificial manner.
The persistent comparison between poetry and painting went a long way, as did the emancipation of the three visual arts from the crafts, to prepare the ground for the later system of the five fine arts, but it obviously does not yet presuppose or constitute such a system.
Even the few treatises written in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century that dealt with both poetry and painting do not seem to have gone beyond more or less external comparisons into an analysis of common principles.
[516]
The sixteenth century formulated still other ideas that pointed in the direction of later developments in the field of aesthetics.
Just as the period attached great importance to questions of "precedence" at courts and in public ceremonies, so the Academies and educated circles inherited from the medieval schools and universities the fancy for
arguing the relative merits and superiority
of the various sciences, arts or other human activities.
This type of debate was by no means limited to the arts, as appears from the old rivalry between medicine and jurisprudence, or from the new contest between "arms and letters."
Yet this kind of discussion was also applied to the arts and thus helped to strengthen the sense of their affinity.
The parallel between painting and poetry, in so far as it often leads to a plea for the superiority of painting over poetry, shows the same general pattern.
No less popular was the contest between painting and sculpture, on which Benedetto Varchi in 1546 held a regular inquiry among contemporary artists, whose answers are extant and constitute interesting documents for the artistic theories of the time.
The question was still of interest to Galileo.
The most important text of this type is Leonardo's Paragone, which argues for the superiority of painting over poetry, music, and sculpture.¹⁰⁹
In a sense, this tract contains the most complete system of the fine arts that has come down to us from the Renaissance period.
However, the text was not composed by Leonardo in its present form, but put together from his scattered notes by one of his pupils, and again rearranged by most of the modern editors.
In any case, architecture is omitted, the separation between poetry and music is not consistently maintained, and the comparison seems to be extended to the mathematical disciplines
¹⁰⁵ ...
¹⁰⁹ The Literary Works, l.c. Paragone: A Comparison of the Arts by Leonardo da Vinci, ed. Irma A. Richter (London, 1949).
Lionardo da Vinci, Das Buch von der Malerei, ed. H. Ludwig, I (Vienna, 1882).
Miss Richter changes the arrangement of the manuscript, which in its turn is not due to Leonardo himself.
[517]
with which painting, as a science, is closely linked for Leonardo.
Another line of thinking which might be called the amateur tradition appears in several writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, probably first in Castiglione's Courtier.
The exercise, as well as the appreciation of poetry, music and painting are grouped together as pursuits appropriate for the courtier, the gentleman, or the prince.
Again, the occupation with these "fine arts" is not clearly marked off from fencing, horseriding, classical learning, the collecting of coins and medals and of natural curiosities or other equally worthy activities.
But there seems to be
a sense of the affinity
between the various arts
in their effect
upon the amateur, and
by the first half of the seventeenth century,
the taste and pleasure
produced by painting, music and poetry is felt by several authors to be of a similar nature.
It does not seem that Plotinus' view that beauty resides in the objects of sight, hearing, and thought exercised any particular influence at that time.
The most explicit comparison between poetry, painting, and music that I have been able to discover in Renaissance literature is the appendix which the Bohemian Jesuit, Jacobus Pontanus, added to the third edition of his treatise on poetics.
In stressing the affinity
[518]
between the three arts as forms of imitation aiming at pleasure, the author goes beyond his classical sources.
He argues for the status of painting as a liberal art, as many others had done before, but also places musical composition (not musical theory) as a separate art on the same plane with poetry and painting.
The passage is quite remarkable, and I should like to think that it was influential, since the work was often reprinted, in France also, where much of the later discussion on these topics took place.
Renaissance speculation on beauty was still unrelated to the arts and apparently influenced by ancient models.
Nifo's treatise de pulchro, still quoted in the eighteenth century, dealt exclusively with personal beauty.
Francesco da Diacceto's main philosophical work, which carries the same title, continues the metaphysical speculations of Plotinus and of his teacher Ficino and does not seem to have exercised any lasting influence.
That the Renaissance,
in spite of these notable changes,
was still far
from establishing the modern system of the fine arts appears most clearly from the classifications of the arts and sciences that were pro-
[519]
posed during that period.
These schemes continued in part the traditions of the Middle Ages, as is clear in the case of such Thomists as S. Antonino or Savonarola.
On the whole, however, there is
a greater variety of ideas
than in the preceding period, and
some of the thinkers concerned
were
neither backward nor unrepresentative.
Vives, Ramus, and Gesner largely follow the old scheme of the liberal arts and the university curriculum of their time.
Neither Agrippa of Nettesheim nor Scaliger, nor in the seventeenth century Alsted or Vossius, shows any attempt to separate the fine arts
[520]
from the sciences;
they list them scattered among all kinds of sciences and professions, and the same is still true of the eighteenth-century Cyclopaedia of E. Chambers.
Francis Bacon connects poetry with the faculty of imagination, but does not mention the other arts, and the same is true of Vico, whom Croce considers the founder of modern aesthetics.
Bonifacio stresses the link between poetry and painting, but otherwise does not separate the fine arts from the sciences, and the same is true of Tassoni.
Even Muratori, who again stresses imagination in poetry and at times compares poetry and painting, when he speaks of the arti connected with poetry means eloquence and history, in other words, the studia humanitatis.
The
[521]
modern system of the fine arts does not appear in Italy before the second half of the eighteenth century, when such writers as Bettinelli began to follow the lead of contemporary French, English and German authors.
V
During the seventeenth century the cultural leadership of Europe passed from Italy to France, and
many characteristic ideas and tendencies of the Italian Renaissance were continued and transformed by French classicism and the French Enlightenment before they became a part of later European thought and culture.
Literary criticism and poetic theory, so prominent in the French classical period, seem to have taken little notice of the other fine arts.
Only La Mesnardière in his Poetics has an introductory remark on the similarity between poetry, painting and music,
a point he calls a commonplace in Latin and Italian treatises on poetics, which is but vaguely reminiscent of such writers as Madius, Minturno, and Zuccolo, but for which we can indicate no specific source unless we assume the author's familiarity with the appendix of Jacobus Pontanus.
[522]
Yet the Siècle de Louis XIV was not limited in its achievements to poetry and literature.
Painting and the other visual arts began to flourish, and with Poussin France produced a painter of European fame.
Later in the century Lulli, although of Italian birth, developed a distinctive French style in music, and
his great success with the Parisian public went a long way to win for his art the same popularity in France it had long possessed in Italy.
This rise of the various arts was accompanied by
an institutional development
which followed in many respects the earlier Italian model, but was guided by a conscious governmental policy and hence more centralized and consistent than had been the case in Italy.
The Académie Française was organized in 1635 by Richelieu for the cultivation of the French language, poetry, and literature after the model of the Accademia della Crusca.
Several years later, in 1648, the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture was founded under Mazarin after the model of the Accademia di S. Luca in Rome, and
tended to detach
French artists from the artisans' guilds to which they had previously belonged.
