Aesthetics

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Ascensio in Deum per vestigia et in vestigiis. The St. Bonaventure’s immanent Aesthetics and its possible reflections in the iconography of the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi

José María SALVADOR GONZÁLEZ

Original title: Ascensio in Deum per vestigia et in vestigiis. La Estética inmanente de San Buenaventura y sus posibles reflejos en la iconografía de la Basílica de San Francisco en Asís

Published in Monastic and Scholastic Philosophy in the Middle Ages

Keywords: Aesthetics, Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, Created world, God, Iconography, Medieval Philosophy, St. Bonaventure, Vestige.

In his Itinerarium mentis in Deum (1259), St. Bonaventure (1221-1274) discusses the six degrees (with a seventh of ecstatic enjoyment) by which man can and should ascend from the created world to contemplate God. In this paper we will analyze only the first two grades of this Itinerarium, which constitute both of them what we might call the “immanent aesthetic” of St. Bonaventure. Highlighting then two of the central theses of this “immanent aesthetic”, we shall try to show the possible reflections that these theses may have had in the iconography of some frescoes in the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi.

Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) and the Aesthetics of his Age

Antonia Javiera CABRERA MUÑOZ

Original title: Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) y la Estética de su Tiempo

Published in The Medieval Aesthetics

Keywords: Aesthetics, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes, Renaissance.

Contrary to other writers in the Spanish Golden Age, such as Luis de Góngora, Francisco de Quevedo and Calderón de la Barca, Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) is considered as being an autodidact by experts. From the publication of La Galatea (1585) on, Cervantes begins to devote himself fully to Literature. His journey through several genres and subgenres makes him both pertaining and alien to his own time, since he starts to deal in his works with a variety of aesthetic topics (authorship, reading, literary creation, etc.) that put in question particularly the previous age, the Renaissacence. The aim of this study is to survey some of those aesthetic topics in Don Quixote (1605 and 1615), in order to establish Cervantes’s worldview as the author of the most ingenious work in Spanish Literature.

St. Bonaventure’s aesthetic ideas as possible doctrinal source of Trecento Italian iconography

José María SALVADOR GONZÁLEZ

Original title: Ideas estéticas de San Buenaventura como posible fuente doctrinal de la iconografía del Trecento italiano

Published in Art, Criticism and Mysticism

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.

The Aesthetics of the Interpretation of Dreams

José Eduardo Costa SILVA, Ernesto HARTMANN

Original title: A Estética da Interpretação dos Sonhos

Published in Art, Criticism and Mysticism

Keywords: Aesthetics, Freud., The Interpretation of Dreams.

This paper presents a philosophical study of the tensions and interconections between Aesthetics and Logic in The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). We wish to demonstrate how Freud in this text which is strategic for the establishment of psychoanalytic praxis and that resonates in contemporary artistic movements, establishes a method supported in the accuracy of observation and logic and, at the same time, invocates in aid to this method notions of representation, form, content and unit, seemingly opposing thus the idealist philosophical tradition, historically founded in the distinction between the intelligible and the sensible.