A Study in the History of Aesthetics

Part I *

Dedicated to Professor Hans Tietze on his 70th birthday

      PART I                                                                                   PART II

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

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. ²  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. ³

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. ⁴  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. ⁵

It is my purpose here to show that this system of the five major 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.

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. ⁷  Plato puts art above mere routine because it proceeds by rational principles and rules, ⁸ 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. ⁹  The Stoics also defined Art as a system of cognitions, ¹⁰ and it was in this sense that they considered moral virtue as an art of living. ¹¹

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 καλόν and its Latin equivalent (pulchrum) were never neatly or consistently distinguished from the moral good. ¹²  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.¹³  An incidental remark made in the Phaedrus ¹⁴ and elaborated by Proclus ¹⁵ 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, ¹⁶ the context as well as Cicero’s Latin rendering ¹⁷ suggest that they meant by

“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, ¹⁸ a term he borrows from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ¹⁹ 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. ²⁰  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 interpretation 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 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. ²²  However, we should also remember that the same conception of poetry is expressed with a certain irony in the Ion ²³ and the Apology, ²⁴ and that even in

the Phaedrus the divine madness of the poet is compared with that of the lover and of the religious prophet. ²⁵  There is no mention of the “fine arts” in this passage, and it was left to the late sophist Callistratus ²⁶ 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. ²⁷

Music also held a high place in ancient thought; yet it should be remembered that the Greek term μουσική, 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. ²⁸  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

elements of certain types of poetry, especially of lyric and dramatic poetry. ²⁹  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, ³⁰  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 ³² and Plato, ³³ by Aristotle and Horace, ³⁵ as it was compared to rhetoric by Cicero, ³⁶ Dionysius of Halicarnassus ³⁷ and other writers. ³⁸  It is also true that architecture was included among the liberal arts by Varro ³⁹ and Vitruvius, ⁴⁰ and

painting by Pliny ⁴¹ and Galen,⁴² that Dio Chrysostom compared the art of the sculptor with that of the poet, ⁴³ and that Philostratus and Callistratus wrote enthusiastically about painting and sculpture. ⁴⁴  Yet the place of painting among the liberal arts was explicitly denied by Seneca ⁴⁵ 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 reflect the prevalent view among writers and thinkers. ⁴⁶  The term δημιονργός, 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 ⁴⁷ and even calls his world-shaping god a demiurge, ⁴⁸ 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. ⁴⁹  When Cicero, probably reflecting Panaetius, speaks of the ideal notions in the mind of the sculptor, ⁵⁰ 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. ⁵²

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 ([HHC: Greek not reproduced]).  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. ⁵³  This fact is significant so far as it goes, and it has influenced many later authors, even in the eighteenth century. ⁵⁴  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, ⁵⁵ that music and the dance are treated as parts of poetry and not as separate arts, ⁵⁰ 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. ⁵⁷  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, ⁵⁸ or the use of the mirror, ⁵⁹ of magic tricks, ⁶⁰ or the imitation of animal voices. ⁶¹  Moreover, Aristotle’s distinction between the arts of necessity and the arts of pleasure ⁶² 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, ⁶³ it should be added that they share this place with grammar (writing) and arithmetic.

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 (τά έγκύκλιа).  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. ⁶⁴  Cicero often speaks of the liberal arts and of their mutual connection, ⁶⁵  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. ⁶⁶  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. ⁶⁷  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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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. ⁶⁸   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; ⁶⁹ 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, ⁷⁰ 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.

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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. ⁷¹  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. ⁷²  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. ⁷³  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. ⁷⁴  Architecture as

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. ⁷⁵   Music appears in all these schemes in the company of the mathematical disciplines,⁷⁶ whereas poetry, when mentioned, is closely linked to grammar, rhetoric and logic. ⁷⁷  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. ⁷⁸  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. ⁷⁹  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. ⁸⁰  And the term artista coined in the Middle Ages indicated either the craftsman or the student of the liberal arts. ⁸¹  Neither for Dante ⁸² nor for Aquinas has the term Art the meaning

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 Aquinas ⁸⁴ and somewhat more emphatically by a few other medieval philosophers ⁸⁵ 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. ⁸⁶   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,

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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 occasional 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.

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. ⁸⁸  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. ⁸⁹  Yet the name poetry, meaning at first Latin poetry, received much honor and

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. ⁹⁰  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. ⁹¹

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. ⁹²  Poetic imitation is regularly