Many more Academies were founded by Colbert between 1660 and 1680.
They included provincial academies of painting and sculpture, the French Academy in Rome, dedicated to the three visual arts, as well as Academies of Architecture, of Music, and of the Dance.
However, the system of
[523]
the arts that would seem to underly these foundations is
more apparent than real.
The Academies were founded at different times, and even if we limit ourselves only to the period of Colbert,
we should note that there were also the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Inscriptions et Médailles, which have no relation to the "Fine Arts";
that there was at least a project for an Académie de Spectacles to be devoted to circus performances and other public shows;
and that the Académie de Musique and the Académie de Danse, like this projected Académie de Spectacles, were not organizations of
distinguished professional
artists or scientists, like the other Academies, but
merely licensed establishments
for the regular preparation of public performances
Moreover, an extant paper from the time of Colbert that proposed to consolidate all Academies in a single institution makes no clear distinction between the arts and the sciences and lends additional though indirect support to the view that Colbert's Academies reflect a comprehensive system of cultural disciplines and professions, but not a clear conception of the Fine Arts in particular.
Along with the founding of the Academies, and partly in close connection with their activities, there developed an important and extensive
theoretical and critical literature
on the visual arts.
The Conférences held at the Académie de Peinture et Sculpture are full of
[524]
interesting critical views, and separate treatises were composed by Du Fresnoy, De Piles, Fréart de Chambray, and Félibien.
Du Fresnoy's Latin poem De arte graphica, which was translated into French and English and made the subject of notes and commentaries, was in its form a conscious imitation of Horace's Ars poetica, and
it begins characteristically by quoting Horace's Ut pictura poesis and then reversing the comparison.
The parallel between painting and poetry, as well as the contest between the two arts, were important to these authors, as to their predecessors in Renaissance Italy, because they were
anxious to acquire
for painting
a standing
equal to that of poetry and literature.
This notion, which has been fully studied, remained alive until the early eighteenth century, and
it is significant that the honor painting derives from its similarity to poetry is sometimes extended, as occasionally in the Italian Renaissance, to sculpture, architecture and even engraving as related arts.
Even the term Beaux Arts, which seems to have been intended at first for the visual arts alone, corresponding to Arti del Disegno, seems sometimes for these authors to include also music or poetry.
The comparison between painting and music is also made a few times, and
Poussin himself,
who lived in Italy,
tried to transfer
the theory of the Greek musical modes to poetry and especially to painting.
[525]
One of the great changes that occurred during the seventeenth century was
the rise and emancipation of the natural sciences.
By the second half of the century, after the work of Galileo and Descartes had been completed and the Académie des Sciences and the Royal Society had begun their activities, this development could not fail to impress the literati and the general public.
It has been rightly observed that
the famous Querelle des Anciens et Modernes,
which stirred many scholars in France and also in England during the last quarter of the century, was
due largely to
the recent discoveries in the natural sciences.¹⁵⁸
The Moderns, conscious of these achievements, definitely shook off the authority of classical antiquity that had weighed on the Renaissance no less than on the Middle Ages, and
went a long ways toward formulating
the concept of human progress.
Yet this is only one side of the Querelle.
The Querelle as it went on had two important consequences which have not been sufficiently appreciated.
First, the Moderns
broadened
the literary controversy
into
a systematic comparison
between the achievements of antiquity and of modern times in the various fields of human endeavor,
thus developing a classification of knowledge and culture that was in many respects novel, or more specific than previous systems.¹⁵⁹
Secondly, a point by point examination of the claims of the ancients and moderns in the various fields led to the insight that
in certain fields, where everything depends on
mathematical calculation and
the accumulation of knowledge,
the progress of the moderns over the ancients can be clearly demonstrated, whereas
in certain other fields, which depend on
individual talent
and on
the taste of the critic,
the relative merits of the ancients and moderns cannot be so clearly established but may be subject to controversy.
¹⁵⁸ ...
J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (London, 1920), 78ff.
¹⁵⁹ Brunetière (120) emphasizes that Perrault extended the discussion from literary criticism toward a general aesthetics, by drawing upon the other arts and even the sciences. The Italian forerunners of the Querelle had no system of the arts and sciences comparable to that of Perrault or Wotton,...
¹⁶⁰ ...
[526]
Thus the ground is prepared for the first time for a clear distinction between the arts and the sciences, a distinction absent from ancient, medieval or Renaissance discussions of such subjects even though the same words were used.
In other words, the separation between the arts and the sciences in the modern sense presupposes not only
the actual progress of the sciences
in the seventeenth century
but also
the reflection upon
the reasons why
some other human intellectual activities
which we now call the Fine Arts
did not or could not participate
in
the same kind of progress.
To be sure, the writings of the Querelle do not yet attain a complete clarity on these points, and this fact in itself definitely confirms our contention that the separation between the arts and the sciences and the modern system of the fine arts were just in the making at that time.
Fontenelle, as some scholars have noticed, indicates in an occasional statement of his Digression that he was aware of the distinction between the arts and the sciences.
Much more important and explicit is the work of Charles Perrault.
His famous Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes discusses the various fields in separate sections which reflect a system: the second dialogue is dedicated to the three visual arts, the third to eloquence, the fourth to poetry, and the fifth to the sciences.
The separation of the fine arts from the sciences is almost complete, thought not yet entirely, since music is treated in the last book among the sciences, whereas in his poem, Le Siècle de Louis le Grand, which gave rise to the whole controversy, Perrault seems to connect music with the other arts.
Moreover, in his prefaces Perrault states explicitly that at
[527]
least in the case of poetry and eloquence, where everything depends on talent and taste, progress cannot be asserted with the same confidence as in the case of the sciences which depend on measurement.
Equally interesting, though unrelated to the Querelle, is another writing of Perrault, Le Cabinet des Beaux Arts (1690).
This is a description and explanation of eight allegorical paintings found in the studio of a French gentleman to whom the work is dedicated.
In the preface, Perrault
opposes the concept Beaux Arts to the traditional Arts Libéraux, which he rejects, and then
lists and describes the eight "Fine Arts" which the gentleman had represented to suit his taste and interests:
Éloquence, Poésie, Musique, Architecture, Peinture, Sculpture, Optique, Méchanique.
Thus on the threshold of the eighteenth century we are very close to the modern system of the Fine Arts, but we have not yet quite reached it, as the inclusion of Optics and Mechanics clearly shows.
The fluctuations of the scheme show
how slowly emerged the notion
which to us
seems so thoroughly obvious.
(Continued in the next issue, Jan. 1952)
Journal of the History of Ideas,
Vol. 13, No. 1 (Jan., 1952), pp. 17-46
[17]
THE MODERN SYSTEM OF THE ARTS:
A Study in the History of Aesthetics (II)
By Paul Oskar Kristeller
VI
During the first half of the eighteenth century the interest of amateurs, writers and philosophers in the visual arts and in music increased.
