Definition/Introduction
The early modern period witnessed a transition between two different theoretical discourses regarding artistic practice: From the theory of art to aesthetics. This transition is described in the entry below. In the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventieth centuries, theory of art existed in the form of practical manuals for practitioners of the various arts (as architecture, design, drawing, sculpture, machinery, engineering, music, literature, and rhetoric). Over the eighteenth century, for the first time, one finds the development of what one still calls “aesthetics,” that is to say an encompassing philosophy of art which is based on the sensual reception of the arts. This new phase was energized by the development art criticism and evaluation of art (see below). The corpus of early modern theory of art is a relatively cohesive group of writings, returning to regular, repeating concepts and stylistic standards. In this sense, theory of art can be viewed as...
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Efal-Lautenschläger, A. (2022). Aesthetics. In: Jalobeanu, D., Wolfe, C.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_598-1
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