Published in Art, Criticism and Mysticism

Keywords: Keywords: Aesthetics, Iconography, Italian painting, Mariology, Patristics. Medieval Philosophy, St. Bonaventure, Trecento.

This paper attempts to highlight the influence that the primary Aesthetics designed by St. Bonaventure could have had on some paintings of the Italian Trecento. Therefore, the work is divided into two parts essentially linked. Firstly it analyzes in detail the first two levels (of the six proposed by the saint. plus a seventh of pure ecstasy), by which man can and must ascend from the world to contemplate God: on those two initial levels, linked to the sensory knowledge, man uses his sensitivity to appreciate the material things of this created world as footprints and traces of their Creator. In the second part several paintings by Giotto, Simnone Martini, Pietro Lorenzetti, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Agnolo Gaddi and Taddeo Gaddi are analyzed, in order to see if one can perceive in them some influence of the initial phase of the Aesthetics of Bonaventure, that implies a remarkable enhancement of the physical world and the senses by which we perceive it with full cognitive validity.