The age produced not only critical writings on these arts composed by and for laymen, but also treatises in which the arts were compared with each other and with poetry, and thus finally arrived at the fixation of the modern system of the fine arts.
Since this system seems to emerge gradually and after many fluctuations in the writings of authors who were in part of but secondary importance, though influential,
it would appear that the notion and system of the fine arts may have grown and crystallized in the conversations and discussions of
cultured circles
in Paris and in London, and that the formal writings and treatises merely reflect
a climate of opinion
resulting from such conversations.
A further study of letters, diaries and articles in elegant journals may indeed supplement our brief survey, which we must limit to the better known sources.
The treatise on Beauty by J. P. de Crousaz, which first appeared in 1714 and exercised a good deal of influence, is usually considered as the earliest French treatise on aesthetics.
It has indeed something to say on the visual arts and on poetry, and devotes a whole section to music.
Moreover, it is an important attempt to give a philosophical analysis of
beauty as distinct from goodness,
thus restating and developing the notions of ancient and Renaissance Platonists.
Yet the author has no system of the arts, and applies his notion of beauty without any marked distinction to the mathematical sciences and to the moral virtues and actions as well as to the arts,
and
[18]
the fluidity of his "aesthetic" thought is shown by the fact that in his second edition he substituted a chapter on the beauty of religion for the one dealing with music.
During the following years, the problem of the arts seems to have dominated the discussions of the Académie des Inscriptions, and
several of its lectures which were printed somewhat later and exercised a good deal of influence stress the affinity between poetry, the visual arts and music.
These discussions no doubt influenced the important work of the Abbé Dubos that appeared first in 1719 and was reprinted many times in the original and in translations far into the second half of the century.¹⁷³
Dubos' merits in the history of aesthetic or artistic thought are generally recognized.
It is apparent that he discusses
not only the analogies
between poetry and painting but
also their differences,
and that he is
not interested in
the superiority of one art over the others,
as so many previous authors had been.
His work is also significant as an early, though not the first, treatment of painting
by an amateur writer,
and his claim that
the educated public
rather than
the professional artist
is the best judge
in matters of painting as well as of poetry is quite characteristic.
He did not
¹⁷¹ ...
¹⁷³ Réflexions critiques sur la poësie et sur la peinture, 4th ed., 3 vols. (Paris, 1740).
A. Lombard, L'Abbé Du Bos: Un initiateur de la pensée moderne (1670-1742) (thes. Paris, 1913). ...
¹⁷⁴ ...
[19]
invent the term beaux-arts, nor was he the first to apply it to other than the visual arts, but
he certainly popularized the notion that poetry was one of the beaux-arts.
He also has a fairly clear notion of the difference between the arts that depend on
"genius" or talent
and the sciences based on
accumulated knowledge,
and it has been rightly observed that in this he continues the work of the "Moderns" in the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, especially of Perrault.
Significant also is his acquaintance with English authors such as Wotton and Addison.
Finally, although the title of his work refers only to poetry and painting, he repeatedly has occasion to speak also of the other visual arts as linked with painting, especially of sculpture and engraving, and he discusses music so frequently that his English translator chose to mention this art in the very title of the book.
However, Dubos is as unsystematic in his presentation and arrangement as he is interesting for the variety of his ideas, and he fails to give anywhere a precise list of the arts other than poetry and painting or to separate them consistently from other fields of professions.
Voltaire also in his Temple du Goût (1733) seems to link together several of the fine arts,
but in an informal and rather elusive fashion which shows that he was unable or unwilling to present a clear
[20]
scheme.
More important for the history of our problem is the Essay on Beauty of Père André (1741), which exercised a good deal of influence.
His Cartesian background is worth noticing, although it is not enough to ascribe an aesthetics to Descartes.
The major sections of the work discuss visible beauty, which includes nature and the visual arts, the beauty of morals, the beauty of the works of the spirit, by which he means poetry and eloquence, and finally the beauty of music.
André thus moves much closer to the system of the arts than either Crousaz or Dubos had done, but in his treatise the arts are still combined with morality, and subordinated to the problem of beauty in a broader sense.
The
decisive step
toward a system of the fine arts was taken by the Abbé Batteux in his famous and influential treatise, Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe (1746).
It is true that many elements of his system were derived from previous authors, but at the same time
it should not be overlooked that he was the first to set forth
a clearcut system
of the fine arts in a treatise
devoted exclusively to this subject.
This alone may account for his claim to originality as well as for the enormous influence he exercised both in France and abroad, especially in Germany.
Batteux codified the modern system of the fine arts almost in its final form, whereas all previous authors had merely prepared it.
He started from the poetic theories of Aristotle and Horace, as he states in his preface, and tried to extend their principles
from poetry and painting
to the other arts.
In his first chapter, Batteux gives a clear division of the arts.
[21]
He separates the fine arts which have pleasure for their end from the mechanical arts, and lists the fine arts as follows:
music,
poetry,
painting,
sculpture and
the dance.
He adds a third group which combines pleasure and usefulness and puts eloquence and architecture in this category.
In the central part of his treatise, Batteux tries to show that
the "imitation of beautiful nature"
is the principle common to all the arts, and he concludes with a discussion of
the theatre as
a combination of all the other arts.
The German critics of the later eighteenth century,
and their recent historians, criticized Batteux for his theory of imitation and
often failed to recognize that he formulated the system of the arts which
they took for granted
and for which they were merely
trying to find different principles.
They also overlooked the fact that
the much maligned principle of imitation
was
the only one
a classicist critic such as Batteux could use when he wanted to group the fine arts together
with even an appearance of
ancient authority.
For
the "imitative" arts
were the only authentic ancient precedent
for the "fine arts,"
and the principle of imitation
could be replaced
only after the system of the latter had been so firmly established as no longer to need the ancient principle of imitation to link them together.
Kristeller seems to be suggesting here that Batteux simply wanted
to group the fine arts together
come what may, and that it mattered less (or not at all) just how this move was to be imbued with
authority
and
precedent .
Since I'm totally ignorant of the sources, this can't help but seem like quite the assumption.
But then, I'm not (quite as) ignorant of my own cohort, and so if someone told me that this is what has been going on with them, I'd have no trouble believing it.
Diderot's criticism of Batteux has been emphasized too much, for it concerned only the manner in which Batteux defined and applied his principle, but neither the principle itself, nor the system of the arts for which it had been designed.
As a matter of fact, Diderot and the other authors of the Encyclopédie not only followed Batteux's system of the fine arts, but also furnished the final touch and thus helped to give it a general currency not only in France but also in the other European countries.
Montesquieu in his essay on taste written for the Encyclopédie takes the fine arts for granted.
