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.
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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). ...
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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 "Fine 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.
