In the period from c. 1980 to present, various Revisionist arguments against the traditional approach have been made, especially by Paul Oskar Kristeller, Jan Aertsen, Andreas Speer, and Olivier Boulnois (2008). Putting together the various critics, the following counterargument can be constructed.
There were indeed some scholastic discussions about beauty, but (Aertsen 1991) it is misleading to think that beauty was considered a transcendental attribute in its own right, like unity or truth. Rather, it is just envisaged as an aspect ofgoodness. Aquinas, who has been regarded as the central medieval aesthetic philosopher, had very little indeed to say about beauty (Speer 1990). Moreover, most of the theories of beauty were proposed in a theological context. Even where they concern a notion like that of beauty in its normal sense - an attribute that different things possess to different degrees, their subject is the beauty of natural things, not that of artifacts. The link between beauty and art, which characterizes modern aesthetics, is missing - and so, given medieval assumptions it must be. Human-made things were judged as being lower than natural - that is, created - ones. And there was no system of fine arts, distinguishing the subject matter of what is now aesthetics (centrally: literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, music) from other pursuits (Kristeller 1980). The ‘‘arts’’ were the liberal arts of language (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and mathematics (arithmetic, geometry, music - studied theoretically - and astronomy). Even when, in his Didascalicon, Hugh of St Victor (1961:II.21-8) takes the unusual step of listing seven mechanical arts along with the seven liberal ones, he Just shows how distant medieval thinking was from the concept of the fine arts or art, as it is now understood. The mechanicaL arts are mostly practical crafts, such as agriculture, sailing, and weaving; “theatrical knowledge’’ turns out to include gymnastics and athletics, and painting and sculpture are included merely as subdivisions of arms-making.
Investigations by revisionist critics into individual works that had been used as sources for medieval aesthetics support this powerful line of counter-argument. For example, a recent study of Suger’s De consecratione (Suger 1995) makes the case that, contrary to Panofsky’s reading, Suger’s treatise puts forward his views on the liturgy, ecclesiology, and history, in line with his political aims, and does not present St Denis as a work of art.
There is, besides, another type of criticism that can be made of the traditional approach, related to the second element of soft Hegelianism mentioned above. Even if the traditionalists’ conclusions are accepted, they merely establish that there was a certain, characteristically medieval way of thinking about aesthetics, but not that there was the rational debate about aesthetic positions that would make the period one in which the subject flourished as a field of philosophy. It is true that Eco (1970, 1956) presents a philosophically interesting theory as Aquinas’ aesthetics. But, as he makes clear, this theory is his own construction; Eco is informed by Aquinas’ overall thinking informs, but it is he who is responsible for this supposedly thirteenth-century aesthetic theory.
See also: > Aesthetics, Byzantine > Albert the Great > Robert Grosseteste > Thomas Aquinas > William of Auvergne
World History