Diderot, whose interests included music and the visual arts and who was also acquainted with such English authors as Shaftesbury, Addison and Hutcheson,
criticizes Batteux in his Lettre sur les Sourds et Muets (1751), in which he demands a better and more detailed comparison between poetry, painting and music that would take into account the different modes of expression of those arts as they would affect their treatment of even the same subject
¹⁹⁰ ...
¹⁹¹ ...
Edwin P. Dargan, The Aesthetic Doctrine of Montesquieu (thes. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 1907), 21.
[22]
matter.
In the article on the Arts for the Encyclopédie, Diderot does not discuss the fine arts, but uses the old distinction between the liberal and mechanical arts and stresses the importance of the latter.
Yet in his article on beauty, he does discuss the fine arts, mentions Crousaz and Hutcheson and gives qualified approval to both André and Batteux,
calling each of these two good works the best in its category and criticizing Batteux merely for his failure to define his concept of "beautiful nature" more clearly and explicitly.
Still more interesting is D'Alembert's famous Discours préliminaire.
In his division of knowledge, purportedly based on Francis Bacon, D'Alembert makes a clear distinction between philosophy, which comprises both the natural sciences and such fields as grammar, eloquence, and history, and "those cognitions which consist of imitation," listing among the latter painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry and music.
He criticizes the old distinction between the liberal and mechanical arts, and then subdivides the liberal arts into the fine arts which have pleasure for their end, and the more necessary or useful liberal arts such as grammar, logic and morals.
He concludes with
[23]
a main division of knowledge into philosophy, history and the fine arts.
This treatment shows still a few signs of fluctuation and of older notions, but it sets forth the modern system of the fine arts in its final form, and at the same time refects its genesis.
The threefold division of knowledge follows Francis Bacon, but significantly d'Alembert speaks of the five fine arts where Bacon had mentioned only poetry.
D'Alembert is aware that the new concept of the fine arts is taking the place of the older concept of the liberal arts, which he criticizes, and he tries to compromise by treating the fine arts as a subdivision of the liberal arts, thus leaving a last trace of the liberal arts that was soon to disappear.
Finally, he reveals his dependence on Batteux in certain phrases and in the principle of imitation, but against Batteux and the classical tradition he now includes architecture among the imitative arts, thus removing the last irregularity which had separated Batteux's system from the modern scheme of the fine arts.
Thus we may conclude that
the Encyclopédie,
and especially its famous introduction,
codified the system of the fine arts
after and beyond Batteux
and through its prestige and authority gave it the widest possible currency all over Europe.
After the middle of the century and after the publication of the Encyclopédie, speculation on the fine arts in France does not seem to have undergone any basic changes for some time.
The notion was popularized and stabilized through such works as Lacombe's portable dictionary of the Fine Arts, which covered architecture, sculpture, painting, engraving, poetry and music, and through other similar works.
The term Beaux Arts, and "Art," in the new sense, found its way into the dictionaries of the French language that had ignored it before.
And the Revolution gave the novel term a new institu-
[24]
tional expression when it merged several of the older Academies into the Académie des Beaux Arts.
Gradually, the further developments of aesthetics in Germany began to affect French philosophy and literature.
The second edition of the Encyclopédie, published in Switzerland in 1781, has additions by Sulzer, including an article on aesthetics and a section on Fine Arts appended to the article on Art that had not appeared in the first edition.
Early in the nineteenth century, the philosopher Victor Cousin, following Kant and the Scottish thinkers of the eighteenth century, as well as what he believed he found in Plato, Proclus and other classical sources, centered his philosophical system on the three concepts of the Good, the True and the Beautiful, understanding by the latter the realm of art and aesthetics.
Cousin's wide influence in the later nineteenth century went a long ways toward establishing this triad in modern value theory and toward fortifying the place of aesthetics in the system of philosophical disciplines.
It also induced many thinkers and historians to interpret in terms of this scheme a number of ancient and medieval notions that resembled it superficially but had in reality a very different meaning and context.
Meanwhile, as Cousin's doctrine was spreading among philosophers and historians, French literature and criticism had long been feeling the impact of Romanticism.
They were beginning to develop modern problems and theories concerning the arts and their interpretation, no longer related to the discussions of the eighteenth century, and were laying the ground for more recent present-day tendencies.
VII
Having followed the French development through the eighteenth
¹⁹⁹ ...
²⁰² V. Cousin, Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien, 29th ed. (Paris, 1904; first ed., 1836, based on lectures delivered in 1817-18).
...
E. Krantz (Essai sur l'esthétique de Descartes [Paris, 1882], 312f.) emphasizes that Cousin was the first French thinker who gave a separate place to aesthetics and to beauty in his philosophical system.
[25]
century, we must discuss the history of artistic thought in England.²⁰³
The English writers were strongly influenced by the French down to the end of the seventeenth century and later, but
during the eighteenth century they made important contributions of their own and in turn influenced continental thought, especially in France and Germany.
Interest in the arts other than poetry began to rise slowly in the English literature of the seventeenth century.
Works of an eneyclopedic nature show little awareness of the separate function of the fine arts, whereas an author such as Henry Peacham, who continued the amateur tradition of the Renaissance, would not only write a treatise on drawing, but also recommend the cultivation of painting, music and poetry, of classical studies and the collecting of coins and other antiquities and of natural curiosities, for the education of a perfect gentleman.
John Evelyn, who was the model of a virtuoso, included artistic and scientific interests, but the work of the virtuosi of the Royal Society soon led to a separation between the arts and the sciences.
The Querelle, which was at least partly caused by the emancipation of the natural sciences in the seventeenth century, spread from France to England. The most important treatise in England representing the views of the Moderns, that of Wotton, tried to cover systematically all the human arts and activities, just as Perrault
²⁰³ ...
John W. Draper, "Aristotelian 'Mimesis' in Eighteenth Century England," PMLA 36 (1921), 372-400.
Id., "Poetry and Music in Eighteenth Century Aesthetics," Englische Studien 67 (1932-33), 70-85.
J. G. Robertson, Studies in the Genesis of Romantic Theory in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1923), 235f.
...
Herbert M. Schueller, "Literature and Music as Sister Arts: An Aspect of Aesthetic Theory in Eighteenth-Century Britain," Philological Quarterly 26 (1947), 193-205.
²⁰⁴ ...
[26]
had done, and emphasized like Perrault the fundamental difference between the sciences that had made progress since antiquity, and the arts that had not.
A translation of one of the French works related to the Querelle, Callière's History of the War of the Ancients and Moderns, was published as late as 1705, and reveals in its very title the growing sense of the affinity of the fine arts.
Even before the end of the seventeenth century, Dryden had translated Du Fresnoy's poem on painting with De Piles' commentary and had added his famous introduction on the Parallel of Painting and Poetry which popularized the notion in England.²¹⁰
This translation was still of interest to Sir Joshua Reynolds, who wrote some notes on it.
