The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics ...

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 reser- vation.' It is also generally agreed that such dominating concepts of

*I am indebted for several suggestions and references to Professors Julius S. Held, Rensselaer Lee, Philip Merlan, Ernest Moody, Erwin Panofsky, Meyer Schapiro, and Norman Torrey.

1 B. Croce, Estetica come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generale: Teoria e storia, 5th ed. (Bari, 1922; first ed., 1901); Problemi di estetica, 2nd ed. (Bari, 1923); Storia dell'estetica per saggi (Bari, 1942). Katharine E. Gilbert and Hel- mut Kuhn, A History of Esthetics (New York, 1939). See also: J. Koller, Entwurf zur Geschichte und Literatur der Aesthetik von Baumgarten bis auf die neueste Zeit (Regensburg, 1799). R. Zimmermann, Aesthetik, pt. I: Geschichte der Aesthetik als philosophischer Wissenschaft (Vienna, 1858). M. Schasler, Kritische Geschichte der Aesthetik (Berlin, 1872). K. Heinrich von Stein, Die Entstehung der neueren Aesthetik (Stuttgart, 1886). William Knight, The Philosophy of the Beautiful, vol. I (Being Outlines of the History of Aesthetics) (London, 1891). B. Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic, 3rd ed. (London, 1910). Max Dessoir, Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (Stuttgart, 1906). Ernest Bergmann, Geschichte der Aesthetik und Kunstphilosophie: Ein Forschungsbericht (Leipzig, 1914). Frank P. Chambers, Cycles of Taste (Cambridge, Mass., 1928); The History of Taste (New York, 1932). A. Baeumler, Aesthetik (Handbuch der Philosophie, I, C; Munich- Berlin, 1934). For poetry and literature: G. Saintsbury, A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1900-04; extremely weak on the theoretical side). For music: H. Sahlender, Die Bewertung der Musik im System der Kuenste: Eine historisch-systematische Untersuchung (thes. Jena, 1929). For the visual arts: A. Dresdner, Die Kunstkritik: Ihre Geschichte und Theorie, vol. I (Munich, 1915). Julius Schlosser, Die Kunstliteratur (Vienna, 1924). Lionello

496

THE MODERN SYSTEM OF THE ARTS 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.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 regu- larity, 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

Venturi, History of Art Criticism (New York, 1936); Storia della critica d'arte (Rome, 1945). R. Wittkower, "The Artist and the Liberal Arts," Eidos I (1950), 11-17. More special studies will be quoted in the course of this paper.

2 M. Menendez y Pelayo, Historia de las Ideas esteticas en Espana III (Buenos Aires, 1943). E. Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufkldrung (Tiibingen, 1932), 368ff. T. M. Mustoxidi, Histoire de l'Esthetique franpaise (Paris, 1920).

L. Venturi, "Per il nome di 'Arte,'" La Cultura, N.S. I (1929), 385-88. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford, 1938), 5-7. See also the books of Parker and McMahon, cited below.

4Theodore M. Greene, The Arts and the Art of Criticism (Princeton, 1940), 35ff. P. Frankl, Das System der Kunstwissenschaft (Briinn-Leipzig, 1938), 501ff.

5 See the works of Zimmermann and Schasler, cited above, note 1.

498 PAUL 0. KRISTELLER

The basic notion that the five " major arts " constitute an area all by themselves, clearly separated by common characteristics 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 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.

II The Greek term for Art (Trxvq) 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

sI 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.


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.1

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 KaXov 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.l3 An incidental remark made in the Phaedrus14 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

7 o filos PLpaXv, 8e TrevXr UaKpx'. Hippocrates, Aphorisms, 1. Seneca, De brevitate vitae, 1. Schiller, Wallensteins Lager, Prolog, 138. Goethe, Faust I, Studierzimmer 2, 1787.

8 Gorgias, 462 b ff. 9 Nicomachean Ethics, VI 4, 1140 a 10. 10 Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, ed. H. von Arnim, I, p. 21; II, p. 23 and 30;

III, p. 51. 11 Ibid., III, pp. 49 and 148f. 12 R. G. Collingwood, "Plato's Philosophy of Art," Mind, N.S. 34 (1925), 154-

72, esp. 161f. 13 Symposium, 210 a ff. Phaedrus, 249 d. 14 TO 83 OEOV KacAov, crooV, acyaOov, KaU rarv OT TOLOVTOV. 246 d-e. 15 Commentary on Plato's Alcibiades I (ed. Cousin, 356-57). I am indebted

for this reference to Dr. Laurence Rosan. The KaXov does not denote aesthetic beauty in this passage any more than in Plato, and to interpret the arofov as Truth seems arbitrary. Yet the passage may have influenced its editor, Cousin.

16 Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta III, p. 9ff. (to'vov TO KaXov ayaOov). 17 Ibid., III, p. 10f., and I, pp. 47 and 84. Cicero, De finibus III, 26 (quod

honestum sit id solum bonum).


"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 deco- rum,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 Apology24 and that even in

18 Cicero, De officiis I 27, 93ff. R. Philippson, "Das Sittlichschoene bei Panaitios," Philologus 85 (N.F. 39, 1930), 357-413. Lotte Labowsky, Die Ethik des Panaitios (Leipzig, 1934). 19 III 7, 1408 a 10ff.

20Enn. V 8, 1. I 6, 1-3. See also I 3, 1. There is no evidence that Plotinus intended to apply his remarks on music to all the other fine arts, as E. Krakowski believes (Une philosophie de l'amour et de la beaute: L'esthetique de Plotin et son influence [Paris, 1929], 112ff.). The triad of Goodness, Truth and Beauty is made a basis of his interpretation by Dean William R. Inge (The Philosophy of Plotinus II [London, 1918], 74ff. and 104) but does not occur in the works of Plotinus.

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. Gil- son, Introduction a l'etude de Saint Augustin, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1949), 279f.

22 245 a. 23533 e ff. 2422 a ff.


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. Aris- totle, 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 Aris- totle's works. Moreover, since the order of the writings in the Aristo- telian 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 iovUTK,, 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

25 244 a ff. 26 Descriptiones, 2. 27 L. Baur, "Die philosophische Einleitungslitteratur bis zum Ende der Scho-

lastik," in: Dominicus Gundissalinus, De divisione philosophiae, ed. L. Baur (Beitrdge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, IV, 2-3, Muenster, 1903), 316ff. See also J. Mari6tan, Probleme de la classification des sciences d'Aristote a St. Thomas (thes. Fribourg, 1901).

28 Republic II, 376 e if.

502 PAUL O. KRISTELLER

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 34 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

29 Poetics 1, 1447 a 23ff. Laws II, 669 e f. 30 VII, 531 a ff. 31 Dresdner, l.c., 19ff. E. Zilsel, Die Entstehung des Geniebegriffs (Tiibingen,

1926), 22ff. B. Schweitzer, "Der bildende Kiinstler und der Begriff des Kiinstler- ischen in der Antike," Neue Heidelberger Jahrbiucher, N.F. (1925), 28-132. Hans Jucker, Vom Verhaltnis der Romer zur bildenden Kunst der Griechen (Frankfurt, 1950). For ancient art theories in general: Eduard Mueller, Geschichte der Theorie der Kunst bei den Alten, 2 vols. (Breslau, 1834-37). Julius Walter, Die Geschichte der Aesthetik im Altertum (Leipzig, 1893). For Plato and Aristotle: G. Finsler, Platon und die Aristotelische Poetik (Leipzig, 1900). S. H. Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, 4th ed. (London, 1911). A. Rostagni, "Aristotele e Aristotelismo nella storia dell'estetica antica," Studi italiani di filologia classica, N.S. 2 (1922), 1-147. U. Galli, " La mimesi artistica secondo Aristotele," ibid., N.S. 4 (1927), 281-390. E. Cassirer, "Eidos und Eidolon: Das Problem des Sch6nen und der Kunst in Platons Dialogen," Vortrdge der Bibliothek Warburg, II: Vortrage 1922-23, I (Leipzig-Berlin, 1924), 1-27. R. G. Collingwood, " Plato's Philosophy of Art," Mind, N.S. 34 (1925), 154-72. E. Bignami, La Poetica di Aristotele e il con- cetto dell'arte presso gli antichi (Florence, 1932). P.-M. Schuhl, Platon et l'art de son temps (Arts plastiques; Paris, 1933). R. McKeon, " Literary Criticism and the Concept of Imitation in Antiquity," Modern Philology, 34 (1936-37), 1-35.

32 Plutarch, De gloria Atheniensium 3, 346 F ff. 33 Republic X, 605 a ff. 34 Poetics 1, 1447 a 19ff.; 2, 1448 a 4ff. 35 De arte poetica 1ff.; 361ff. 36 De inventione II, 1. 37 De veteribus scriptoribus 1. 38 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria XII, 10, 3ff. 39 F. Ritschl, " De M. Terentii Varronis disciplinarum libris commentarius," in

his Kleine philologische Schriften III (Leipzig, 1877), 352-402. 40 Cf. De architectura I, 1, 3ff.


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 87tLovpyo', 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

41 Natural History XXXV, 76f. 42 Protrepticus (Opera, ed. C. G. Kuehn, I [Leipzig, 1821], 39). 43 Oratio XII. Cf. S. Ferri, " II discorso di Fidia in Dione Crisostomo," Annali

della R. Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Lettere, Storia e Filosofia, Ser. II, vol. V (1936), 237-66.

44 Philostratus, Imagines. Callistratus, Descriptiones. Ella Birmelin, "Die Kunsttheoretischen Gedanken in Philostrats Apollonios," Philologus 88, N.F. 42 (1933), 149-80; 392-414.

45 Epistolae Morales 88, 18. 46 Somnium 14. Cf. Plutarch, Pericles 1-2. 47 Republic V, 472 d. Cf. VI, 501 a ff. 48 Timaeus 29 a. 49 Physics II 3, 194 b 24f. and 195 a 5f. Metaphysics IV 2, 1013 a 25f. and b 6f. 50 Orator 8f. 51 W. Theiler, Die Vorbereitung des Neuplatonismus (Berlin, 1930), 1ff. Bir-

melin, I.c., p. 402ff. Plotinus, Enn. I 6, 3; V 8, 1. E. Panofsky, Idea (Leipzig- Berlin), 1924. 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 0. Kurz, Die Legende vom Kiinstler (Vienna, 1934), 47ff.

52 The opinion of S. Haupt (" Die zwei Biicher des Aristoteles irept 7rOLqTLtKq

TrXVi, Philologus 69, N.F. 23 [1910], 252-63) that a lost section of Aristotle's Poetics dealt with the visual arts, as well as with lyrical poetry, must be rejected.


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 ( rIL'a s). 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.64 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,56 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.

53See above, note 31. Cf. esp. Plato, Republic II, 373 b; X, 595 a ff. Laws II, 668 bf. Aristotle, Poetics 1, 1447 a 19ff. Rhetoric I 11, 1371 b 6ff. Politics VIII 5, 1340 a 38f.

64 It seems clear, at least for Plato (Republic X and Sophist 234 a ff.) that he arrived at his distinction between the productive and imitative arts without any exclusive concern for the " fine arts," since imitation is for him a basic metaphysical concept which he uses to describe the relation between things and Ideas.

55 Perhaps lyrical poetry is also excluded. It is not discussed by Aristotle, except for certain special kinds, and there are passages in Plato's Republic (X, 595 a) that imply that only certain kinds of poetry are imitative.

I6 See above, note 29. 57 Aristotle, Poetics 1, 1447 a 24ff. 58 Plato, Sophist 234 e f. 69 Republic X, 596 d f. 60 Ibid., 602 d. Cf. Sophist, 235 a. 61 Plato, Cratylus, 423c. Cf. Aristotle, Poetics 1, 1447 a21 (a controversial

passage). See also Rhetoric III 2, 1404 a 20ff. for the imitative character of words and language. 62 Metaphysics I 1, 981 b 17ff. 63 VIII 3, 1337 b 23ff.


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 (Ta 'yKV'KXta). 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 insert- ing them, of which we have spoken above. On the other hand, the liberal arts include grammar and logic, mathematics and astronomy,

64 Moritz Guggenheim, Die Stellung der liberalen Kiinste oder encyklischen Wissenschaften im Altertum (progr. Zurich, 1893). E. Norden, Die antike Kunst- prosa II, 4th ed. (Leipzig-Berlin, 1923), 670ff. H.-J. Marrou, Histoire de l'education dans l'antiquite (Paris, 1948), 244f. and 523f.; also Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture classique (Paris, 1938), 187ff. and 211ff.

65 Pro Archia poeta 1, 2: " etenim omnes artes quae ad humanitatem pertinent habent quoddam commune vinculum." 66 See above, note 39.

67 Charles S. Baldwin, Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic (New York, 1924), esp. 1ff., 63ff., 226ff.


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.6 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 sus- ceptible 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.

68 J. von Schlosser, " Giusto's Fresken in Padua und die Vorlaufer der Stanza della Segnatura," Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhochsten Kaiserhauses XVII, pt. 1 (1896), 13-100, esp. 36. Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclo- paedie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft 16 (1935), 680ff., esp. 685f. and 725ff.

