Studi di estetica

Introduction. Aesthetics’ eyes on antiquity

2026-07-07T10:24:21+00:00

The contributions to this issue of “Studi di Estetica” display different ways in which ancient aesthetic ideas can enter modern arts and aesthetics. Ancient authors may show how to revise our accounts of art-appreciation, as Phillip Mitsis argues by appeal to Plutarch, and as Nadezhda Zubova and Gao Jing both argue, from different perspectives, about Aristotle. Or the ancient ideas speak to characteristics of modern art; this is Ignacio Garay’s reading of Pythagorean music theory and classic rock. Giulia Cervato likewise addresses the ancient ideas in modern practice, with reference to Plato and painting, although she questions the traditional narrative of modern reception. Kristin Boyce and Cynthia Freeland, writing about dance, show both how to enlarge a Platonic mimetic theory, and how Plato’s Laws finds its ideas staged in Balanchine’s ballet.

Plutarch and everyday aesthetics of living

2026-07-07T10:26:43+00:00

Contemporary aesthetics describes aesthetic experience in terms of attention, together with absorption, salience, and sustained engagement. Although illuminating cognitive and temporal structures, often implicitly assumed is that richer experience corresponds to heightened responsiveness. Yet, if intensification functions as a normative touchstone, aesthetics risks describing a few moments unusually well while misdescribing the aesthetic experience of most people for most of their lives. Similarly, capacities culturally associated with youth and its readiness for emotional escalation serve as the unspoken basis for the majority of accounts of aesthetic engagement. Ancient Greek and Roman writings, however, offer a different valuation based on the arc of lives. Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle each treat pleasurable experience as something distributed across a life, not as moments of episodic intensification, while Plutarch repeatedly evaluates responsiveness in terms of measure (μέτρον), steadiness (ἡσυχία), fittingness (πρέπον), and the right time (καιρός). Recovering Plutarch’s aesthetics allows us to diagnose the tacit evaluative metrics of contemporary theories of aesthetics and to open up to philosophical scrutiny what it would mean for aesthetics to become explicitly sensitive to the arc of lives.

Rethinking surprise in music through Aristotle’s Poetics

2026-07-07T10:42:40+00:00

The article revives the notions of thaumaston and thaumasion from Aristotle’s Poetics to study surprise in music perception. A detailed analysis of these terms reveals a previously unrecognised distinction between the potentially and the subjectively surprising, referring to the disposition to surprise and to its subjective experience, respectively. This distinction resolves important problems: if the experience of surprise is subjective, what does it mean when we attribute the quality of surprising to the musical event itself? And why does the same musical event elicit surprise in one listener while leaving another indifferent? The article furthermore studies the conditions of both types of surprising with particular attention to influencing factors such as expertise and purpose of listening. Thus, by analysing surprise in music, we discover a necessity and a way to bridge ancient and contemporary philosophy, reaching a deeper understanding of surprise and demonstrating how ancient concepts may enrich contemporary aesthetics.

Art as Energeia

2026-07-07T10:45:10+00:00

The paper examines how the philosophical concept of energeia shapes Aristotle’s theory of art and what it can contribute to understanding emerging art species, especially AI-generated art. First, by tracing energeia across Aristotle’s major texts, this discussion clarifies that the philosophical mode of energeia unites what a thing is and how it is. Extending this to aesthetics, energeia provides a conceptual basis for the reality of artistic imitation. Based on the Poetics, read in conjunction with other Aristotelian texts, this discussion concludes that, for Aristotle, art can be understood as energeia: it comes to presence as its potential is being actualized in the subject’s aesthetic experience. Attention turns to today, energeia is becoming an important interdisciplinary concept. From an energeia perspective, the value and perhaps even the nature of AI-generated art can be approached by considering its potential and its mode of actualization.

Harmonia in time

2026-07-07T10:47:45+00:00

This article examines how Pythagorean principles of number, proportion, and rhythm (rhythmos) are conceptually rearticulated in the aesthetic experience of classic rock music. Moving beyond the traditional intellectualist interpretation of harmonia as an abstract system, it emphasizes rhythm, repetition, and bodily engagement as central to musical perception. Drawing on classical sources such as Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero, alongside contemporary philosophy of music (Gracyk, Cox, Shusterman, Giovannelli), the paper argues that classic rock reactivates key ancient insights: music organizes time, bodies, and affect, rendering proportion perceptible and lived. Through an analysis of groove, repetition, and collective listening in artists such as Led Zeppelin, The Who, Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden, the article shows that the aesthetic power of rock resides in its capacity to structure embodied temporal experience, revealing a continuity between ancient musical thought and contemporary practice.

“Ap-eikonizō”: Odysseas Elytīs, painting and the Platonic reconfiguration of Greek aesthetic continuity

2026-07-07T10:51:10+00:00

This article examines Odysseas Elytīs’s aesthetic thought through the lens of the reception of antiquity, arguing that his reflections on painting can be read as articulating a counter-genealogy of Western aesthetics. Against modern European accounts that construe ancient Greek art as either a historical origin or a lost normative paradigm, Elytīs reconceives Greece as a living mode of perception, defined by a specific sensory-expressive configuration that persists across epochs. The article first reconstructs Elytīs’s notion of “Greekness” as a non-Western perceptual modality irreducible to iconographic transmission. It then analyzes his theory of pictorial representation, centered on the distinction between apeikonizō and eikonizō, and suggests that this pair can be read as reactivating Plato’s distinction between mimēsis phantastikē and mimēsis eikastikē in the Sophist. Through this Platonic framework, Elytīs challenges the dominance of perspectival and chiaroscuro-based representation in Western aesthetics, proposing instead a mode of figuration that resists illusionism and subjectivism. Finally, through Elytīs’s reading of modern Greek painting – especially Theophilos Chatzīmichaīl’s and Nikos Ghika’s – the article argues that the rejection of momentariness and sensible contingency in pictorial representation does not simply resolve into pure idealism, but that his “solar metaphysics” can be understood as pointing beyond Platonic idealism by reconciling the ideal with the intensification of sensibility.