Early in the eighteenth century, Jonathan Richardson was praising painting as a liberal art, and John Dennis in some of his critical treatises on
²⁰⁸ ...
²¹⁰ C. A. Du Fresnoy, De arte graphica, tr. J. Dryden (London, 1695), pр. I-LVIII: “Preface of the Translator, with a Parallel of Poetry and Painting." The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose of John Dryden, ed. E. Malone, vol. III (London, 1800), 291ff.
²¹¹ ...
[27]
poetics stressed the affinity between poetry, painting and music.
Of greater importance were the writings of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, one of the most influential thinkers of the eighteenth century, not only in England but also on the continent.
His interest and taste for literature and the arts are well known, and his writings are full of references to the various arts and to the beauty of their works.
The ideal of the virtuoso which he embodied and advocated no longer included the sciences, as in the seventeenth century, but had its center in the arts and in the moral life.
Since Shaftesbury was
the first
major philosopher in modern Europe in whose writings the discussion of
the arts occupied a prominent place,
there is some reason for considering him as
the founder
of modern aesthetics.
Yet Shaftesbury was
influenced primarily by Plato and Plotinus,
as well as by Cicero,
and he consequently did not make a clear distinction between artistic and moral beauty.
His moral sense still includes both ethical and aesthetic objects.
Moreover, although references to the particular arts are frequent in his writings, and some of his works are even entirely devoted to the subjects of painting or of poetry,
the passages in which he mentions poetry, the visual arts and music together are not too frequent, and do not contain any more specific notions than may be found in earlier authors.
Poetry, especially, appears still in the company not only
[28]
of eloquence but also of history, thus reflecting the Renaissance tradition of the Studia humanitatis.
Almost equally influential in England as well as on the continent, at least in literary circles, was Joseph Addison.
His famous essays on imagination, which appeared in the Spectator in 1712, are remarkable not merely for their early emphasis on that faculty, but also for the manner in which he attributes the pleasures of the imagination to the various arts as well as to natural sights.
Without ever giving a definite system, he constantly refers to gardening and architecture, painting and seulpture, poetry and music, and makes it quite clear that the pleasures of the imagination are to be found in their works and products.
The philosophical implications of Shaftesbury's doctrine were further developed by a group of Scottish thinkers.
Francis Hutcheson, who considered himself Shaftesbury's pupil, modified his doctrine by
distinguishing between
the moral sense
and
the sense of beauty.
This distinction, which was adopted by Hume and quoted by Diderot, went a long ways to prepare the separation of ethics and aesthetics, although Hutcheson still assigned the taste of poetry to the moral sense.
A later philosopher of the Scottish school, Thomas
[29]
Reid, introduced common sense as a direct criterion of truth, and
although he was no doubt influenced by Aristotle's notion of common sense and the Stoic and modern views on "common notions," it has been suggested that his common sense was conceived as a counterpart to Hutcheson's two senses.
Thus the psychology of the Scottish school led the way for the doctrine of the three faculties of the soul, which found its final development in Kant and its application in Cousin.
Other English authors, motivated by critical rather than philosophical interests and probably influenced by French authors, popularized the notion of the affinity between poetry, painting, and music,—e.g., Charles Lamotte and Hildebrand Jacobs.
More philosophical are the essays of James Harris, who continued Shaftesbury and had some influence on German writers.
In the first of his three essays, which are written in an elegant dialogue form but heavily annotated with references to classical authors, Harris expounds the concept of art on the basis of Aristotle and with its older comprehensive meaning.
In the second essay, he distinguishes between the necessary arts and the arts of elegance, putting under the latter category especially music, painting and poetry, and comparing these three arts with each other according to their relative merits.
The third essay deals with happiness as the art of human conduct.
About
[30]
the same time, the poet Akenside continued the work of Addison; and
before the middle of the century the important French works of Dubos and Batteux were presented to English readers, the former in a translation, the latter in an anonymous version or summary, entitled The Polite Arts.
During the second half of the eighteenth century, English writers continued to discuss the various arts.
But they were not so much interested in expounding and developing a system of the fine arts, which they took pretty much for granted, as in discussing
general concepts and principles concerning the arts; e.g., Home, Burke, and Gerard;
or else the relations between the particular arts; e.g., Daniel Webb or John Brown, to mention only some of the more influential
[31]
writers.
All these
English and Scottish
writers show
a strong preoccupation with psychology,
as might be expected
from the general trend of English thought in that century.
They exercised considerable influence on the continent, especially in Germany, where many of their works appeared in translations.
It has been noted that the emphasis of writers and literary critics on the affinity between poetry and painting was followed
after the middle of the century
by an increasing insistence on the links between
poetry and music.
One reason for this may have been the public attention which music received in London after the appearance of Handel, just as had been the case in Paris after the success of Lulli.
On the other hand, if poetry really tended to exchange the company of painting for that of music, this merely reflects a change in style and taste
from descriptive
to emotional
poetry that corresponds to the transition
from classicism
to romanticism.
A new epoch in English critical and artistic theory begins toward the very end of the century with Coleridge, who imported from Germany some of the aesthetic notions of Kant and of the early Romanticists.
The further development these ideas received through Coleridge and his English successors in the nineteenth century is beyond the scope of this paper.
[32]
VIII
Discussion of the arts does not seem to have occupied many German writers in the seventeenth century, which was on the whole a period of cultural decline.
The poet Opitz showed familiarity with the parallel of poetry and painting, but
otherwise the Germans did not take part in the development we are trying to describe before the eighteenth century.
During the first part of that century interest in literature and literary criticism began to rise, but did not yet lead to a detailed or comparative treatment of the other arts.
However, some of the French and English writers we have mentioned were widely read and also translated into German during the course of the century, such as Dubos and Batteux, Shaftesbury and Harris.
The critical writings of the Swiss authors, Bodmer and Breitinger, focus from the very beginning on the parallel between painting and poetry, and reflect the influence of Addison and perhaps of Dubos.
Even their classicist opponent, Gottsched, mentions occasionally the affinity between poetry, painting, music, and the other arts,
as does Johann
[33]
Elias Schlegel, who is said to have been influenced by the lectures of Fraguier and other authors published in the Memoirs of the Académie des Inscriptions.
His brother Johann Adolf Schlegel, who was one of the translators of Batteux, added to his version several original essays in which he criticizes the theory of imitation and also presents a modified system of the fine arts.
Yet all these writers were primarily interested in poetics and literary criticism and drew upon the other arts only for occasional analogies.
These critical discussions among poets and literati constitute the general background for the important work of the philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and of his pupil Georg Friedrich Meier.
[34]
Baumgarten is famous for having coined the term aesthetics, but opinions differ as to whether he must be considered the founder of that discipline or what place he occupies in its history and development.