69Carolus Schmidt, Quaestiones de musicis scriptoribus Romanis . . . (thes. Giessen, Darmstadt, 1899).

70 Schlosser, Kunstliteratur, 46ff.


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.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, theatrica4 Architecture as

71 p. Gabriel Meier, Die sieben freien Kiinste im Mittelalter (progr. Einsiedeln, 1886-87). Norden, I.c. A. Appuhn, Das Trivium und Quadrivium in Theorie und Praxis (thes. Erlangen, 1900). P. Abelson, The Seven Liberal Arts (thes. Columbia University, New York, 1906). For artistic representations of this scheme, see P. d'Ancona, " Le rappresentazioni allegoriche delle arti liberali nel medio evo e nel rinascimento," L'Arte 5 (1902), 137-55; 211-28; 269-89; 370-85. E. Male, L'art religieux du XIIIe siecle en France, 4th ed. (Paris, 1919), 97ff.

72 P. Rajna, "Le denominazioni Trivium e Quadrivium," Studi Medievali, N.S. 1 (1928), 4-36.

73 Besides the works of Baur and Marietan, cited above (note 27), see M. Grab- mann, Die Geschichte der scholastischen Methode II (Freiburg, 1911), 28ff.

74 Hugonis de Sancto Victore Didascalicon, ed. Ch. H. Buttimer (Washington, 1939), bk. II, ch. 20ff.


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.7 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

75 Ibid., ch. 22. For the position of the architect in particular, see N. Pevsner, "The Term 'Architect' in the Middle Ages," Speculum XVII (1942), 549-62.

76 Cf. G. Pietzsch, Die Klassifikation der Musik von Boetius bis Ugolino von Orvieto (thes. Freiburg, 1929).

77 Ch. S. Baldwin, Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (New York, 1928). E. Faral, Les arts poetiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siecle (Paris, 1924). R. McKeon, " Poetry and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century," Modern Philology 43 (1946), 217-34.

78E. De Bruyne, ltudes d'Esthetique medievale II (Bruges, 1946), 371ff., and III, 326ff.

79 Schlosser, Kunstliteratur, 65. N. Pevsner, Academies of Art, Past and Pres- ent (Cambridge, 1940), 43ff. M. Wackernagel, Der Lebensraum des Kiinstlers in der Florentinischen Renaissance (Leipzig, 1938), 306ff. 80 De Bruyne, I.c.

81 C. Du Cange, Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis I (Paris, 1937), 413. 82 D. Bigongiari, " Notes on the Text of Dante," Romanic Review 41 (1950), 81f.


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 Areopa- gite. 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,

83 L. Schuetz, Thomas-Lexikon, 2nd ed. (Paderborn, 1908), 65-68. A. Dyroff, "Zur allgemeinen Kunstlehre des hi. Thomas," Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, Festgabe Clemens Bdumker . . . (Beitrdge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, Supplementband II, Miinster, 1923), 197-219. De Bruyne, I.c., III, 316ff. J. Maritain, Art et Scolastique (Paris, 1920), If. and 28f. G. G. Coulton, Art and the Reformation (Oxford, 1928), 559ff.

84 M. De Wulf, " Les theories esthetiques propres a Saint Thomas," Revue Neo- Scolastique 2 (1895), 188-205; 341-57; 3 (1896), 117-42. M. Grabmann, Die Kulturphilosophie des H1. Thomas von Aquin (Augsburg, 1925), 148ff. I. Chap- man, " The Perennial Theme of Beauty," in Essays in Thomism (New York, 1942), 333-46 and 417-19. E. Gilson, Le Thomisme, 5th ed. (Paris, 1945), 382-83.

85 M. Grabmann, "Des Ulrich Engelberti von Strassburg O.P. (+ 1277) Ab- handlung De pulchro," Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissen- schaften, Philosophisch-Philologische und Historische Klasse (Jahrgang 1925), no. 5. Cf. H. Pouillon, "Le premier Traite des proprietes transcendentales, La Summa de bono du Chancelier Philippe," Revue Neoscolastique de Philosophie 42 (1939), 40-77. A. K. Coomaraswamy, "Medieval Aesthetic," The Art Bulletin 17 (1935), 31-47; 20 (1938), 66-77 (reprinted in his Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought [London, 1946], 44-84. I am indebted for this reference to John Cuddihy). E. Lutz ,"Die Asthetik Bonaventuras," Studien zur Geschichte der Philosophie: Festgabe . . . Clemens Bdumker gewidmet (Beitrdge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, Supplementband, Miinster, 1913), 195-215.

86 Maritain, I.c., p. 31ff., esp. 40. Chapman, I.c. L. Wencelius, La philosophie de Vart chez les Neo-Scolastiques de langue frangaise (Paris, 1932), esp. 93ff.


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.

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.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

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 See my article, " Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance," Byzantion 17 (1944-45), 346-47, esp. 364-65.

89 K. Vossler, Poetische Theorien in der italienischen Friihrenaissance (Berlin, 1900).


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.9? 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

90M. Maylender, Storia delle Accademie d'ltalia, 5 vols. (Bologna, 1926-30). See also Pevsner, 1.c., Iff. 91 Zilsel, I.c., 293ff.

92 J. E. Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, 6th ed. (New York, 1930). G. Toffanin, La fine dell'umanesimo (Turin, 1920). Donald L. Clark, Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance (New York, 1922). Charles S. Bald- win, Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (New York, 1939). Among the commentators, Franciscus Robortellus groups poetry with rhetoric and various parts of logic (In librum Aristotelis de arte poetica explicationes [Florence, 1548], p. 1) and takes Poetics 1447 a 18ff. to refer to painting, sculpture and acting (p. 10f.: "sequitur similitudo quaedam ducta a pictura, sculptura et histrionica"). Vin- centius Madius and Bartholomaeus Lombardus also group poetry with logic and rhetoric (In Aristotelis librum de poetica communes explanationes [Venice, 1550], p. 8) but interpret the same passage in terms of painting and music (p. 40-41): "aemulantium coloribus et figuris alios, pictores inquam, voce autem alios, pho- nascos scilicet (music teachers), aemulari, quorum pictores quidem arte, phonasci autem consuetudine tantum imitationem efficiunt." Petrus Victorius states that Aristotle does not list all the imitative arts in the beginning of the Poetics (Com- mentarii in primum librum Aristotelis de arte poetarum, 2nd ed. [Florence, 1573], p. 4) and refers the imitation through voice not to music, but to the copying of the song of birds (p. 6: "cum non extet ars ulla qua tradantur praecepta imitandi cantum avis aut aliam rem voce ") and of other animals (p. 7). Lodovico Castel- vetro repeatedly compares poetry to painting and sculpture as to other imitative arts (Poetica d'Aristotele volgarizzata et sposta [Basel, 1576], p. 14ff.; 581) but recognizes music and the dance as parts of poetry (p. 13: "la poesia di parole, di ballo e di suono "). Significant is his attempt to relate poetry to the realm of the soul as opposed to the body (p. 342: "il dipintore rappresenta la bonta del corpo, cio e la bellezza, e'l poeta rappresenta la bonta dell'animo, cio e i buoni costumi "; Cf. H. B. Charlton, Castelvetro's Theory of Poetry [Manchester, 1913], 39). Fran-


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,93 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.94 It seems that the prac- cesco Patrici, anti-Aristotelian in poetics as well as in philosophy, rejects the principle of imitation altogether and calls it a term with many meanings, unfit to serve as a genus for several arts (Della Poetica, La Deca disputata [Ferrara, 1586], p. 63): "Percio che cosi in confuso presa (i.e., imitation), non pare potere essere genere univoco ne analogo a Pittori, a Scoltori, a Poeti e ad Istrioni, artefici cotanto tra loro differenti "; p. 68: " essendo adunque la imitazione della favola stata commune a scrittori, istorici, a filosofi, a sofisti, a dialogisti, ad istoriali e a novellatori." Bernardino Daniello (Della poetica [Venice, 1536], p. 69f.) compares the poet not only to the painter but also to the sculptor. Antonius Minturnus compares poets, musicians and painters as imitators (De poeta [Venice, 1559], p. 22: "Videbam enim ut pictorum musicorumque ita poetarum esse imitari ") but stresses repeatedly that music in ancient times was joined to poetry (p. 49; 60; 91: "eosdem poetas ac musicos fuisse "; 391) and compares poetry also with history and other sciences (p. 76; 87ff.; 440f.). In another work, the same author, echoing Aristotle's Poetics, compares poetry to painting and acting (L'arte poetica [Naples, 1725], p. 3: " i pittori con li colori e co' lineamenti la facciano, i parasiti e gl'istrioni con la voce e con gli atti, i poeti . .. con le parole, con l'armonia, con i tempi ") and treats music and dance as parts of poetry (ibid.). Johannes Antonius Viperanus defines poetry as imitation through verse and thus differentiates it from other forms of imitation. Lucian can be called a poet, "sed ea dumtaxat ratione qua pictores, mimi et imitatores alii propter nominis generalem quandam lateque diffusam signifi- cationem nominari possunt et nominantur etiam poetae" (De poetica libri tres [Antwerp, 1579], p. 10). Giovanni Pietro Capriano divides the imitative arts into two classes, the noble and the ignoble. The former appeal to the noble senses of seeing and hearing and have durable products, such as poetry, painting and sculpture, the latter for which no examples are given appeal to the three lower senses and produce no lasting works (Della vera poetica [Venice, 1555], fol. A 3-A 3v. Cf. Spingarn, p. 42). Music is treated as a part of poetry (ibid.). Other writers on poetics whom I have examined, such as Fracastoro or Scaliger, have nothing to say on the other "fine arts," except for occasional comparisons between poetry and painting. B. Varchi also groups poetry with logic, rhetoric, history and grammar (Opere, ed. A. Racheli, II [Trieste, 1859], p. 684). Cf. Spingarn, 25.

93 A. Pellizzari, II Quadrivio nel Rinascimento (Naples, 1924), 63ff. 94 Guglielmo Ebreo Pesarese, Trattato dell'arte del ballo (Scelta di curiosita

letterarie, 131, Bologna, 1873), p. 3 and 6-7.


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.95 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.96

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.97 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.8 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 jour- nalist 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

95 Raphael Brandolini, De musica et poetica opusculum (ms. Casanatense C V 3, quoted by Adrien de La Fage, Essais de diphtherographie musicale . .. [Paris, 1864], 61ff.).

96 Lodovico Zuccolo, Discorso delle ragioni del numero del verso italiano (Venice, 1623), 65ff. (" mentre si addatta non la musica a i versi, ma questi si accommodano a quella contro ogni dovere," p. 65).

97 Schlosser, " Giusto's Fresken," 70ff.; Kunstliteratur, 66. 98 Dresdner, 77ff. L. Olschki, Geschichte der neusprachlichen wissenschaftlichen

Literatur, I: Die Literatur der Technik und der angewandten Wissenschaften vom Mittelalter bis zur Renaissance (Heidelberg, 1919), 31ff.


repeat the claim that painting should be considered as one of the liberal, not of the mechanical arts.99 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.100

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.l01 The Art Academies followed the pattern of the literary Academies that had been in exist- ence 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.102

99Schlosser, Kunstliteratur, 50; 79f.; 98; 136; 138; 385. Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy 1450-1600 (Oxford, 1940), 48ff. K. Birch-Hirschfeld, Die Lehre von der Malerei (thes. Leipzig, 1911), 25. For a French example of 1542, see F. Brunot, Histoire de la langue francaise . . . VI, 1 (1930), 680.

100 The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. Jean Paul Richter, I, 2nd ed. (London, 1939), 31ff.

101 Schlosser, Kunstliteratur, 385ff. Olschki, II (Bildung und Wissenschaft im Zeitalter der Renaissance in Italien, Leipzig, 1922), 188ff. Blunt, 55ff. Pevsner, 42ff.

102 Pevsner, 48.


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 pictura 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,103 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.104

103 Rensselaer W. Lee, " Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Paint- ing," The Art Bulletin 22 (1940), 197-269. See also W. G. Howard, "Ut pictura poesis," Publications of the Modern Language Association 24 (1909), 40-123. Lessing, Laokoon, ed. William G. Howard (New York, 1910), p. L ff. Denis Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (London, 1947).

104 Due dialoghi di M. Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano, Nel prime de' quali si ragiona de le parti morali, e civili appertenenti a Letterati Cortigiani, et ad ogni gentil'huomo, e l'utile, che i Prencipi cavano da i Letterati. Nel secondo si cagiona de gli errori de Pittori circa l'historie . . . (Camerino, 1564). Antonius Possevinus, De poesi et pictura ethnica humana et fabulosa collata cum vera honesta et sacra (1595), in his Bibliotheca selecta de ratione studiorum II (Cologne, 1607), 407ff. (this treatise is based on an explicit comparison between the two arts, cf. 470: " quae poeticae eadem picturae conveniunt monita et leges "). Filippo Nufies, Arte poetica, e da pintura e symmetria, cor principios de perspectiva (Lisbon, 1615; not seen; the Arte de pintura was reprinted separately in 1767; cf. Innocenzo Fran- cisco da Silva, Diccionario Bibliographico Portuguez II [Lisbon, 1859], 303-04).