Sōphrosynē in the city

2026-07-07T10:54:06+00:00

Plato’s final work, the Laws, plans a new city in Crete. Far from censoring the arts as in Republic X, this new city requires everyone to sing and dance at civic festivals. Plato made two major changes from his earlier account of art as mimēsis (imitation). First, artworks can be accurate and beneficial; second, art’s pleasures help educate youths in virtue (especially sōphrosynē or moderation) while sustaining civic harmony. Plato’s Timaeus similarly links individual and cosmic harmony. Together these texts helped stimulate the foundation of Renaissance arts “academies” that led to court dance and, later, ballet. We argue, focusing on works by choreographer George Balanchine, that the notions of mimēsis and sōphrosynē have continuing relevance for modern ballet. Balanchine had to invent new ways for dance to foster harmony within a tumultuous, increasingly irrational, new city and universe.

Chiasms and contacts

2026-07-07T10:56:56+00:00

This paper aims to examine the tension between ethics and aesthetics in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Although he displays a certain wariness toward any aestheticisation of existence, Levinas does not refrain from invoking artistic and literary figures, often precisely at critical junctures in his work, those moments in which he seeks to articulate what exceeds both ontological discourse and the activity of the transcendental subject. Starting from the concepts of world and exoticism, and moving through the dimension of language, this study seeks to establish a dialogue between poetics and ontology, with the aim of showing how art can give voice to that which resists the subject’s totalising movement. From this perspective, the aesthetic gesture does not merely evoke alterity, but safeguards its enigma – its irreducible polysemy, resistant to any reduction to a univocal, and thus ideological, mode of feeling. Ultimately, the ethical significance of art lies in the preservation of the Other; yet here alterity is understood, in the first instance, as a transcendental principle: it arises primarly all as a restless question dwelling within the subject, which – if heeded – may suggest the ethical possibility of feeling otherwise.

Le paysage et l’œuvre d’art

2026-07-07T12:13:11+00:00

This paper explores the relationship between the work of art as an aesthetic object and the experience of landscape. This nexus – frequently emphasized in the history of aesthetics – may be understood either as conflictual and asymmetrical or as symbiotic, and even as simultaneously both. More specifically, two different perspectives within phenomenological aesthetics – those of Henri Maldiney and Mikel Dufrenne – will be examined in order to identify their internal paradoxes and theoretical difficulties.

Resisting oblivion

2026-07-07T12:14:51+00:00

The power of narrative consists in orientation of the story. Formerly, however, this frequently led to the omission of certain historical experiences that had the capacity, if properly addressed, to shed light on female empowerment, both actual and potential. Starting from the relevant epistolary material, the present paper aims to establish a comparison between two key figures within the Hegelian Constellation of the feminine, namely, Christiane Luise Hegel (1773-1832) and Fanny Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Hensel (1805-1847). The purpose of doing so is to reflect deeply on the narrative of the feminine. From this point of view, the application of the biographical and narrative method to philosophical research is closely aligned with Dieter Henrich’s exploration of the genesis of German Idealism (Konstellationsforschung), allowing the interdependence and the reciprocal connections between life and thought to emerge. In the wake of studies aimed at interpreting human sciences from a female perspective, a broader reflection on the central value of narratives as the origin of every form of thought and communication will ultimately be developed.

Adornment as aesthetic philosophy

2026-07-07T12:17:53+00:00

This paper explores adornment and metaphysical beauty through Kerala murals, Tibetan Thangkas, and medieval scholastic thought. Aquinas defined beauty through integritas, proportion, and claritas, whereas Asian traditions invest jewels, textiles, and pigments with layered meaning. Such elements work as devotional and epistemic devices, linking material form with the transcendent and opening cross-cultural perspectives beyond Eurocentric aesthetics.

Henry John Pratt, The philosophy of comics. What they are, how they work and why they matter Illustrated by Kurt F. Shaffert, New York, Oxford University Press, 2023, pp. xxii + 200

2026-07-07T12:19:53+00:00

Afroditi Angelopoulou, The body and the senses in Greek tragedy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2025, pp. 240

2026-07-07T12:20:57+00:00

AI & Aesthetics

2026-07-07T12:24:41+00:00

This contribution aims to share the results achieved through a bibliographic research carried out in 2024-25 within the framework of the “AIsthetics” project, outlining the state of the art of the philosophical debate on the relationship between aesthetics and Artificial Intelligence. Through a systematic survey of international academic literature, the study offers an overview of the prevailing theoretical trajectories in contemporary aesthetics. By organizing the results into a synoptic framework, the research highlights critical issues such as the redefinition of authorship, the stochastic nature of algorithmic creativity, and the impact of AI predictive systems on the formation of taste and on new modes of articulating the aesthetic. Far from proposing definitive conclusions, this work serves as an open critical apparatus, inviting further interpretive integrations for future philosophical and aesthetic inquiries. Ultimately, it provides an interdisciplinary reference tool for analyzing the forms of experience and subjectivity mediated by Artificial Intelligence.