The
original meaning
of the term aesthetics as coined by Baumgarten, which has been well nigh forgotten by now, is
the theory of sensuous knowledge,
as a counterpart to
logic as a theory of intellectual knowledge.
The definitions Baumgarten gives of aesthetics show that he is concerned with the arts and with beauty as one of their main attributes,
but he still uses the old term liberal arts, and
he considers them as
forms of knowledge.
The question whether Baumgarten really gave a theory of all the fine arts, or merely a poetics and rhetoric with a new name, has been debated but can be answered easily.
In
his earlier work,
in which he first coined the term aesthetics, Baumgarten was
exclusively concerned with poetics and rhetoric.
In
his later, unfinished work,
to which he gave the title Aesthetica, Baumgarten states in his introduction that
he intends to give a theory of all the arts,
and actually makes occasional references to the visual arts and to music.
This impression is confirmed by the text of Baumgarten's lectures published only recently, and
[35]
by the writings of his pupil Meier.
On the other hand, it is quite obvious, and was noted by contemporary critics, that
Baumgarten and Meier
develop their actual theories
only in terms of poetry and eloquence
and
take nearly all their examples
from literature.
Baumgarten is the founder of aesthetics in so far as he first conceived a general theory of the arts as a separate philosophical discipline with a distinctive and well-defined place in the system of philosophy.
He failed to develop his doctrine with reference to the arts other than poetry and eloquence, or even to propose a systematic list and division of these other arts.
In this latter respect, he was preceded and surpassed by the French writers, especially by Batteux and the Encyclopaedists, whereas the latter failed to develop a theory of the arts as part of a philosophical system.
It was the result of German thought and criticism during the second half of the eighteenth century that the more concrete French conception of the fine arts was utilized in a philosophical theory of aesthetics for which Baumgarten had formulated the general scope and program.
When Meier tried to answer the critics of his teacher Baumgarten, he stated that Baumgarten and himself had spoken only about literature, since
they did not know enough
about the other arts.
The broadening scope of German aesthetics after Baumgarten, which we must now try to trace, was due not only to the influence of Batteux, of the Encyclopaedists, and of other French and English writers, but also to
the increasing interest taken
by writers, philosophers, and the lay public in the visual arts and in music.
Winckelmann's studies of
[36]
classical art are important for the history of our problem for the enthusiasm which he stimulated among his German readers for ancient sculpture and architecture, but not for any opinion he may have expressed on the relation between the visual arts and literature.
Lessing's Laokoon (1766), too, has a notable importance, not only for its particular theories on matters of poetry and of the visual arts, but also for the very attention given to the latter by one of the most brilliant and most respected German writers of the time.
Yet the place of the Laokoon in the history of our problem has been misjudged.
To say that the Laokoon put an end to the age-old tradition of the parallel between painting and poetry that had its ultimate roots in classical antiquity and found its greatest development in the writers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth century, and thus freed poetry from the emphasis on description, is to give only one side of the picture.
It is to forget that the parallel between painting and poetry was one of the most important elements that preceded the formation of the modern system of the fine arts, though it had lost this function as a link between two different arts by the time of Lessing, when the more comprehensive system of the fine arts had been firmly established.
In so far as
Lessing paid no attention to the broader system
of the fine arts, especially to music, his Laokoon constituted a detour or a dead end in terms of the development leading to a comprehensive system of the fine arts.
It is significant that
the Laokoon was criticized for this very reason
by two prominent contemporary critics, and that
Lessing in the posthumous notes for the second part of the work
gave some consideration to this criticism,
though we have no evidence that he actually planned to extend his analysis to music and to a coherent system of the arts.
The greatest contributions to the history of our problem in the interval between Baumgarten and Kant came from Mendelssohn, Sulzer, and Herder.
Mendelssohn, who was well acquainted with French and English writings on the subject,
demanded
in a famous article that the fine arts (painting, sculpture, music, the dance, and architecture) and belles lettres (poetry and eloquence) should be re-
[37]
duced to some common principle better than imitation,
and
thus was the first among the Germans
to formulate a system of the fine arts.
Shortly afterwards, in a book review, he criticized Baumgarten and Meier for not having
carried out the program
of their new science, aesthetics.
They wrote as if they had been thinking exclusively in terms of poetry and literature, whereas aesthetic principles should be formulated in such a way as to apply to the visual arts and to music as well.
In his annotations to Lessing's Laokoon, published long after his death, Mendelssohn persistently criticizes Lessing for not giving any consideration to music and to the system of the arts as a whole;²⁵⁸
we have seen how Lessing, in the fragmentary notes for a continuation of the Laokoon, tried to meet this criticism.
Mendelssohn also formulated a doctrine of the three faculties of the soul corresponding to the three basic realms of goodness, truth and beauty, thus continuing the work of the Scottish philosophers.
He did not work
²⁵⁶ ...
²⁵⁸ ... Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften 2 (1931), 231ff.
²⁵⁹ ...
[38]
out an explicit theory of aesthetics, but under the impact of French and English authors he indicated the direction in which German aesthetics was to develop from Baumgarten to Kant.
What Mendelssohn had merely set forth in a general outline and program,
the Swiss thinker Sulzer, who was well versed in French literature but spent the greater part of his life in Northern Germany, was able to develop in a more systematic and elaborate fashion.
Sulzer began his literary activity with a few short philosophical articles in which his interest for aesthetics was already apparent, and in which he also leaned toward the conception of an aesthetic faculty of the soul separate from the intellectual and moral faculties,²⁶⁰ a conception in whose development Mendelssohn and the philosopher Tetens also took their part.
Some years later, he was prompted by the example of Lacombe's little dictionary of the fine arts to compile a similar
...
²⁶⁰ Johann Georg Sulzer, Vermischte Philosophische Schriften, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1773-81). In an article of 1751-52, he distinguishes between Sinne, Herz, Einbildungskraft and Verstand, relating the second faculty to moral sentiments and the third to the fine arts (vol. 1, pp. 24 and 43; see also vol. 2, p. 113;
...
Otherwise, the distinction of the three faculties of the soul does not yet appear elearly or consistently in these early writings, but only in his Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste, 2nd ed., II (Leipzig, 1778), 240, ...
²⁶¹ ...
[39]
dictionary in German on a much larger scale.
This General Theory of the Fine arts, which appeared in several editions, has been disparaged on account of its pedantic arrangement, for it is clear, comprehensive and learned, and had a considerable importance in its time.
The work covers all the fine arts, not only poetry and eloquence, but also music and the visual arts, and thus represents the first attempt to carry out on a large scale the program formulated by Baumgarten and Mendelssohn.
Thanks to its wide diffusion, Sulzer's work went a long way to acquaint the German public with the idea that all the fine arts are related and connected with each other.