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,105 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.106 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.107 The question was still of interest to Galileo.108 The most important text of this type is Leonardo's Paragone, which argues for the superiority of painting over poetry, music, and sculpture.'09 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 E. Garin, La disputa delle Arti nel Quattrocento (Florence, 1947). 106 Schlosser, Kunstliteratur, 154ff. 107 G. G. Bottari, Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura scultura ed architectura I

(Rome, 1754), 12ff. Cf. Schlosser, Kunstliteratur, 200ff. See also Varchi's own lecture on this subject (Opere, ed. A. Racheli, II [Trieste, 1859], 627ff.).

108 Letter to Lodovico Cardi da Cigoli (1612), in his Opere, Edizione Nazionale XI (Florence, 1901), 340-43. On the authenticity of this letter, see Margherita Margani, "Sull'autenticita di una lettera attribuita a G. Galilei," Atti della Reale Accademia delle Scienze di Torino 57 (1921-22), 556-68. I am indebted for this reference to Edward Rosen.

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.


with which painting, as a science, is closely linked for Leonardo. Another line of thinking which might be called the amateur tradi-

tion appears in several writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, probably first in Castiglione's Courtier.110 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.1l 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.l2

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.13 In stressing the affinity

110 B. Castiglione, II Cortegiano, Bk. I. Giovanni Battista Pigna, II Principe (Venice, 1561), fol. 4v-5. Peachham's Compleat Gentleman (1622), ed. G. S. Gordon (Oxford, 1916), chs. 10-13.

111 Lodovico Zuccolo (Discorso delle ragioni del numero del verso Italiano, Venice, 1623), speaking of our judgment concerning verse and rhythm in poetry, refers for a comparison to painting and music (p. 8: "onde habbiamo in costume di dire, che l'occhio discerne la bellezza della Pittura, e l'orecchio apprende l'armonia della Musica; . . . quel gusto della Pittura e della Musica che sentiamo noi . . ."; cf. B. Croce, Storia dell'estetica per saggi [Bari, 1942], 44f.). A comparison between painting and music is made also by Richard Asheley in the preface of his translation of Louis Le Roy (1594); cf. H. V. S. Ogden, "The Principles of Variety and Contrast in Seventeenth Century Aesthetics and Milton's Poetry " this Journal 10 (1949), 168.

112Enn. I 6, 1. Marsilius Ficinus, Commentarium in Convivium Platonis de amore, Oratio 5, cap. 2 (Marsilio Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Symposium, ed. Sears R. Jayne, The University of Missouri Studies XIX, 1 [Columbia, 1944], 65-66). Cf. his Theologia Platonica, Bk. XII, chs. 5-7 (Opera [Basel, 1576], I, 275ff.). See also St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae II, I, 27, 1.

113 Jacobi Pontani de Societate Jesu Poeticarum Institutionum libri III. Editio tertia cum auctario ... (Ingolstadt, 1600), 239-50: "Auctarium. Collatio Poetices cum pictura, et musica" (I have used the copy of Georgetown University; the passage is lacking in the first edition of 1594, of which Columbia University has a


between the three arts as forms of imitation aiming at pleasure, the author goes beyond his classical sources.ll4 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."l

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."l 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."7

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-

copy, and in the second edition of 1597 owned by the Newberry Library and kindly examined for me by Hans Baron; my attention was drawn to it by K. Borinski, Die Antike in Poetik und Kunsttheorie II [Leipzig, 1924], 37ff. and 328ff.

114 " Scriptores antiqui Poeticem cum pictura et musica componere soliti, plurimam utique illius cum hisce duabus artibus affinitatem cognationemque mag- nam et omnino ingenium eius ac proprietatem declarare voluerunt" (239-40). "Omnium insuper commune est delectationem gignere, siquidem ad honestam animi voluptatem potius quam ad singularem aliquam utilitatem repertae . .. videntur. Porro poetica et musica . . . auditum permulcent . . . pictura oculis blanditur" (242). Sculpture is also once brought in: "fas sit sculptores, caelatores, fictores propter similitudinem quandam pictoribus sociare" (244).

115 A. de Backer and Ch. Sommervogel, Bibliotheque des ecrivains de la Com- pagnie de Jesus, new ed., II (Liege-Lyon, 1872), 2075-81, list several French print- ings of the work, of which at least one is clearly based on the third edition. See also the catalogue of the Bibliotheque Nationale, which lists a 3rd ed. issued in Avignon, 1600.

116Augustinus Niphus, de pulchro, de amore (Lyons, 1549). The work is quoted by J. P. de Crousaz, Traite du Beau, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam, 1724), I, 190. I have not seen Marcus Antonius Natta, De pulcro (Pavia, 1553; cf. Catalogo ragionato dei libri d'arte e d'antichita posseduti dal Conte Cicognara I [Pisa, 1821], 188f.).

117 See my article, "Francesco da Diacceto and Florentine Platonism in the Sixteenth Century," Miscellanea Giovanni Mercati IV (Studi e Testi 124, Vatican City, 1946), 260-304, esp. 279ff.


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.ll8 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."9 Neither Agrippa of Nettesheim 120 nor Scaliger,l21 nor in the seventeenth century Alsted 122 or Vossius,123 shows any attempt to separate the fine arts

118 Baur, I.c., 391ff. Spingarn, 24. 119 Johannes Ludovicus Vives, De disciplinis, in his Opera omnia VI (Valencia,

1785). Petrus Ramus, Collectaneae, Praefationes, Epistolae, Orationes (Marburg, 1599). Conrad Gesner (Bibliotheca Universalis II, Zurich, 1548) places poetry between rhetoric and arithmetic; music between geometry and astronomy; and lists architecture, sculpture and painting scattered among the mechanical arts such as transportation, clothmaking, alchemy, trade, agriculture and the like. Gesner is important as the author of a classification scheme designed for bibliographical pur- poses. The later history of such schemes has been studied, and it appears that the arts, meaning the visual arts and music, did not attain a distinct place in them before the eighteenth century, whereas up to the present day poetry, for obvious reasons, has never been combined with the other arts in these bibliographical schemes. Cf. Edward Edwards, Memoirs of Libraries (London, 1859), 747ff. W. C. Berwick Sayers, An Introduction to Library Classification, 7th ed. (London, 1946), 74ff. My attention was drawn to this material by Prof. Thomas P. Fleming.

120 Henricus Cornelius Agrippa ab Nettesheim, De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum (no place, 1537), gives a random list of arts and sciences, in which poetry appears between grammar and history, music between gambling and the dance, painting and sculpture between perspective and glassmaking (specularia), architecture between geography and metal work. In his De occulta philosophia (Opera I [Lyons, s.a.], bk. I, ch. 60; cf. E. Panofsky, Albrecht Diirer I [Princeton, 1943], 168ff.), Agrippa distinguishes three kinds of melancholy and inspiration which he assigns, respectively, to the manual artists such as painters and architects, to the philosophers, physicians and orators, and to the theologians. It is significant that he has the manual artists share in inspiration, but does not link them with the poets mentioned in the same chapter, and he clearly places them on the lowest of the three levels.

121 In a rather incidental passage, he groups architecture with cooking and agriculture; singing and the dance with wrestling; speech with navigation (Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem [no place, 1594], bk. III, ch. 1, p. 206). Varchi has several random groupings of the arts and finally gives the prize to medicine and next to architecture (Opere II, 631ff.). Nizolius classes poetry with grammar, rhetoric and history (Robert Flint, Philosophy as Scientia Scientiarum and a History of Classifications of the Sciences [New York, 1904], 98f.).

122 He includes poetry under philology, and music under theoretical philosophy (Ibid., 113-15).


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.124 Francis Bacon connects poetry with the faculty of imagination,125 but does not mention the other arts, and the same is true of Vico,126 whom Croce considers the founder of modern aesthetics.l27 Bonifacio stresses the link between poetry and painting, but otherwise does not separate the fine arts from the sciences,128 and the same is true of Tassoni.129 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.l29a The

123 Gerardus Johannes Vossius, De artium et scientiarum natura ac constitu- tione libri quinque (in his Opera III, Amsterdam, 1697). He lists four groups of arts: The vulgar arts such as tailoring and shoemaking; the four popular arts of reading and writing, of sports, of singing and of painting (this group is borrowed from Aristotle's Politics VIII 3, 1337 b 23ff.); the seven liberal arts; the main sciences of philosophy (with eloquence), jurisprudence, medicine and theology.

124 5th ed. (London, 1741), III (first published in 1727). He classes painting with optics under mixed mathematics, music again under mixed mathematics, architecture and sculpture with the trades also under mixed mathematics, gardening with agriculture, and poetry with rhetoric, grammar and heraldry.

125 Of the Advancement of Learning (The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, ed. John M. Robertson [London, 1905], 79 and 87ff.). Cf. F. H. Anderson, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (Chicago, 1948), 149.

126 Vico's theory of phantasy refers to poetry only. In an incidental passage he lists two groups of arts: the visual arts, and oratory, politics, medicine (De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, ch. 2, in Le orazioni inaugurali . . ., ed. G. Gentile and F. Nicolini [Bari, 1914], 144). 127 Estetica, I.c., 243ff.

128Giovanni Bonifacio, L'Arte de' Cenni . . . (Vicenza, 1616). He combines painting with poetry on account of their similarity, but places them between rhetoric and history (553ff.). Music appears between astrology and arithmetic (517ff.), architecture with sculpture between navigation and woolmaking (614ff.).

129 Alessandro Tassoni, Dieci libri di pensieri diversi, 4th ed. (Venice, 1627). He places poetry between history and oratory (597ff.), puts architecture after agriculture and before decoration, sculpture, painting and clothing (609ff.), whereas music appears between arithmetic and astronomy (657ff.). Benedetto Accolti, another forerunner of the Querelle des anciens et modernes who lived in the fifteenth century, discusses only military art and politics, philosophy, oratory, jurisprudence, poetry, mathematics and theology (Dialogus de praestantia virorum sui aevi, in Philippi Villani liber de civitatis Florentiae famosis civibus, ed. G. C. Galletti [Florence, 1847], 106-07 and 110-28).

129a Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Della perfetta poesia italiana, ch. 6: "quelle arti nobili che parlano all'intelletto, come sono la Rettorica, la Storica, la Poetica" (in his Opere IX, pt. I [Arezzo, 1769], 56). These three arts are called "figliuole o ministre della filosofia morale " (ibid.), and the analogy with painting, based on the concept of imitation, is applied to all three of them (ibid., 59).


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 Ger- man authors.l30

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.l31 Only La Mesnardiere 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,132 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.'33

130 Dell'Entusiasma delle Belle Arti (1769). The author lists as Belle Arti: poetry, eloquence, painting, sculpture, architecture, music and the dance (Saverio Bettinelli, Opere II [Venice, 1780], 36ff.). In the preface, apparently added in 1780, he cites the Encyclopedie, Andre, Batteux, Schatfibury (sic), Sulzer and others (11).

131 F. Brunetiere, L'evolution des genres dans l'histoire de la litterature, 5th ed. (Paris, 1910). A. Soreil, Introduction a l'histoire de l'Esthetique franfaise: Contri- bution a l'etude des-theories litteraires et plastiques en France de la Pleiade au XVIIIe siecle (thes. Liege, Brussels, 1930).

132 " Mais entre les plus agreables (i.e., arts and sciences), dont le principal objet est de plaire a la phantasie, on sqait bien que la peinture, la musique et la poesie sont sa plus douce nourriture" (Jules de La Mesnardiere, La poetique I [Paris, 1639], 3). "Plusieurs livres sont remplis de la grande conformite qui est entre ces trois Arts. C'est pourquoy, sans m'arrester a des redites importunes, dont les Traittez de Poesie Latins et Italiens ne sont desia que trop chargez . . ." (ibid., 4). Cf. Soreil, 48. Helen R. Reese, La Mesnardiere's Poetique (1639): Sources and Dramatic Theories (Baltimore, 1937), 59.

133 See above, notes 92, 111, 113-15. It is also instructive to compare the sub- titles in the Italian and French editions of Cesare Ripa's famous Iconologia. In Italian (Padua, 1618): Opera utile ad Oratori, Predicatori, Poeti, Pittori, Scultori, Disegnatori, e ad ogni studioso, per inventar concetti, emblemi ed imprese, per divisare qualsivoglia apparato Nuttiale, Funerale, Trionfale. In French (Paris, 1644): Oeuvre . . . necessaire a toute sorte d'esprits, et particulierement a ceux qui aspirent a estre, ou qui sont en effet orateurs, poetes, sculpteurs, peintres, ingenieurs, autheurs de medailles, de devises, de ballets, et de poemes dramatiques.


