Unseen beauty
The persistence of the medieval in contemporary aesthetics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15448/1984-6746.2022.1.43273Keywords:
visible beauty, unseen beauty, aesthetics, experience, artAbstract
The experience of beauty is no less mysterious for the aesthetician today than it was in the Middle Ages. Here I focus on the notion of ‘unseen beauty’ and how certain aspects of medieval philosophizing about the nature of beauty can still be of use for the contemporary aesthetician. I draw a comparison between some concepts that pervade the whole of the Medieval period – that there is a transcendent source of visible beauty, and that visible beauties function as images of the invisible beauty – with a modern conception of aesthetic experience, as it is expressed in authors like Clive Bell.
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