Sulzer's influence extended also to France, for when the great Encyclopédie was published in Switzerland in a second edition, many additions were based on his General Theory, including the article on aesthetics and the section on the Fine Arts.
In the decades after 1760, the interest in the new field of aesthetics spread rapidly in Germany.
Courses on aesthetics
were offered at a number of universities
after the example set by Baumgarten and Meier, and new tracts and textbooks, partly based on these courses, appeared almost every year.
These authors have been listed, but their individual contributions remain to be investigated.
The influence of the great Encyclopédie is attested by a curious engraving printed in Weimar in 1769 and attached to a famous copy of the Encyclopédie.
It represents the tree of the arts and sciences as
[40]
given in the text of D'Alembert's Discours, putting the visual arts, poetry and music with their subdivisions under the general branch of imagination.
Among the minor aesthetic writers of this period, Riedel has attracted some scholarly attention, probably because he was the target of Herder's criticism.
In his treatise on aesthetics, based on university lectures, Riedel gives a full discussion of all the fine arts, and also sets out with a general division of philosophical subjects into the True, the Good and the Beautiful.
It is interesting to note the reaction to this aesthetic literature of the leaders of the younger generation, especially of Goethe and of Herder.
Goethe in his early years published a review of Sulzer which was quite unfavorable.
Noticing
the French background
of Sulzer's conception, Goethe
ridicules
the grouping together
of all the arts
which are so different from each other
in their aims and means of expression,
a system which reminds him of the old-fashioned system of the seven liberal arts, and
adds that this system may be
useful to the amateur
but certainly
not to the artist.²⁶⁸
This reaction shows
²⁶⁶ ...
²⁶⁸ J. W. Goethe, review of Sulzer's Die schönen Künste in ihrem Ursprung (1772).
...
[41]
that the system of the fine arts was something novel and not yet firmly established, and that
Goethe, just like Lessing, did not take an active part in developing the notion that was to become generally accepted.
Toward the very end of his life, in the Wanderjahre, Goethe shows that he had
by then accepted the system
of the fine arts, for he assigns a place to each of them in his pedagogical province.
Yet his awareness of the older meaning of art is apparent when
in a group of aphorisms originally appended to the same work
he defines art as knowledge
and concludes that
poetry,
being based on genius,
should not be called an art.
Herder, on the other hand,
took an active part
in the development of the system of the fine arts and used the weight of his literary authority to have it generally accepted.
In an early but important critical work (Kritische Waelder, 1769), he dedicates the entire first section to a critique of Lessing's Laokoon.
Lessing shows merely, he argues, what poetry is not, by comparing it with painting.
In order
to see what its essence is,
we should
compare it with all
its sister arts, such as music, the dance, and eloquence.
Well,
due diligence is required here,
tedious as it is.
Given that
anything resembles anything else,
not
in just
any
way,
but in
particular
ways,
then:
To define something exclusively by way of
comparison
with something else
can hardly count as establishing its
essence
even if we have reason to believe that such a thing can be established.
It's easy enough to imagine a calculus-like procedure whereby our thing-in-question is serially "compared" with one damn thing after another until the results (hopefully) begin to converge upon some "essence". But even if we are convinced that this possibility is (remotely) practical, the notion that a three- or five- or seven-art comparison is meaningfully closer to the truth than a one-art comparison remains a laughable notion. That's only as good as saying that the narrower half of a trapezoid 'approximates a curve'.
Of course, we were convinced from the start that some three arts, five arts, seven arts, etc., together formed an appropriate comparison class; and that decision too has to be justified if it is not to be conceded as itself nothing more than a proverbial finger on the scale.
Quoting Aristotle and Harris, Herder stresses the comparison between poetry and music, and concludes that this problem would require another Lessing.
In the fourth section, he quotes Mendelssohn as well as the more important English and French authors, and presents his own system of the fine arts, which includes all the essential elements though it differs from previous authors in some detail.
Herder's later contributions
[42]
to aesthetics are beyond the scope of this paper.
I should like to conclude this survey with Kant, since
he was the first
major philosopher who
included aesthetics
and the philosophical theory of the arts as an integral part of his system.
Kant's interest in aesthetic problems
appears already in his early writing
on the beautiful and sublime, which was influenced in its general conception by Burke.
He also had occasion to discuss aesthetic problems in several of his courses.
Notes based on these courses extant in manuscript have not been published, but have been utilized by a student of Kant's aesthetics.
It appears that Kant cited in these lectures many authors he does not mention in his published works, and that
he was thoroughly familiar
with most of the French, English and German writers on aesthetics.²⁷⁴
At the time when he published the Critique of Pure Reason, he still used the term aesthetics in a sense different from the common one, and explains in an interesting footnote, that
he does not follow Baumgarten's terminology
since
he does not believe in the possibility
of
a philosophical theory of the arts.²⁷⁵
In the following years, however,
he changed his view,
and in his Critique of Judgment, which constitutes the third and concluding part of his philosophical system, the larger of its two major divisions is dedicated to aesthetics, whereas the other section deals with teleology.
The system of the three Critiques as presented in this last volume is based on a threefold division of the faculties of the mind, which adds the faculty of judgment, aesthetic and teleological, to pure and practical reason.
Aesthetics, as the philosophical theory of beauty and the arts, acquires equal standing with the theory of truth (metaphysics or epistemology) and the theory of goodness (ethics).
²⁷³ ...
²⁷⁴ O. Schlapp, Kants Lehre vom Genie und die Entstehung der Kritik der Urteilskrajt (Göttingen, 1901).
²⁷⁵ "Die Deutschen sind die einzigen, welche sich jetzt des Worts Aesthetik bedienen, um dadurch das zu bezeichnen, was andere Kritik des Geschmacks heissen. Es liegt hier eine verfeblte Hoffnung zum Grunde, die der vortreffliche Analyst Baumgarten fasste, die kritische Beurtheilung des Schönen unter Vernunftprincipien zu bringen, und die Regeln derselben zur Wissenschaft zu erheben. Allein diese Bemühung ist vergeblich."
[Translation by Gemini (27 May 2026):]
"The Germans are the only ones who currently make use of the word 'aesthetic' to signify what others call the critique of taste. At the root of this lies a failed hope, conceived by the excellent analyst Baumgarten, to bring the critical evaluation of the beautiful under principles of reason, and to elevate its rules to a science. However, this effort is in vain."
He then states that he will use the term aesthetics for the critical analysis of perception
(Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, Transszendentale Aesthetik #1, ed. Cassirer, 3 (1923), 56f.).
²⁷⁶ ...
[43]
In the tradition of systematic philosophy this was an important innovation, for
neither Descartes nor Spinoza nor Leibniz nor any of their ancient or medieval predecessors had found a separate or independent place in their system for the theory of the arts and of beauty, though
they had expressed occasional opinions on these subjects.