Yet the Siecle 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.134

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.135 The Academie Frangaise was organized in 1635 by Richelieu for the cultivation of the French language, poetry, and literature after the model of the Accademia della Crusca.136 Several years later, in 1648, the Academie 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.37 Many more Academies were founded by Colbert between 1660 and 1680. They included provincial academies of painting and sculpture,138 the French Academy in Rome, dedicated to the three visual arts,'39 as well as Academies of Archi- tecture,140 of Music,14' and of the Dance.142 However, the system of

134 J. Igcorcheville, De Lulli a Rameau, 1690-1730: L'Esthetique musicale (Paris, 1906).

135 My attention was called to this problem by Dr. Else Hofmann. Cf. Pevsner, 84ff. La Grande Encyclopedie I, 184ff. L'lnstitut de France: Lois, Statuts et Reglements concernant les anciennes Academies et l'Institut, de 1635 a 1889, ed. L. Aucoc (Paris, 1889). Lettres, Instructions et Memoires de Colbert, ed. P. Clement, V (Paris, 1868), LIII ff. and 444ff. 136 Aucoc, p. XXI-XLIII.

137 Aucoc, p. CIV ff. Pevsner, 84ff. 138 Founded in 1676. Aucoc, CXXXVIII ff. 139 Founded in 1666. Lettres . . . de Colbert, p. LVIII ff. and 510f. 140 Founded in 1671. Aucoc, CLXVI ff. Lettres . . . de Colbert, LXXII. 141 This Academy, which was nothing else but the Paris Opera, can be traced

back to a privilege granted to Pierre Perrin in 1669; cf. La Grande Encyclopedie I, 224f. The Opera was definitely established in 1672 when a similar privilege was granted to Lulli, authorizing him "d'establir une academie royale de musique dans nostre bonne ville de Paris . .. pour faire des representations devant nous . . . des pieces de musique qui seront composees tant en vers frangais qu'autres langues estrangeres, pareille et semblable aux academies d'Italie" (Lettres . . . de Colbert, 535f.). 142 Founded in 1661. La Grande Encyclopedie I, 227.


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 Academie des Sciences 143 and the Acade- mie des Inscriptions et Medailles,144 which have no relation to the "Fine Arts"; that there was at least a project for an Academie de Spectacles to be devoted to circus performances and other public shows; 145 and that the Academie de Musique and the Academie de Danse, like this projected Academie de Spectacles, were not organiza- tions of distinguished professional artists or scientists, like the other Academies, but merely licensed establishments for the regular prepa- ration of public performances.146 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 147 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.148 The Conferences held at the Academie de Peinture et Sculpture are full of

143 Founded in 1666. Aucoc, IV. Lettres . . . de Colbert, LXII ff. 144 Founded in 1663. It changed its name to Academie Royale des Inscriptions

et belles-lettres in 1716. Aucoc, IV and LI ff. 145 The privilege granted to Henri Guichard in 1674 but not ratified authorizes

him " de faire construire des cirques et des amphitheatres pour y faire des carrousels, des tournois, des courses, des joustes, des luttes, des combats d'animaux, des illumi- nations, des feux d'artifice et generalement tout ce qui peut imiter les anciens jeux des Grecs et des Romains," and also " d'establir en nostre bonne ville de Paris des cirques et des amphitheatres pour y faire lesdites representations, sous le titre de 1'Academie Royale de spectacles" (Lettres . . . de Colbert, 551f.).

146 This appears clearly from the charters, cited or referred to above. 147 A note prepared by Charles Perrault for Colbert in 1666 proposes an

Academie generale comprising four sections: belles-lettres (grammaire, eloquence, poesie); histoire (histoire, chronologie, geographie); philosophie (chimie, simples, anatomie, physique experimentale); mathematiques (geometrie, astronomie, algebre). Lettres . . . de Colbert, 512f. Poetry appears thus among belles-lettres with grammar and eloquence, and the other fine arts are not mentioned.

148 Lee, I.c. Soreil, I.c. A. Fontaine, Les doctrines d'art en France . . . De Poussin a Diderot (Paris, 1909).


interesting critical views,'49 and separate treatises were composed by Du Fresnoy, De Piles, Freart de Chambray, and Felibien.l50 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.l51 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,l52 remained alive until the early eighteenth century,153 and it is significant that the honor painting derives from its similarity to poetry is sometimes extended, as occasionally in the Italian Renais- sance, to sculpture, architecture and even engraving as related arts.'54 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.l55 The comparison between painting and music is also made a few times,156 and Poussin himself, who lived in Italy, tried to transfer the theory of the Greek musical modes to poetry and especially to painting.57

149 Conferences de l'Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, ed. Felibien (London, 1705). Conferences de l'Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, ed. H. Jouin (Paris, 1883). Conferences inedites de l'Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, ed. A. Fontaine (Paris, n.d.).

150 Cf. Lee, I.c., and Schlosser, I.c. 151 "Ut pictura poesis erit; similisque poesi sit pictura..." (C. A. Du

Fresnoy, De arte graphica [London, 1695], 2). 152 Fontaine, I.c.; Lee, I.c. 153 P. Marcel, "Un debat entre les Peintres et les Poetes au d6but du XVIIIe

siecle," Chronique des Arts (1905), 182-83; 206-07. 154 Cf. L'Art de Peinture de C. A. Du Fresnoy, ed. R. de Piles, 4th ed. (Paris,

1751), 100. Felibien, Entretiens sur les vies . . . 4 (Paris, 1685), 155. 155 Conferences, ed. Jouin, 240. R. de Piles, Abrege de la vie des Peintres . . .

(Paris, 1699), 23. Cf. Brunot, Histoire de la langue francaise, 6, 1, 681. 156 Conferences, ed. Felibien, preface (" dans la musique et dans la poesie qui

conviennent le plus avec la Peinture "). F6libien, Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes, pt. IV (Paris, 1685), 155. R. de Piles, Cours de Peinture par principes (Paris, 1708), 9. Conferences, ed. Jouin, 240; 277-78; 328.

157 N. Poussin, Traite des modes, in his Correspondance, ed. Ch. Jouanny (Paris, 1911), 370ff. Cf. Conferences, ed. Jouin, 94. Soreil, 27.


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 Academie 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 cal- culation 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.'60

158 This aspect has been studied especially by Richard F. Jones (Ancients and Moderns, St. Louis, 1936). For a broader treatment of the Querelle: H. Rigault, Histoire de la querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, in his Oeuvres completes I [Paris, 1859]. H. Gillot, La Querelle des anciens et des modernes en France [Paris, 1914]. 0. Diede, Der Streit der Alten und Modernen in der englischen Literatur- geschichte des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (thes. Greifswald, 1912). J. Delvaille, Essai sur l'histoire de l'idee de progres jusqu'a la fin du XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1910), 203ff. J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (London, 1920), 78ff.

159 Brunetiere (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, see above, note 128.

160 Rigault (323f.) recognizes this distinction in Wotton, and Bury (104f. and 121ff.) attributes it to Fontenelle and Wotton. We shall see that it is also present in Perrault. For Wotton, see below.


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 Di- gression that he was aware of the distinction between the arts and the sciences.161

Much more important and explicit is the work of Charles Perrault. His famous Parallele 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.l62 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 Siecle de Louis le Grand, which gave rise to the whole controversy, Perrault seems to connect music with the other arts.'63 Moreover, in his prefaces Perrault states explicitly that at

161 Fontenelle (Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes, 1688, in his Oeuvres IV [Amsterdam, 1764], 114-31, esp. 120-22) admits the superiority of the ancients in poetry and eloquence, but stresses the superiority of the moderns in physics, medicine and mathematics. Significant is the emphasis on the more rigorous method introduced by Descartes.

162Charles Perrault, Parallele des Anciens et des Modernes, 4 vols. (Paris, 1688-96). These are the subjects treated in the fifth dialogue (vol. 4, 1696): astronomie, geographie, navigation, mathematiques (geometry, algebra, and arithmetic), art militaire, philosophie (logique, morale, physique, metaphysique), mede- cine, musique, jardinage, art de la cuisine, vehicles, imprimerie, artillerie, estampes, feux d'artifice.

163This is the grouping in the poem (Parallele, vol. I (Paris, 1693), 173ff.): oratory, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, gardening, music. In the second dialogue also Perrault compares the visual arts repeatedly with music which he calls a bel art (146 and 149). Another work connected with the Querelle, Francois de Calliere's Histoire poetique de la guerre nouvellement declaree entre les anciens et les modernes (Amsterdam, 1688; first ed., Paris, 1687) deals primarily with poetry and eloquence, but gives one section (Book 11, p. 213ff.) to painting, sculpture and


least in the case of poetry and eloquence, where everything depends on talent and taste, progress cannot be asserted with the same confi- dence as in the case of the sciences which depend on measurement.164 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 Libe'raux, which he rejects,'65 and then lists and describes the eight " Fine Arts " which the gentleman had represented to suit his taste and interests: Eloquence, Poesie, Musique, Architecture, Pein- ture, Sculpture, Optique, Mechanique.166 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.

music. This is brought out in the title of the anonymous English translation: Characters and Criticisms, upon the Ancient and Modern Orators, Poets, Painters, Musicians, Statuaries, and other Arts and Sciences (London, 1705). Cf. A. C. Guthkelch, The Library, 3rd ser., vol. 4 (1913), 270-84.

164 " Si nous avons un avantage visible dans les Arts dont les secrets se peuvent calculer et mesurer, il n'y a que la seule impossibilite de convaincre les gens dans les choses de gout et de fantaisie, comme sont les beautez de la Poesie et de l'Eloquence qui empesche que nous ne soyons reconnus les maitres dans ces deux Arts comme dans tous les autres" (Parallele I [Paris, 1693], preface). " Les Peintres, les Sculp- teurs, les Chantres, les Poetes / Tous ces hommes enfin en qui l'on voit regner / Un merveilleux scavoir qu'on ne peut enseigner " (Le genie, verse epistle to Fontenelle, ibid., 195f.). " Si j'avois bien prouve, comme il est facile de le faire, que dans toutes les Sciences et dans tous les Arts dont les secrets se peuvent mesurer et calculer, nous l'emportons visiblement sur les Anciens; il n'y auroit que l'impossibilite de convaincre les esprits opiniastres dans les choses de goust et de fantaisie, comme sont la plupart des beautez de l'Eloquence et de la Poesie, qui pust empescher que les Modernes ne fussent reconnus les maistres dans ces deux arts comme dans tous les autres " (ibid., 202). Cf also vol. III, preface. In his general conclusion also (IV, 292f.) Perrault excepts poetry and eloquence from his proof for the superiority of the Moderns.

165 " Apres avoir abandonne cette division (of the seven liberal arts), on a choisi entre les Arts qui meritent d'etre aim6s et cultives par un honnete homme ceux qui se sont trouvees etre davantage du gout et du genie de celui qui les a fait peindre dans son cabinet" (p. If.).

166 Eloquence, poetry, and music are put together in one group, as are the three visual arts (p. 2).

(Continued in the next issue, Jan. 1952)

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,167 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.168 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 re- sulting from such conversations.169 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.70 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 re- stating and developing the notions of ancient and Renaissance Plato- nists. 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

* Part I appeared in the Oct. 1951 issue. 167 Dresdner, 103ff. 68 Fontaine, Les doctrines d'art. Soreil, I.c. W. Folkierski, Entre le classi-

cisme et le romantisme: ?'tude sur l'esthetique et les l'estheticiens du XVIIIe siecle (Cracow-Paris, 1925). T. M. Mustoxidi, Histoire de l'Esthetique francaise, 1700- 1900 (Paris, 1920). For music, see also 1corcheville, I.c. Hugo Goldschmidt, Die Musikaesthetik des 18. Jahrhunderts und ihre Beziehungen zu seinem Kunstschaffen (Ziirich-Leipzig, 1915). While these scholars discuss most of the relevant sources, none of them focuses on the problem which concerns us.

169 "Tel livre qui marque une date n'apporte, a vrai dire, rien de nouveau sur le marche des idees, mais dit tout haut et avec ordre ce que beaucoup de gens pensent en detail et disent tout bas, sans s'arreter a ce qu'ils disent " (Soreil, 146).

170 Traite du Beau, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1724). 17


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.'71

During the following years, the problem of the arts seems to have dominated the discussions of the Academie 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.172 These discussions no doubt influenced the important work of the Abbe 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.74 He did not

171 ( Le dernier chapitre ou j'avois entrepris d'etablir sur mes principes les fondemens de ce que la musique a de beau . . . on y en a substitue un autre .... C'est celui de la beaute de la religion" (preface of the second edition). On the treatment of music in the first edition, which I have not seen, cf. H. Goldschmidt, 35-37.

172 In a lecture given in 1709, Abbe Fraguier describes poetry and painting as arts that have only pleasure for their end (Histoire de l'Academie Royale des In- scriptions et Belles Lettres . . . I (1736), 75ff.). In a Deffense de la Poesie, presented before 1710, Abb6 Massieu distinguishes "ceux [arts] qui tendent a polir l'esprit " (eloquence, poetry, history, grammar); " ceux qui ont pour but un delasse- ment et un plaisir honneste" (painting, sculpture, music, dance); and "ceux qui sont les plus necessaires a la vie " (agriculture, navigation, architecture) (Memoires de litterature tirez de l'Academie Royale des Inscriptions II (1736), 185f.). In a lecture of 1721, Louis Racine links poetry with the other beaux arts (ibid., V (1729), 326). In a lecture of 1719, Fraguier treats painting, music, and poetry as different forms of imitation (ibid., VI (1729), 265ff.). There are many more papers on related subjects.

