Philosophers of aesthetics, from Baumgarten to Hegel, paid considerable attention to art and artists of the early modern period. Yet early modern artistic practices scarcely figure in recent work on aesthetics as a branch of philosophy in the eighteenth century. This book addresses that gap, elaborating the extent to which artworks and practices of the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries were accompanied by an immense range of discussions about the arts and their relation to one another.
Rather than take art as a stand-in for or reflection of some other historical event or social phenomenon, this book treats art itself as the main issue. Far from being a passive mirror for already established sociohistorical realities, art is a fundamental matrix through which social reality is grasped. Each chapter shows how we might better understand central artistic and philosophical preoccupations of the preceding centuries and our own time by asking after both early modern art's claim on philosophy and philosophical realizations of the insistence of art.