Recent proponents of the traditional approach have included Edgar de Bruyne (author of a three-volume History of medieval aesthetics), the wide-ranging historian of aesthetics Wladyslaw Tatarkiewickz, the renowned art historians Erwin Panofsky, Rosario Assunto, and Umberto Eco, as well as Neoscholastics such as Czapiewski and Kovach. The best of these studies are those by Panofsky and Eco: looking at them brings out the methodology shared by all these writers.
Although Panofsky concentrates on architecture and looks to general features of medieval thought rather than the more detailed theories of beauty and technical manuals discussed above, his way of constructing a medieval aesthetics shows very clearly the underlying methodology of the traditional approach. Panofsky was very impressed by the treatise written in the 1140s by Abbot Suger of St Denis, De rebus in sua administratione gestis (On the Things Done Under His Direction). Panofsky (Introduction to Suger 1946) argues that the treatise expresses ideas about aesthetics, inspired by Neoplatonism and the metaphysics of light, and that Suger was inspired by these theories in the way in which he had the cathedral built. Later, Panofsky generalized this way of seeing philosophical tendencies reflected in architectural design in his Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1957). The development of church architecture which led to the Gothic cathedral, unified in its space, and with its elements clearly differentiated, is seen as parallel to the path of scholastic thought towards the highly articulated clarity and the comprehensiveness of the synthesis of philosophy and religion which attributes to Aquinas.
There are two elements of soft Hegelianism underlying Panofsky’s approach. The first is the assumption that there is a certain spirit of a period, which can be found in works so different as a cathedral and a theological treatise. The second is the idea that discerning this spirit in its different manifestations and variations is the main task for the historian of philosophy. Medieval aesthetics will therefore be, not a collection of different and often opposed arguments, but a rather a unified (if varying and developing) outlook. These two soft Hegelian tendencies permeate the monumental work of de Bruyne, and they provide the unstated rationale for Eco’s studies of medieval aesthetics. Eco, however, is much more self-conscious than de Bruyne about his enterprise and the difficulties which it faces. He accepts that aesthetics did not exist as a recognized branch of philosophy, in the manner of, for instance, metaphysics or ethics, until Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (1750-1758). Moreover, if aesthetics is to be centered, in the eighteenth-century manner, on beauty as something perceived by the senses, then, he admits, there was little aesthetic reflection in the Middle Ages. But ‘‘if we mean by ‘Aesthetics’ a field of interests around the value ‘beauty,’ its definition, its function, and the ways of producing and enjoying it - then the Middle Ages spoke of aesthetics.’’ Particularly in his work on Aquinas’ aesthetics, Eco shows great ingenuity in extending various hints found in his writings into a complete theory about beauty. He recognizes that Aquinas does not have a philosophy of art, in today’s sense of the word, but, like de Bruyne and most of the other theorists, he makes the link between art and medieval theories of beauty by looking at technical treatises on individual arts.
World History