173 Reflexions critiques sur la poisie et sur la peinture, 4th ed., 3 vols. (Paris, 1740). A. Lombard, L'Abbe Du Bos: Un initiateur de la pensee moderne (1670- 1742) (thes. Paris, 1913). Id., La Querelle des anciens et des modernes; l'abbe du Bos (Neuchatel, 1908). Aug. Morel, Jltude sur l'Abbe Dubos (Paris, 1850). Marcel Braunschvig, L'Abbe DuBos renovateur de la critique au XVIIIe siecle (thes. Paris, Toulouse, 1904). P. Peteut, Jean-Baptiste Dubos (thes. Bern, 1902). E. Teuber, "Die Kunstphilosophie des Abbe Dubos" Zeitschrift fur Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 17 (1924), 361-410. H. Trouchon, Romantisme et Preromantisme (Paris, 1930), 128ff. 174II, 323ff.


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.l75 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,'76 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.l77 Significant also is his acquaintance with English authors such as Wotton and Addison.178 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,'79 and he discusses music so frequently 80 that his English translator chose to mention this art in the very title of the book.l81 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.'82

Voltaire also in his Temple du Gout (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

175 I, 4; II, 131. 176 , Qu'il est des professions ou le succes depend plus du genie que du secours

que Fart peut donner, et d'autres ou le succes depend plus du secours qu'on tire de I'art que du genie. On ne doit pas inferer qu'un siecle surpasse un autre siecle dans les professions du premier genre, parce qu'il le surpasse dans les professions du second genre." The ancients are supreme in poetry, history and eloquence, but have been surpassed in the sciences such as physics, botany, geography, and astronomy, anatomy, navigation. Among the fields where progress depends "plus du talent d'inventer et du genie naturel de celui qui les exerce que de l'etat de per- fection ou ces professions se trouvent, lorsque l'homme qui les exerce fournit sa carriere," Dubos lists painting, poetry, military strategy, music, oratory, and medicine (II, 558ff.).

177 Lombard, La querelle. Id., L'Abbe Du Bos, 183ff. 178 Lombard, L'Abbe Du Bos, 189f. and 212. 179 I, 393; 481. II, 157f.; 177; 195; 224; 226; 228ff. 180 I, 435ff.; 451 (" Les premiers principes de la musique sont done les memes

que ceux de la poesie et de la peinture. Ainsi que la poesie et la peinture, la musique est une imitation"). The third volume, which deals with the ancient theatre, contains an extensive treatment of music and the dance.

181 Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music, translated by Thomas Nugent (London, 1748).

182 Thus he once groups together grammarians, painters, sculptors, poets, historians, orators (II, 235). For another example, see above, note 176.


scheme.183 More important for the history of our problem is the Essay on Beauty of Pere Andre (1741), which exercised a good deal of influence.184 His Cartesian background is worth noticing, although it is not enough to ascribe an aesthetics to Descartes.185 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.186 Andre 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 Abbe Batteux in his famous and influential treatise, Les beaux arts redduits & un meme principe (1746).187 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.l88 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.189 In his first chapter, Batteux gives a clear division of the arts.

183 " Nous trouvames un homme entoure de peintres, d'architectes, de sculpteurs, de doreurs, de faux connoisseurs, de flateurs " (Voltaire, Le temple du gout, ed. E. Carcassonne [Paris, 1938], 66). "On y passe facilement, / De la musique a la peinture, / De la physique au sentiment, / Du tragique au simple agrement, / De la danse a l'architecture" (ibid., 84).

184 Essai sur le Beau (Amsterdam, 1759; first ed. 1741). Cf. E. Krantz, Essai sur l'esthetique de Descartes . . . (Paris, 1882), 311ff. 185 Krantz, I.c.

186 ( Beau visible; beau dans les moeurs; beau dans les pieces de l'esprit; beau musical" (cf. p. 1).

187 Les beaux arts reduits a un meme principe, new ed. (Paris, 1747; first ed., 1746). Cf. M. Schenker, Charles Batteux und seine Nachahmungstheorie in Deutsch- land (Leipzig, 1909). Eberhard Freiherr von Danckelman, Charles Batteux (thes. Rostock, 1902).

188Trouchon, I.c. Schenker, I.c. For an English treatise based on Batteux, see below.

189 c" Le principe de l'imitation que le philosophe grec (Aristotle) 6tablit pour les beaux arts, m'avoit frappe. J'en avois senti la justesse pour la peinture qui est une poesie muette..." (p. VIII). "J'allai plus loin: j'essayai d'appliquer le meme principe a la musique et i l'art de geste " (VIII f.). He also quotes Cicero, Pro Archia, for the unity of the fine arts (p. X).


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.190 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. 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 Encyclo- pedie 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. Mon- tesquieu in his essay on taste written for the Encyclopedie takes the fine arts for granted.191 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 " Les autres ont pour objet le plaisir . .. on les appelle les beaux arts par excellence. Tels sont la musique, poesie, la peinture, la sculpture et lart du geste ou la danse" (p. 6).

191 Essai sur le gout (Oeuvres completes de Montesquieu, ed. E. Laboulaye, VII [Paris, 1879], 116): "La poesie, la peinture, la sculpture, l'architecture, la musique, la danse, les differentes sortes de jeux, enfin les ouvrages de la nature et de l'art peuvent lui [to the soul] donner du plaisir ... ." Cf. Edwin P. Dargan, The Aesthetic Doctrine of Montesquieu (thes. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 1907), 21.


matter.l92 In the article on the Arts for the Encyclopedie, 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.193 Yet in his article on beauty, he does discuss the fine arts, mentions Crousaz and Hutcheson and gives qualified approval to both Andre 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.194

Still more interesting is D'AIembert's famous Discours preliminaire. 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.'95 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.'96 He concludes with

192 Oeuvres completes de Diderot, ed. J. Assezat, 1 (1875), 343ff. The preface is addressed to Batteux (Lettre a l'auteur des Beaux-arts reduits a un meme principe, 347). Towards the end of his treatise, Diderot summarizes his criticism as follows: "Mais rassembler les beaut6s communes de la poesie, de la peinture et de la musique; en montrer les analogies; expliquer comment le poete, le peintre et le musicien rendent le meme image . . .c'est ce qui reste a faire, et ce que je vous conseille d'ajouter a vos Beaux-arts reduits a un meme principe. Ne manquez pas non plus de mettre a la tete de cet ouvrage un chapitre sur ce que c'est que la belle nature, car je trouve des gens qui me soutiennent que, faute de l'une de ces choses, votre traite reste sans fondement; et que, faute de l'autre, il manque d'application" (385). On Diderot's aesthetic doctrines, see: Werner Leo, Diderot als Kunstphilosoph (thes. Erlangen, 1918). R. Loyalty Cru, Diderot as a Disciple of English Thought (New York, 1913), 395ff.

193 Encyclopedie ou Dictionnaire Raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers I (Paris, 1751), 713ff.

194 " Son Essai sur le beau [i.e., of Pere Andre] est le systeme le plus suivi, le plus 6tendu et le mieux lie que je connaisse. J'oserais assurer qu'il est dans son genre ce que le Trait6 des Beaux-Arts reduits a un seul principe est dans le sien. Ce sont deux bons ouvrages auxquelles il n'a manque qu'un chapitre pour etre excel- lents . . . M. l'abbe Batteux rappelle tous les principes des beaux-arts a l'imitation de la ,belle nature; mais il ne nous apprend point ce que c'est que la belle nature" (Diderot, Oeuvres 10 [1876], 17. Encyclopedie 2 [1751], 169ff.). For the same criticism of Batteux, see also the Lettre sur les sourds, above, note 192.

195 " Des connaissances qui consistent dans l'imitation" (D'Alembert, Oeuvres [Paris, 1853], 99f. Cf. Encyclopedie I (1751), p. I ff.).

196 " Parmi les arts liberaux qu' on a reduit a des principes, ceux qui se pro- posent l'imitation de la nature ont 6te appeles beaux-arts, parce qu'ils ont princi-


a main division of knowledge into philosophy, history and the fine arts.'97 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 reflects its genesis. The threefold division of knowledge follows Francis Bacon, but significantly d'Alem- bert 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 Encyclopedie, 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 Encyclopedie, 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.198 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-

palement l'agrement pour objet. Mais ce n'est pas la seule chose qui les distingue des arts liberaux plus necessaires ou plus utiles, comme la grammaire, la logique ou la morale" (105)

197 " La peinture, la sculpture, l'architecture, la poesie, la musique et leurs differentes divisions composent la troisieme distribution generale, qui nait de l'imagination, et dont les parties sont comprises sous le nom de beaux-arts" (117).

198 Jacques Lacombe, Dictionnaire portatif des Beaux-Arts ou Abrege de ce qui concerne l'architecture, la sculpture, la peinture, la gravure, la poesie et la musique, avec la definition de ces arts, 'explication des termes et des chases qui leur appartien- nent, new ed. (Paris, 1753; first ed. 1752). The preface refers to " Le gout que le public temoigne pour les Beaux-Arts" and to "la necessite d'un livre qui renferme les Recherches et les Connoissances d'un amateur" (p. III). Pierre Esteve, L'esprit des Beaux Arts, 2 vols. (Paris, 1753). P.-J.-B. Nougaret, Anecdotes des Beaux Arts, contenant tout ce que la Peinture, la Sculpture, la Gravure, l'Architecture, la Litterature, la Musique etc. et la vie des artistes offrent de plus curieux et de plus piquant, 3 vols. (Paris, 1776-80; the work actually covers only the visual arts).


tional expression when it merged several of the older Academies into the Academie des Beaux Arts.199 Gradually, the further developments of aesthetics in Germany began to affect French philosophy and literature. The second edition of the Encyclopedie, published in Switzerland in 1781, has additions by Sulzer, including an article on aesthetics 200 and a section on Fine Arts appended to the article on Art that had not appeared in the first edition.201 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, cen- tered 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.202 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 Aucoc, 6-7. The section for literature and the fine arts of the Institut,

created in 1795, comprised: grammaire, langues anciennes, poesie, antiquite et monuments, peinture, sculpture, architecture, musique, declamation.

200 Encyclopedie 13 (Berne and Lausanne, 1781), 84-86: "Esthetique ... terme nouveau, invente pour designer une science qui n'a ete reduite en forme que depuis peu d'annees. C'est la philosophie des beaux-arts." [Aristotle did not have such a theory.] " M. Dubos est, si je ne me trompe, le premier d'entre les modernes qui ait entrepris de deduire d'un principe general la theorie des beaux-arts, et d'en demontrer les regles .... Feu M. Baumgarten . . . est le premier qui ait hasarde de creer sur des principes philosophiques la science generale des beaux-arts, a laquelle il a donne le nom d'esthetique." 201 Ibid. 3 (1781), 484ff.

202 V. Cousin, Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien, 29th ed. (Paris, 1904; first ed., 1836, based on lectures delivered in 1817-18). Cf. P. Janet, Victor Cousin et son oeuvre (Paris, 1885). E. Krantz (Essai sur l'esthetique 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.


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 Ger- many. Interest in the arts other than poetry began to rise slowly in the English literature of the seventeenth century. Works of an en- cyclopedic nature show little awareness of the separate function of the fine arts,204 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 per- fect gentleman.05 John Evelyn, who was the model of a virtuoso, included artistic and scientific interests,206 but the work of the virtuosi of the Royal Society soon led to a separation between the arts and the sciences.207 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 Eng- land representing the views of the Moderns, that of Wotton, tried to cover systematically all the human arts and activities, just as Perrault

203 James E. Tobin, Eighteenth Century English Literature and Its Cultural Background: A Bibliography (New York, 1939), 11-16; 27-33. John W. Draper, Eighteenth Century English Aesthetics: A Bibliography (Heidelberg, 1931). B. Sprague Allen, Tides of English Taste (1619-1800), 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1937). F. Mirabent, La estetica inglesa del siglo XVIII (Barcelona, 1927). Karl L. F. Thielke, Literatur- und Kunstkritik in ihren Wechselbeziehungen: Ein Beitrag zur englischen Aesthetik des 18. Jahrhunderts (Halle, 1935). 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), 235ff. Elizabeth W. Manwaring, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England (New York, 1925), 14ff. 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 George Hakewill (An Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World . . ., 3rd ed., Oxford, 1635), who compares the ancients and moderns in the arts and sciences (Bury, 89), puts poetry between history and the art military (278ff.), architecture and painting between philosophy and navigation (303ff.), whereas sculpture and music receive no separate treatment in his work. 205 See above, note 110.

