Grace as an Aesthetic Concept

During the Renaissance, a notion of grace served as the central critical concept for understanding art, and the achievement of grace in art was taken to be the highest artistic ideal. The course will examine the concept of grace within its theological, philosophical, and art theoretical contexts in an effort to understand more completely how art was thought to function in the early modern period. It will also consider the place of grace in the development of the aesthetics tradition.

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Who Put the Capital A in Art? Aesthetics, Art, and Virtue

Kant’s concept of the disinterested aesthetic is often presented as the idea that finally clinched the secularization of art that had begun in the Renaissance. The seminar seeks to refine this view by contextualizing Kant’s separation of the moral and the aesthetic within the virtue ethics of the Western poetics tradition. Through an examination of relevant late medieval and early modern texts, the seminar considers how late medieval reception of Aristotle’s Poetics set the stage for art’s secularization in the West.

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