Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> HOW DID THE CONTEMPORARIES of Duccio and Giotto think about art and beauty? The internationally-acclaimed Italian critic and novelist Umberto Eco discloses for the first time to English-speaking readers the unsuspected richness breadth complexity and originality of the aesthetic theories advanced by Tho- mas Aquinas the greatest theologian of the medieval period. Inheriting his basic ideas of art and beauty from the classical world Aquinas transformed or modified these ideas in the light of Christian theol- ogy and of developments in metaphysics and optics during the thirteenth century. Setting the stage with a vivid account of the aesthetic and artistic sensibility that flourished in medieval times Eco ex- amines Aquinas’s conception of tran- scendental beauty his theory of aesthetic perceptions or visio and his account of the three conditions of beauty – integrity proportion and clarity that centuries later emerged again in the writings of the young James Joyce. He examines the con- crete application of these theories in Aquinas’s reflections on God mankind music poetry and scripture. He dis- cusses Aquinas’s views on art and com- pares his poetics with Dante’s. Eco then shows how Aquinas’s aesthetics came to be absorbed and superseded in late medieval times and draws instructive par- allels between Thomistic ideas and con- temporary philosophical trends. (SP)