206 The Literary Remains of John Evelyn, ed. W. Upcott (London, 1834). 207 James A. H. Murray, A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles,

vol. 10, pt. 2 (Oxford, 1928), 240f. Several of the seventeenth-century passages given for "virtuoso " include a scientific interest. The limitation of the term to a taste for the arts is clear in Shaftesbury, see below. Cf. Manwaring, I.c., 25.


had done, and emphasized like Perrault the fundamental difference between the sciences that had made progress since antiquity, and the arts that had not.208 A translation of one of the French works related to the Querelle, Calliere'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.209 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.211 Early in the eighteenth century, Jonathan Richardson was praising painting as a liberal art,212 and John Dennis in some of his critical treatises on

208 William Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, 3rd ed. (London, 1705). "... of these particulars there are two sorts: one, of those wherein the greatest part of those learned men who have compared Ancient and Modem Performances, either give up the cause to the Ancients quite, or think, at least, that the Moderns have not gone beyond them. The other of those, where the Advocates for the Moderns think the case so clear on their side, that they wonder how any man can dispute it with them. Poesie, Oratory, Architecture, Painting, and Statuary, are of the first sort; Natural History, Physiology, and Mathematics, with all their Dependencies, are of the second" (p. 18, end of ch. 2). "The generality of the learned have given the Ancients the preference in those arts and sciences which have hitherto been considered: but for the precedency in those parts of learning which still remain to be enquired into, the Moders have put in their claim, with great briskness. Among this sort, I reckon mathematical and physical sciences, in their largest extent" (p. 74f., ch. 7). In the first group, Wotton discusses Moral and Political knowledge, Eloquence and Poesie, grammar, architecture, statuary and painting. The second group includes, besides the sciences, philology and theology, also gardening which is treated with agriculture (ch. 22, p. 272) and music which is placed between optics and medicine (ch. 25, p. 307). The chapter on gardening is lacking in the first edition (London, 1694). Wotton does once compare music with painting (" For, in making a Judgment of Music, it is much the same thing as it is in making a judgment of Pictures," 311), but he treats music as a "physico-mathematical science, built upon fixed rules, and stated proportions" (309f.), and also in other respects his two groups do not coincide with the modern distinction between fine arts and sciences. Wotton is obviously moving towards that distinction, but I do not see that he goes beyond Perrault in this respect, as stated by Rigault (323f.) and Bury (121f.). No distinction between the arts and sciences is made by Sir William Temple, " An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning " (1690), in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn, vol. 3 (Oxford, 1909), 32-72. 209 See above, note 163.

210C. A. Du Fresnoy, De arte graphica, tr. J. Dryden (London, 1695), p. 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 Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Literary Works II (London, 1835), 297-358 (first ed., 1783).

212 Jonathan Richardson, The Theory of Painting (first published in 1715), in his Works (London, 1792), 5ff.


poetics stressed the affinity between poetry, painting and music.213 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.214 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 advo- cated no longer included the sciences, as in the seventeenth century, but had its center in the arts and in the moral life.215 Since Shaftes- bury 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.216 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.217 His moral sense still includes both ethical and aesthetic objects.218 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 219 or of poetry,220 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.221 Poetry, especially, appears still in the company not only

213 The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward N. Hooker, vol. I (Balti- more, 1939), 201f. ("The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry," 1701); 336 (" The Ground of Criticism in Poetry," 1704).

214 His importance is stressed by all historians of aesthetics. See also E. Cassirer, Die platonische Renaissance in England und die Schule von Cambridge (Leipzig, 1932), 115; 138ff. G. Spicker, Die Philosophie des Grafen von Shaftesbury (Frei- burg, 1872), 196ff. Christian Friedrich Weiser, Shaftesbury und das deutsche Geistesleben (Leipzig-Berlin, 1916). L. Stuermer, Der Begriff " moral sense " in der Philosophie Shaftesbury's (thes. Konigsberg, 1928).

215 Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics, ed. John M. Robertson (Lon- don, 1900), vol. I, 214f.; II, 252f. The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophi- cal Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. B. Rand (London, 1900), 249 ("A virtuoso to propose poetry, music, dance, picture, architecture, garden, and so on "); 416f. (" Had Mr. Locke been a virtuoso, he would not have philosophized thus "); 478; 484; 496; 506. 216 See Cassirer, l.c., above, note 214.

217 Characteristics II, 128; 138. 218 Characteristics I, 262; II, 136f. 219 Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Second Characters, ed. B. Rand (Cambridge,

1914). 220 Characteristics I, 10ff. 221 From music, poetry, rhetoric, down to the simple prose of history, through

all the plastic arts of sculpture, statuary, painting, architecture, and the rest; everything muse-like, graceful, and exquisite was rewarded with the highest honours ..." (i.e., by the Greeks). Characteristics II, 242. Cf. ibid., II, 330, where criticism of poetry is compared to the judgment of music or painting. I, 94 (beauty in architecture, music, poetry); II, 129; 252f.


of eloquence but also of history, thus reflecting the Renaissance tradition of the Studia humanitatis.222 Almost equally influential in Eng- land 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 sculpture, poetry and music, and makes it quite clear that the pleasures of the imagination are to be found in their works .and products.223

The philosophical implications of Shaftesbury's doctrine were further developed by a group of Scottish thinkers. Francis Hutche- son, who considered himself Shaftesbury's pupil, modified his doctrine by distinguishing between the moral sense and the sense of beauty.224 This distinction, which was adopted by Hume225 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.226 A later philosopher of the Scottish school, Thomas

222 II, 242. There seems to be a tendency in Shaftesbury to associate not only the beauty of the senses with the visual arts and music, but also the beauty of character and virtue, or moral beauty, with poetry. I, 136 (" moral artist "); 216 (" poetical and moral truth, the beauty of sentiments, the sublime of characters . . "); II, 318 (" to morals, and the knowledge of what is called poetic manners and truth "); 331f. (" a sense of that moral truth on which . . . poetic truth and beauty must naturally depend "). This is not merely a residue of the old moral- istic interpretation of poetry, but an attempt to correlate the emerging system of the fine arts with Plato's ladder of beauty. Cf. the statement of Castelvetro, above, note 92.

223 Joseph Addison, Works, ed. Tickell, II (London, 1804), 354ff. (Spectator, no. 411ff.). Addison includes architecture, and perhaps gardening, along with natural sights, among the primary pleasures, whereas he lists as secondary pleasures the "arts of mimicry," i.e., "statue, picture, description, or sound" (376). Significant also is a sentence from an earlier essay, published in the Spectator, no. 29, on April 3, 1711: "that music, architecture, and painting, as well as poetry and oratory, are to deduce their laws and rules from the general sense and taste of mankind . ." (ibid., I, 78).

224 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Glasgow, 1772; first ed., 1725), p. XI; 8; 100. Cf. Thomas Fowler, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson (New York, 1883). William Robert Scott, Francis Hutcheson (Cambridge, 1900). John J. Martin, Shaftesbury's und Hutcheson's Verhdltnis zu Hume (thes. Halle, 1905).

225 D. Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Appendix I: "Concerning Moral Sentiment." Cf. A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book III, Part I, Section II.

226 L.c., 239 (" We shall find this sense to be the foundation also of the chief pleasures of poetry "). For the root of this idea in Shaftesbury, see above, note 222.


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.227 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 228 and Hildebrand Jacobs.229 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.230 About

227 Thomas Reid, Works, 4th ed. (Edinburgh, 1854). Matthias Keppes, Der Common Sense als Princip der gewissheit in der Philosophie des Schotten Thomas Reid (Munich, 1890), 15. Cf. F. Ueberweg, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philoso- phie, III, 12th ed. (Berlin, 1924), 416. 0. Robbins, "The Aesthetics of Thomas Reid," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 5 (1942), 30-41.

228 Charles Lamotte, An Essay upon Poetry and Painting .. . (Dublin, 1745; first ed., 1730).

229 Hildebrand Jacobs, Of the Sister Arts; an Essay, in his Works (London, 1735), 379-419 (first ed., 1734). "If it be allow'd with Cicero that all Arts are related, we may safely conclude, that Poetry, Painting, and Music are closely ally'd" (379). "Poetry is much nearer ally'd to Painting, than to Music. Lyric Poetry approaches more to Music than any other Species of it, as Dramatic, and Pastoral Poetry do to Painting" (380). "The same Rules which Aristotle lays down as necessary for the Poets to observe in the Formation of he (sic) Manners, or Characters, are equally instructive to the Painters " (401). "That the Ancients were more excellent than we in most Parts of these Arts of Ornament, is as mani- fest, as that latter Ages have invented many useful Things entirely unknown to them " (412). However, the moderns are said to be superior in music (392). These statements are so explicit and interesting that it would be worth while to explore the influence of this author in France and Germany.

230 J(ames) H(arris), Three Treatises, the first concerning art, the second concerning music, painting, and poetry, the third concerning happiness (London, 1744). "All arts have this in common that they respect human life. Some contribute to


the same time, the poet Akenside continued the work of Addison; 231

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,232 the latter in an anonymous version or summary, entitled The Polite Arts.233

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 its necessities, as medicine and agriculture; others to its elegance, as music, painting, and poetry " (53). These three arts are called mimetic (65; 94).

231 Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination, in his Poetical Works, ed. G. Gilfillan (Edinburgh, 1857), Iff. In the preface of 1744, painting and sculpture, music and poetry are listed as imitative arts, and the poem is said to cover " all the various entertainment we meet with, either in poetry, painting, music, or any of the elegant arts" (p. 1). In the general argument added to the edition of 1757, the pleasures of imagination are said to proceed from natural objects or "from works of art, such as a noble edifice, a musical tune, a statue, a picture, a poem," and music, sculpture, painting and poetry are called "elegant arts " (77).

232 See above, note 181. 233 The Polite Arts, or, a Dissertation on Poetry, Painting, Musick, Architec-

ture, and Eloquence (London, 1749). The work is anonymous, and dedicated to William Cheselden. In the copy of the Yale University Library I have used, a contemporary manuscript note at the end of the preface identifies the author as follows: " Hippesley, son of the player, & bred under Mr. Cheselden & now surgeon abroad to the African company, 1753 " (p. IX). This is obviously John Hippisley (d. 1767) son of the actor (d. 1748), to whom the following anonymous writings have been attributed: Dissertation on Comedy ... (London, 1750); Essays, 1. On the Populousness of Africa, 2. On the Trade at the Forts on the Gold Coast, 3. On the Necessity of erecting a Fort at Cape Appollonia (London, 1764). Cf. Dictionary of National Biography IX, 903. The essay on The Polite Arts appears to depend closely on Batteux. This is the division of the arts given in ch. 2: "Arts may be divided into three kinds. The first have the Necessities of Mankind for their Ob- ject .... From this the Mechanick Arts arose. The next kind have Pleasure for their Object . . . They are called Polite Arts by way of Excellency, such are Musick, Poetry, Painting, Sculpture, and the Art of Gesture or Dancing. The third kind are those which have usefulness and Pleasure at the same time for their Object: such are Eloquence and Architecture" (5-6). A close comparison between the anonymous English essay and Batteux's treatise shows that the former follows the latter verbatim for large sections of the text, but alters its model through numerous transpositions, omissions and additions. The most important among the latter are two chapters on Eloquence and Architecture at the end of the English essay.


writers.234 All these English and Scottish writers show a strong pre- occupation 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.235 One reason for this may have been the public attention which music received in London after the appearance of Handel,236 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 descrip- tive 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.

234 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (New York, 1830; first ed., 1762). He lists poetry, painting, sculpture, music, gardening and architecture as "fine arts" (11). E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1770; first ed., 1757). Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (London, 1759). He lists as the "finer arts ": music, painting, statuary, architecture, poetry and eloquence (189). Daniel Webb, Obser- vations on the Correspondence between Poetry and Music (London, 1769; cf. Hans Hecht, Daniel Webb, Hamburg, 1920). Dr. (John) Brown, A Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions, of Poetry and Musick (London, 1763; cf. Hermann M. Flasdieck, John Brown (1715-66) und seine Dissertation on Poetry and Music, Halle, 1924). Thomas Robertson, An In- quiry into the Fine Arts (London, 1784; he quotes Batteux and Bettinelli, and lists as fine arts: music, speech, architecture, painting, sculpture, gardening, dance, eloquence, poetry and also history, cf. 14-17). Sir William Jones, Essay II. on the Arts, commonly called Imitative, in his Poems, 2nd ed. (London, 1777), 191ff. (he also quotes Batteux and discusses especially poetry, music and painting. James Beattie, An Essay on Poetry and Music, as they affect the Mind, 3rd ed. (London, 1779; written in 1762). Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (London, 1787; first ed., 1783).

235 John W. Draper, " Poetry and Music in Eighteenth Century Aesthetics," Englische Studien 67 (1932-33), 70-85. Herbert M. Schueller, "Literature and Music as Sister Arts . . . ," Philological Quarterly 26 (1947), 193-205.