If Kant took this decisive step after some hesitation, he was obviously influenced by the example of Baumgarten and by the rich French, English, and German literature on the arts his century had produced, with which he was well acquainted.
In his critique of aesthetic judgment, Kant discusses also the concepts of the sublime and of natural beauty, but his major emphasis is on beauty in the arts, and he discusses many concepts and principles common to all the arts.
In section 51 he also gives a division of the fine arts:
speaking arts
(poetry, eloquence);
plastic arts
(sculpture, architecture, painting, and gardening);
arts of the beautiful play of sentiments
(music, and the art of color)
This scheme contains a few ephemeral details that were not retained by Kant's successors.
However, since Kant
aesthetics has occupied a permanent place among the major philosophical disciplines, and
the core of the system of the fine arts fixed in the eighteenth century has been generally accepted as a matter of course by most later writers on the subject, except for variations of detail or of explanation.
IX
We shall not attempt to discuss the later history of our problem after Kant, but shall rather draw a few general conclusions from the development so far as we have been able to follow it.
The grouping together of the visual arts with poetry and music into the system of the fine arts with which we are familiar
did not exist
in
classical antiquity,
in
the Middle Ages
or
in
the Renaissance.
However, the ancients contributed to the modern system the comparison between poetry and painting, and the theory of imitation that established a
[44]
kind of link between painting and sculpture, poetry and music. The Renaissance brought about the emancipation of the three major visual arts from the crafts, it multiplied the comparisons between the various arts, especially between painting and poetry, and it laid the ground for an amateur interest in the different arts that tended to bring them together from the point of view of the reader, spectator and listener rather than of the artist. The seventeenth century witnessed the emancipation of the natural sciences and thus prepared the way for a clearer separation between the arts and the sciences. Only the early eighteenth century, especially in England and France, produced elaborate treatises written by and for amateurs in which the various fine arts were grouped together, compared with each other and combined in a systematic scheme based on common principles. The second half of the century, especially in Germany, took the additional step of incorporating the comparative and theoretical treatment of the fine arts as a separate discipline into the system of philosophy. The modern system of the fine arts is thus pre-romantic in its origin, although all romantic as well as later aesthetics takes this system as its necessary basis. It is not easy to indicate the causes for the genesis of the system in the eighteenth century. The rise of painting and of music since the Renaissance, not so much in their actual achievements as in their prestige and appeal, the rise of literary and art criticism, and above all the rise of an amateur public to which art collections and exhibitions, concerts as well as opera and theatre performances were addressed, must be considered as important factors. The fact that the affinity between the various fine arts is more plausible to the amateur, who feels a comparable kind of enjoyment, than to the artist himself, who is concerned with the peculiar aims and techniques of his art, is obvious in itself and is confirmed by Goethe's reaction. The origin of modern aesthetics in amateur criticism would go a long way to explain why works of art have until recently been analyzed by aestheticians from the point of view of the spectator, reader and listener rather than of the producing artist. The development we have been trying to understand also provides an interesting object lesson for the historian of philosophy and of ideas in general. We are accustomed to the process by which notions first formulated by great and influential thinkers are gradually diffused among secondary writers and finally become the common property of the general public. Such seems to have been the development of aesthetics from Kant to the present. Its history before Kant is of a very different kind. The basic questions and conceptions under- [45] lying modern aesthetics seem to have originated quite apart from the traditions of systematic philosophy or from the writings of important original authors. They had their inconspicuous beginnings in secondary authors, now almost forgotten though influential in their own time, and perhaps in the discussions and conversations of educated laymen reflected in their writings. These notions had a tendency to fluctuate and to grow slowly, but only after they had crystallized into a pattern that seemed generally plausible did they find acceptance among the greater authors and the systematic philosophers. Baumgarten's aesthetics was but a program, and Kant's aesthetics the philosophical elaboration of a body of ideas that had had almost a century of informal and non-philosophical growth. If the absence of the scheme of the fine arts before the eighteenth century and its fluctuations in that century have escaped the attention of most historians, this merely proves how thoroughly and irresistibly plausible the scheme has become to modern thinkers and writers. Another observation seems to impose itself as a result of our study. The various arts are certainly as old as human civilization, but the manner in which we are accustomed to group them and to assign them a place in our scheme of life and of culture is comparatively recent. This fact is not as strange as may appear on the surface. In the course of history, the various arts change not only their content and style, but also their relations to each other, and their place in the general system of culture, as do religion, philosophy or science. Our familiar system of the five fine arts not merely originated in the eighteenth century, but it also reflects the particular cultural and social conditions of that time. If we consider other times and places, the status of the various arts, their associations and their subdivisions appear very different. There were important periods in cultural history when the novel, instrumental music, or canvas painting did not exist or have any importance. On the other hand, the sonnet and the epic poem, stained glass and mosaic, fresco painting and book illumination, vase painting and tapestry, bas relief and pottery have all been "major " arts at various times and in a way they no longer are now. Gardening has lost its standing as a fine art since the eighteenth century. On the other hand, the moving picture is a good example of how new techniques may lead to modes of artistic expression for which the aestheticians of the eighteenth and nineteenth century had no place in their systems. The branches of the arts all have their rise and decline, and even their birth and death, and the distinction between "major" arts and their subdivisions is arbitrary and subject to change. There is hardly any ground but critical tradition or philo- [46] sophical preference for deciding whether engraving is a separate art (as most of the eighteenth-century authors believed) or a subdivision of painting, or whether poetry and prose, dramatic and epic poetry, instrumental and vocal music are separate arts or subdivisions of one major art. As a result of such changes, both in modern artistic production and in the study of other phases of cultural history, the traditional system of the fine arts begins to show signs of disintegration. Since the latter part of the nineteenth century, painting has moved further away from literature than at any previous time, whereas music has at times moved closer to it, and the crafts have taken great strides to recover their earlier standing as decorative arts. A greater awareness of the different techniques of the various arts has produced dissatisfaction among artists and critics with the conventions of an aesthetic system based on a situation no longer existing, an aesthetics that is trying in vain to hide the fact that its underlying system of the fine arts is hardly more than a postulate and that most of its theories are abstracted from particular arts, usually poetry, and more or less inapplicable to the others. The excesses of aestheticism have led to a healthy reaction which is yet far from universal. The tendency among some contemporary philosophers to consider Art and the aesthetic realm as a pervasive aspect of human experience rather than as the specific domain of the conventional fine arts also goes a long way to weaken the latter notion in its traditional form. All these ideas are still fluid and ill defined, and it is difficult to see how far they will go in modifying or undermining the traditional status of the fine arts and of aesthetics. In any case, these contemporary changes may help to open our eyes to an understanding of the historical origins and limitations of the modern system of the fine arts. Conversely, such historical understanding might help to free us from certain conventional preconceptions and to clarify our ideas on the present status and future prospects of the arts and of aesthetics. Columbia University.
278 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, 1934).
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