Many treatises in the various areas now classified as art or the fine arts were written in the Middle Ages. They are, with a few exceptions, technical treatises and handbooks for practitioners, rather than second-order discussions of the issues considered by aestheticians today in connection with these arts - for instance, the nature of musical expression, or pictorial representation, or the relationship between authorial intention and the meaning of a text. In music, there was a highly theoretical approach, based upon Augustine’s and Boethius’ musical treatises, which made music into a branch of mathematics; and then there were a host of more practical handbooks. The De diversis artibus (On Different Arts) by Theophilus, probably from the twelfth century, is a treatise on how to use various types of materials (pigments, glues, varnishes) and how to work on various sorts of objects - walls, books, panels, glass, metal. Even the series of Arts of Poetry, such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova, written in Latin at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century and based partly on Horace and partly on rhetorical manuals, are mainly devoted to giving practical advice to the would-be poet. Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular) is an innovative and reflective discussion about language, but contains little in the way of philosophical reflection about poetry itself.
World History