236 Cf. H. Parker, The Nature of the Fine Arts (London, 1885), 18ff.


VIII Discussion of the arts does not seem to have occupied many Ger-

man writers in the seventeenth century, which was on the whole a period of cultural decline.237 The poet Opitz showed familiarity with the parallel of poetry and painting,238 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.239 Even their classicist opponent, Gottsched, mentions occasionally the affinity between poetry, painting, music, and the other arts,240 as does Johann

237 For German aesthetics in the eighteenth century, see, besides the general histories of aesthetics: F. Braitmaier, Geschichte der poetischen Theorie von den Diskursen der Maler bis auf Lessing, 2 pts. (Frauenfeld, 1888-89). E. Gurcker, Histoire des doctrines litteraires et esthetiques en Allemagne, 2 vols. (Paris, 1883- 96). Robert Sommer, Grundziige einer Geschichte der deutschen Psychologie und Aesthetik von Wolff-Baumgarten bis Kant-Schiller (Wiirzburg, 1892). M. Dessoir, Geschichte der neueren deutschen Psychologie, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1902). H. Gold- schmidt, Die Musikaesthetik des 18. Jahrhunderts . . . (Zurich and Leipzig, 1915). W. Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, 4th ed. (Leipzig, 1913), 42ff. E. Cassirer, Freiheit und Form, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1918), 97ff. Herman Wolf, Versuch einer Geschichte des Geniebegriffs in der deutschen Aesthetik des 18. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg, 1923). K. Bauerhorst, Der Geniebegriff. . . (thes. Breslau, 1930). B. Rosenthal, Der Geniebegriff des Aufkldrungszeitalters (Berlin, 1933).

238C. Borinski, Die Kunstlehre der Renaissance in Opitz' Buch von der deutschen Poeterey (thes. Munich, 1883), 44f.

239Die Discourse der Mahlern (1721-22), ed. Th. Vetter (Frauenfeld, 1891). The analogy between poetry and painting is stressed in discourse no. 19 (p. 91) and extended to sculpture in discourse no. 20 (97ff.). The same analogy is stressed in the later works of Bodmer and Breitinger. See Johann Jacob Bodmer, Critische Betrachtungen ueber die Poetischen Gemalde der Dichter (Zurich, 1741), 27ff. Johann Jacob Breitinger, Critische Dichtkunst (Zurich, 1740), 3ff. and 29ff. (where the comparison with painting is extended to history and eloquence). Cf. R. De Reynold, Histoire litteraire de la Suisse au XVIIIe siecle, II (Lousanne, 1912): Bodmer et Pl'cole Suisse. R. Verosta, Der Phantasiebegriff bei den Schweizern Bodmer und Breitinger (progr. Vienna, 1908). F. Braitmaier, Die poetische Theorie Gottsched's und der Schweizer (progr. Tibingen, 1879). F. Servaes, Die Poetik Gottscheds und der Schweizer (Strassburg, 1887).

240 Johann Christoph Gottsched, Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst, 3rd ed. (Leipzig, 1742), 98 (where poetry is compared with painting, sculpture, music and dance).


Elias Schlegel, who is said to have been influenced by the lectures of Fraguier and other authors published in the Memoirs of the Academie des Inscriptions.241 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.242 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 Alex- ander Gottlieb Baumgarten and of his pupil Georg Friedrich Meier.243

241 Johann Elias Schlegels Aesthetische und dramaturgische Schriften, ed. J. von Antoniewicz (Heilbronn, 1887). In an essay composed in 1745, Schlegel compares poetry with architecture, painting and sculpture (97), in another essay dated 1742- 43 with painting, sculpture and music (107ff.). On his French sources, see the introduction, p. XXXVI ff. and XCV ff.

242 Herrn Abt Batteux . . . . Einschrdnkung der Schonen Kiinste auf einen einzigen Grundsatz, tr. Johann Adolf Schlegel, 3rd ed. (Leipzig, 1770; first ed., 1751), II, 155ff.: "Abhandlung no. 5. Von der Eintheilung der schonen Kiinste nach ihrer verschiednen Absicht." Schlegel summarizes Batteux but insists that eloquence and architecture should be included among the fine arts (157) and also adds prose poetry as well as drawing and engraving to the list (180-81). Cf. Hugo Bieber, Johann Adolf Schlegels poetische Theorie in ihrem historischen Zusammen- hange untersucht (Berlin, 1912).

243 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica, ed. B. Croce (Bari, 1936; first ed., 1750-58). This edition also contains (1-45) his Meditationes Philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (1735). B. Poppe, Alexander Gottlieb Baum- garten (thes. Miinster, Borna-Leipzig, 1907), who publishes from a Berlin manuscript the text of Baumgarten's course on Aesthetics, delivered in German, probably in 1750-51 (65ff.). Georg Friedrich Meier, Abbildung eines Kunstrichters (Halle, 1745). Id., Anfangsgriinde aller schonen Wissenschaften, 2nd ed. (Halle, 1754-59; first ed., 1748-50). Thomas Abbt, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens Leben und Character (Halle, 1765). Georg Friedrich Meier, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens Leben (Halle, 1763). Th. W. Dannel, Gottsched und seine Zeit, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1855), 211ff. Carolus Raabe, A. G. Baumgarten aestheticae in disciplinae formam redactae parens et auctor (thes. Rostock, 1873). Hans Georg Meyer, Leibniz und Baumgarten als Begriinder der deutschen Aesthetik (thes. Halle, 1874). Johannes Schmidt, Leibnitz und Baumgarten, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Aesthetik (thes. Halle, 1875). E. Prieger, Anregung und metaphysische Grundlagen der Aesthetik von Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (thes. Berlin, 1875). M. Boja- nowski, Literarische Einfliisse bei der Entstehung von Baumgartens Aesthetik (thes. Breslau, 1910). Ernst Bergmann, Die Begriindung der deutschen Aesthetik durch Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten und Georg Friedrich Meier (Leipzig, 1911). A. Rie- mann, Die Aesthetik Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens (Halle, 1928). Hans Georg Peters, Die Aesthetik Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens und ihre Beziehungen zum Ethischen (Berlin, 1934).


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.244 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.245 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.248 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,247 and actually makes occasional references to the visual arts and to music.248 This impression is confirmed by the text of Baumgarten's lectures published only recently,249 and

244 " Sint ergo voyTra cognoscenda facultate superiore objectum logices; a'lrtr, e7rlUarrY7 u atUrlO7rtK7 sive aestheticae" (Meditationes, ed. Croce, #116, p. 44). The distinction is reminiscent of the one made by Speusippus and related by Sextus Empiricus (Adversls Mathematicos VII, 145: SrenoLrwro 8e 7 re rwv ipayuaxov r

abwV aor9qa ra e SEvo77a TW /EV VOr/TWV KptTiqpLtOV CAeX V Elvat TOV ErflLlovVKOv Aoyov, Triv Se aiac7OrTwv r1v (erTTr.qOVtKaV atlaOcrtLv). Aesthetica, #1 (ed. Croce, p. 55): " Aesthetica theoria liberalium artium, gnoseologia inferior, ars pulcre cogitandi . . . est scientia cognitionis sensitivae."

245Ibid. See also #3 (p. 55) where the usefulness of aesthetics is thus de- scribed: "bona principia studiis omnibus artibusque liberalibus subministrare."

246 In the Meditationes (#117, ed. Croce, p. 44-45), rhetorica generalis and poetica generalis are introduced as the main parts of aesthetica.

247 In #5 (ed. Croce, p. 56) he raises this objection against himself: "eam eandem esse cum rhetorica et poetica," and answers thus: "latius patet . . . com- plectitur has cum aliis artibus ac inter se communia."

248 #4, p. 55 (musicus); #69, p. 76 (musici); #780, p. 461-62 (music, painting); #83, p. 82-83 (music, the dance, painting, where painting is also assigned to one of the Muses.)

249 " Die ganze Geschichte der Maler, Bildhauer, Musikverstandigen, Dichter, Redner wird hierher geh6ren, denn alle diese verschiedenen Teile haben ihre allgemeinen Regeln in der Aesthetik" (ed. Poppe, 67). "Er [Aristotle] teilt seine Philosophie, wodurch die menschliche Kenntnis verbessert werden soll, in die Logik, Rhetorik und Poetik, die er zuerst als Wissenschaften vortragt. Die Einteilung selbst ist unvollkommen. Wenn ich sinnlich sch6n denken will, warum soll ich bloss in Prosa oder in Versen denken? Wo bleibt der Maler und Musikus?" (69).


by the writings of his pupil Meier.250 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.251 Baum- garten 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 Encyclo- paedists, 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.252 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

... da die Erklarung auch auf Musik und Malerei gehen muss " (71). ". . alle Kiinste, die man sch6n nennet, werden von der Kenntnis dieser Regeln den grossten Nutzen haben " (75). " Die Aesthetik geht viel weiter als die Rhetorik und Poetik " (76). These lectures are also notable for the more frequent references to French and English authors.

250" So lange es Maler, Dichter, Redner, Musickverstandige und so weiter gegeben hat, so lange ist Aesthetik ausgeibt worden" (Anfangsgriinde, vol. I, #6, p. 10). He then lists as liberal arts and "fine sciences": "die Redekunst, die Dichtkunst, die Music, die Historie, die Malerkunst und wie sie alle heissen " (#16, p. 27). Cf.p.21; 581, etc.

251 Wir werden in den Exempeln immer bei der Rede stehen bleiben ..." (Baumgarten, ed. Poppe, #20, p. 82). "Ob nun gleich die Aesthetick auch die Grinde zu den iibrigen schonen Kilnsten enthalt, so werde ich doch meine aller- meisten Exempel aus den Rednern und Dichtern nehmen" (Meier, Anfangsgriinde, pt. l, #19, p. 31).

252 "( Und wenn philosophische Kopfe, welche die Music, Malerkunst, und alle iibrige sch6ne Kiinste ausser der Rede und Dichtkunst, verstehen, die aesthetischen Grundsatze auf dieselben werden anwenden: so wird der einzige Einwurf, der bisher mit Artigkeit und vielem Scheine wider die Aesthetic gemacht worden, ganzlich wegfallen" (Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens Leben, 43f.).


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.253 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 bril- liant and most respected German writers of the time.254 Yet the place of the Laokoon in the history of our problem has been mis- judged. 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.255

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-

253 G. Baumecker, Winckelmann in seinen Dresdner Schriften (Berlin, 1933). Henry C. Hatfield, Winckelmann and his German Critics (New York, 1943).

254 Lessings Laokoon, ed. H. Bluemner, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1880). Loakoon, ed. William G. Howard (New York, 1910). Howard, " Ut pictura poesis," 1.c. R. Lee, " Ut pictura poesis," I.c. Croce, Estetica, I.c., 505ff. K. Leysaht, Dubos et Lessing (thes. Rostock, Greifswald, 1874).

255 Several passages in Lessing's notes for a continuation of the Laokoon refer to music and the dance and to their connection with poetry (ed. Bluemner, I.c., 397; 434ff.).


duced to some common principle better than imitation,256 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.257 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. Mendels- sohn 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.259 He did not work

256 Moses Mendelssohn, "Betrachtungen liber die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schonen Kiinste und Wissenschaften" (1757), in his Gesammelte Schriften (Jubildumsausgabe) 1 (Berlin, 1929), 165-90. Cf. G. Kannegiesser, Die Stellung Moses Mendelssohn's in der Geschichte der Aesthetik (thes. Marburg, 1868). Lud- wig Goldstein, Moses Mendelssohn und die deutsche Aesthetik (Konigsberg, 1904).

257Review of G. F. Meier's Auszug aus den Anfangsgriinden aller schonen Kiunste und Wissenschaften (1758), in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, pt. 1, Leipzig, 1844, 313-18. "Allein uns diinkt, dass der Erfinder dieser Wissenschaft der Welt nicht alles geliefert habe, was seine Erklarung des Wortes Aesthetik verspricht. Die Aesthetik soll eigentlich die Wissenschaft der sch6nen Erkenntnis iiberhaupt, die Theorie aller schonen Wissenschaften und Kiinste enthalten; alle Erkldrungen und Lehrsatze miissen daher so allgemein seyn, dass sie ohne Zwang auf jede sch6ne Kunst insbesondere angewendet werden k6nnen. Wenn man z.B. in der allgemeinen Aesthetik erklart, was erhaben sei, so muss sich die Erklirung sowohl auf die erhabene Schreibart, als auf den erhabenen Contour in der Malerei und Bildhauergunst, auf die erhabenen GInge in der Musik, und auf die erhabene Bauart anwenden lassen . ." (314). Baumgarten and Meier give the impression, "als wenn man bei der ganzen einrichtung des Werks bloss die sch6nen Wissen- schaften, d.i. die Poesie und Beredsamkeit, zum Augenmerk gehabt hatte ..." (315). "Eine Aesthetik aber, deren Grundsatze bloss entweder a priori geschlossen, oder bloss von der Poesie und Beredsamkeit abstrahirt worden sind, muss in Ansehung dessen, was sie hatte werden konnen, wenn man die Geheimnisse aller Kiinste zu Rathe gezogen hatte, ziemlich eingeschrankt und unfruchtbar seyn. Dass aber die Baumgarten'sche Aesthetik wirklich diese eingeschrankte Granzen hat, ist gar nicht zu laugnen" (316).

