A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance: With special reference to the influence of Italy in the formation and development of modern classicismSpingarn, Joel Elias
Philosophy
A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance: With special reference to the influence of Italy in the formation and development of modern classicism
Spingarn, Joel Elias
Criticism; Renaissance
In Fracastoro's _Naugerius, sive de Poetica Dialogus_ (1555), there is
the completest explanation of the ideal element in the Aristotelian
conception of imitation. The poet, according to Aristotle, differs from
other writers in that the latter consider merely the particular, while
the poet aims at the universal. He is, in other words, attempting to
describe the simple and essential truth of things, not by depicting the
nude thing as it is, but the idea of things clothed in all their
beauties.[46] Here Fracastoro attempts to explain the Aristotelian
conception of the type with the aid of the Platonic notion of beauty.
There were, in fact, in the Renaissance, three conceptions of beauty in
general vogue. First, the purely objective conception that poetry is
fixed or formal, that it consists in approximating to a certain
mechanical or geometrical form, such as roundness, squareness, or
straightness; secondly, the Platonic conception, ethical rather than
aesthetic, connecting the beautiful with the good, and regarding both as
the manifestation of divine power; and, thirdly, a more purely aesthetic
conception of beauty, connecting it either with grace or conformity, or
in a higher sense with whatever is proper or fitting to an object. This
last idea, which at times approaches the modern conception that beauty
consists in the realization of the objective character of any particular
thing and in the fulfilment of the law of its own being, seems to have
been derived from the _Idea_ of the Greek rhetorician Hermogenes, whose
influence during the sixteenth century was considerable, even as early
as the time of Filelfo. It was the celebrated rhetorician Giulio
Cammillo, however, who appears to have popularized Hermogenes in the
sixteenth century, by translating the _Idea_ into Italian, and by
expounding it in a discourse published posthumously in 1544.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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