258Laokoon, ed. Bluemner, 1.c., 359; 376; 384; 386 (Dichtkunst, Malerey, Baukunst, Musik, Tanzkunst, Farbenkunst, Bildhauerkunst). Mendelssohn, Gesam- melte Schriften 2 (1931), 231ff.

259 " Man pflegt gemeiniglich das Vermogen der Seele in Erkenntnissverm6gen und BegehrungsvermSgen einzutheilen, und die Empfindung der Lust und Unlust schon mit zum BegehrungsvermSgen zu rechnen. Allein mich diinkt, zwischen dem


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.261 Some years later, he was prompted by the example of Lacombe's little dictionary of the fine arts to compile a similar Erkennen und Begehren liege das Billigen, der Beyfall, das Wohlgefallen der Seele, welches noch eigentlich von Begierde weit entfernt ist. Wir betrachten die Sch6n- heit der Natur und der Kunst, ohne die mindeste Regung von Begierde, mit Vergniigen und Wohlefallen .... Ich werde es in der Folge Billigungsvermogen nennen, um es dadurch sowohl von der Erkenntniss der Wahrheit, als von dem Verlangen nach dem Guten abzusondern" (Morgenstunden, ch. 7 (Frankfurt- Leipzig, 1786), 118-19 (first ed. 1785). See also the fragment of 1776, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, pt. 1 (1844), 122f. L. Goldstein, I.c., 228-29. A similar distinction appears already in an article of 1763 (" Abhandlung fiber die Evidenz in meta- physischen Wissenschaften," Gesammelte Schriften 2 (1931), 325; cf. K. F. Wize, Friedrich Justus Riedel und seine Aesthetik (Berlin, 1907), 19-20): " Das Gewissen ist eine Fertigkeit, das Gute vom Bosen, und der Warheitssinn, eine Fertigkeit, das Wahre vom Falschen durch undeutliche Schliisse richtig zu unterscheiden. Sie sind in ihrem Bezirke das, was der Geschmack in dem Gebiete des Sch6nen und Hass- lichen ist."

260 Johann Georg Sulzer, Vermischte Philosophische Schriften, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1773-81). In an article of 1751-52, he distinguishes between Sinne, Herz, Ein- bildungskraft 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; A. Palme, J. G. Sulzers Psychologie und die Anfdnge der Dreivermogenslehre, Berlin, 1905). Other- wise, the distinction of the three faculties of the soul does not yet appear clearly or consistently in these early writings, but only in his Allgemeine Theorie der Schonen Kiunste, 2nd ed., II (Leipzig, 1778), 240, art. Geschmak): "Der Geschmak ist im Grunde nichts anders, als das Vermogen das Schone zu empfinden, so wie die Ver- nunft das Verm6gen ist, das Wahre, Vollkommene und Richtige zu erkennen; das sittliche Gefiihl, die Fahigkeit, das Gute zu fiihlen" (cf. Wize, l.c., 24).

261 Johann Nicolas Tetens, Philosophische Versuche ueber die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwickelung, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1777). He distinguishes three faculties: Verstand, Wille, and Empfindsamkeit or Gefiuhl (I, 619ff.). Cf. J. Lorsch, Die Lehre vom Gefiihl bei Johann Nicolas Tetens (thes. Giessen, 1906). W. Uebele, Johann Nicolaus Tetens (Berlin, 1911), 113ff. A. Seidel, Tetens' Einfluss auf die kritische Philosophie Kants (thes. Leipzig, Wiirzburg, 1932), 17ff.


dictionary in German on a much larger scale.262 This General Theory of the Fine arts, which appeared in several editions, has been dispar- aged 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 Encyclopedie 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.263

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.264 These authors have been listed, but their individual contributions remain to be investigated. The influence of the great Encyclopedie is attested by a curious engraving printed in Weimar in 1769 and attached to a famous copy of the Encyclope'die.25 It represents the tree of the arts and sciences as

262 Allgemeine Theorie der Schonen Kiinste, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (Leipzig, 1777-78; first ed., 1771-74; new ed., 4 vols., 1792-99). For his dependence on Lacombe, see his Vermischte Philosophische Schriften 2, p. 70 (" In diesem Jahre [1756] erhielt er durch ein franzosisches Werkchen, das Dictionaire des beaux Arts vom Herrn La Combe, nach des Herrn Hirzel Erzahlung, die Veranlassung zu seiner allgemeinen Theorie, oder vielmehr zu seinem W6rterbuch der sch6nen Kiinste"). Johannes Leo, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der "Allgemeinen Theorie der Schonen Kiinste" J. G. Sulzers (thes. Heidelberg, Berlin, 1906), 31ff. and 57. See also: Ludwig M. Heym, Darstellung und Kritik der aesthetischen Ansichten Johann Georg Sulzers (thes. Leipzig, 1894). Karl J. Gross, Sulzers Allgemeine Theorie der Schonen Kiinste (thes. Berlin, 1905). 23 See above, note 200-201.

264 Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie, new ed., I (1792), 47ff. I. Koller, Entwurf zur Geschichte und Literatur der Aesthetik . . . (Regensburg, 1799). E. Bergmann, Geschichte der Aesthetik und Kunstphilosophie (Leipzig, 1914), 15ff.

265 This copy was exhibited in New York by the Services Culturels de l'Am- bassade de France in January, 1951. The engraving has the title: "Essai d'une distribution genealogique des sciences et des arts principaux. Selon l'explication detaillee du Systeme des connoissances humaines dans le Discours preliminaire des R]diteurs de l'encyclopedie, publiee par M. Diderot et M. d'Alembert, a Paris en 1751. Reduit en cette forme pour decouvrir la connoissance humaine d'un coup d'oeuil. Par Chretien Guillaume Roth. A Weimar, 1769." The section corresponding to imagination contains poetry, painting, engraving, sculpture, music and architecture with their respective subdivisions.


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.266 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.267

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 Friedrich Just Riedel, Theorie der schonen Kiunste und Wissenschaften (Jena, 1767). Kasimir Filip Wize, Friedrich Justus Riedel und seine Aesthetik (thes. Leipzig, Berlin, 1907). Richard Wilhelm, Friedrich Justus Riedel und die Aesthetik der Aufkldrung (Heidelberg, 1933).

267 " Der Mensch hat dreyerley Endzwecke, die seiner geistigen Vollkommenheit untergeordnet sind, das Wahre, das Gute und das Schone; fur jeden hat ihm die Natur eine besondere Grundkraft verliehen: fiir das Wahre den sensus communis, fiir das Gute das Gewissen, und fur das Schone den Geschmack . . ." (Theorie, 6). Johann Georg Heinrich Feder in his Oratio de sensu interno (1768) quotes Riedel and lists: veritas, pulchritudo (bonitas idealis), honestas (pulchritudo moralis); sensus veri sensusque communis, sensus pulchri sive gustus, sensus iusti et honesti seu conscientiae moralis (Wize, 21-22). On Platner's unpublished aesthetics of 1777-78, see E. Bergmann, Ernst Platner und die Kunstphilosophie des 18. Jahr- hunderts (Leipzig, 1913).

268 J. W. Goethe, review of Sulzer's Die schonen Kiinste in ihrem Ursprung (1772). " Sehr bequem in's Franz6sische zu iibersetzen, k6nnte auch wohl aus dem Franz6sischen iibersetzt sein." "Hier sei fiir niemanden nichts gethan als fur den Schiiler, der Elemente sucht, und fir den ganz leichten Dilettanten nach der Mode." " Da sind sie denn (the fine arts) . . . wieder alle beisammen, verwandt oder nicht. Was steht im Lexikon nicht alles hintereinander? Was lasst sich durch solche Phi- losophie nicht verbinden? Mahlerei und Tanzkunst, Beredsamkeit und Baukunst, Dichtkunst und Bildhauerei, alle aus einem Loche, durch das magische Licht eines philosophischen Lampchens auf die weisse Wand gezaubert .... " "Dass einer, der ziemlich schlecht rasonnierte, sich einfallen liess, gewisse Beschaftigungen und Freuden der Menschen, die bei ungenialischen gezwungenen Nachahmern Arbeit und Miihseligkeit wurden, liessen sich unter die Rubrik Kiinste, sch6ne Kiinste klassifi- zieren zum Behuf theoretischer Gaukelei, das ist denn der Bequemlichkeit wegen Leitfaden geblieben zur Philosophie dariiber, da sie doch nicht verwandter sind, als septem artes liberales der alten Pfaffenschulen." "Denn um den Kiinstler allein ist es zu thun .... Am gaffenden Publikum, ob das, wenn's ausgegafft hat, sich Rechenschaft geben kann, warum es gaffte oder nicht, was liegt an dem? " (Goethes Werke, Sophien-Ausgabe, 37 (Weimar, 1896), 206ff.).


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 prov- ince.269 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.270

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. Quoting Aristotle and Harris, Herder stresses the comparison between poetry and music, and concludes that this problem would require another Lessing.271 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.272 Herder's later contributions

269 Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Bk. II, ch. 8 (Sophien-Ausgabe, 25 (1895), 1ff.) where music, poetry and the visual arts are treated as sisters. See also Bk. III, ch. 12 (ibid., 216ff.).

270"Kiinste und Wissenschaften erreicht man durch Denken, Poesie nicht; denn diese ist Eingebung .... Man sollte sei weder Kunst noch Wissenschaft nennen, sondern Genius" (Aus Makariens Archiv, in Goethe's Werke, Vollstdndige Ausgabe letzter Hand, vol. 23 (Stuttgart-Tiibingen, 1829), 277-78. Sophien- Ausgabe, 42, pt. 2 (1907), 200).

271 Hr.L. zeigt, was die Dichtkunst gegen Malerei gehalten nicht sey; um aber zu sehen, was sie denn an sich in ihrem ganzen Wesen vollig sey, miisste sie mit allen schwesterlichen Kiinsten und Wissenschaften, z.E. Musik, Tanzkunst und Redekunst verglischen, und philosophisch unterschieden werden" (Herders Sdmmt- liche Werke, ed. B. Suphan, 3 (Berlin, 1878), 133). "Hier (on the distinction of poetry and music) wunsche ich der Dichtkunst noch einen Lessing" (161). David Bloch, Herders als Aesthetiker (thes. Wiirzburg, Berlin, 1896). Guenther Jacoby, Herders und Kants Aesthetik (Leipzig, 1907). Kurt May, Lessings und Herders kunsttheoretische Gedanken in ihrem Zusammenhang (Berlin, 1923). Emilie Lutz, Herders Anschauungen vom Wesen des Dichters und der Dichtkunst in der ersten Hdlfte seines Schaffens (thes. Erlangen, 1925). Wolfgang Nufer, Herders Ideen zur Verbindung von Poesie, Musik und Tanz (Berlin, 1929).

272 SSmmtliche Werke, ed. Suphan, 4 (1878), 3ff. Malcolm H. Dewey, Herder's Relation to the Aesthetic Theory of his Time (thes. Chicago, 1920).


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.273 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 Ger- man 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 foot- note, 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).276

273Beobachtungen iiber das Gefiihl des Schonen und Erhabenen (1764), in Immanuel Kants Werke, ed. E. Cassirer, 2 (Berlin, 1922), 243-300.

274 0. Schlapp, Kants Lehre vom Genie und die Entstehung der Kritik der Urteilskraft (Gottingen, 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 verfehlte Hoffnung zum Grunde, die der vortreffliche Analyst Baumgarten fasste, die kritische Beurtheilung des Sch6nen unter Vernunftprincipien zu bringen, und die Regeln derselben zur Wissenschaft zu erheben. Allein diese Bemiihung ist vergeblich." 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.).

276Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790). Juergen Bona Meyer, Kant's Psychologie (Berlin, 1870). Carl Theodor Michaelis, Zur Entstehung von Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft (progr. Berlin, 1892). A. Apitzsch, Die psychologischen Voraussetz- ungen der Erkenntniskritik Kants (thes. Halle, 1897). A. Baumker, Kants Kritik


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 inde- pendent 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).77 This scheme contains a few ephemeral details that were not retained by Kant's successors.278 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

der Urteilskraft (Halle, 1923). W. Br6cker, Kants Kritik der aesthetischen Urteils- kraft (thes. Marburg, 1928). H. W. Cassirer, A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Judgment (London, 1938), 97ff.

277 #51. " Von der Einteilung der schSnen Kiinste" (ed. Cassirer, 5 (1922), 395ff.).

278 The Farbenkunst, mentioned also by Herder and by Mendelssohn in his notes on Lessing's Laokoon (ed. Bluemner, 386) refers to the color piano invented by Abbe Castel, which was expected to produce a new art of color combinations. Cf. Bluemner, I.c., 596-97. L. Goldstein, Moses Mendelssohn, 92-93. The commentators of the Critique of Judgment (J. H. v. Kirchmann, J. C. Meredith, J. H. Bernard, H. W. Cassirer) fail to explain this detail.


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 wit- nessed 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 exhi- bitions, 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 dif- fused among secondary writers and finally become the common prop- erty 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-


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. Baum- garten'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 illumi- nation, 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-


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 dissatis- faction 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 in- applicable 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.279 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. 279 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, 1934).

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