The present volume brings together some of the papers presented at the Seminar "Ancient and Modern: Aesthetics and its history" (Antico e Moderno. L'Estetica e la sua Storia) which was sponsored by the International Study Center on Aesthetics (Palermo, October 21-22, 1988).

Franco Fanizza, Aesthetics: the history, the theory
To say that aesthetics belongs historically to the modern age is not enough. It is essential, on the contrary, to notice that the so far prevailing idea of "Modernity" has hindered the full understanding of "aesthetics" as "modern". For this reason, re-emphasising today the connection between aesthetic thought and its own history means urging this same thought both to recognise the limits it has so far had and developing all its real potentialities. If this is how things stand, the problems of the "birth of Aesthetics", of "aesthetic knowledge" as it is, of the force of the "knowledge" it can express, must once again give us, in a new unity of theory and history, the evidence of an "aesthetic conscience" of modern man, which is the conscience, as Gracián said, of «el hombre de todas horas » (the man of all hours).

Sergio Givone, An Idea for a History of Aesthetics
Nowdays, with respect to the philosophical debate, aesthetics appears a rather minor discipline. Nonetheless, aesthetics, though dealing with the "decorative" and "unessential" aspects of existence, offers a sort of privileged standpoint to observe declining modernity and the "widespread aesthetization" which is a feature of it. Now, how did this discipline come into being, historically speaking? We face two major historiographical models: the one worked out by Tatarkiewicz, who rules out the possibility of any general theory of art and inclines instead towards the observation of artistic activity in the historical process of becoming; and Croce's, which instead conceives the history of aesthetics as the history of a progressive clarification of a determined idea of art. Hence the problem: is it possible to satisfy the legitimate requirements of these two models, while at the same time going beyond their intrinsic limits?

Emilio Mattioli, The History of the Aesthetics of Antiquity after the Revaluation of Rhetoric
The idea at the basis of the contribution is the following: the history of the aesthetics of antiquity needs to be rewritten, the right place being given to poetics and rhetorics. Baeumler in 1934 and Dockhorn in 1949 gave precious hints in this respect, which however have not been much heeded. The most respected of recent histories of aesthetics, that of Tatarkiewciz, does not give much consideration to problems of this kind. The only attempt to reconsider the aesthetics of antiquity in such a way as to give back to rhetorics the right importance is of Alain Michel, in La parole et la beauté, 1982, a significant and worthy attempt, but in a way limited by the idea of aesthetics guiding it: the Platonic idea of the beautiful, splendour of the true. There thus opens up an important working perspective which should lead to a history of aesthetics not only built on a strictly philosophical dimension, but also attentive to the reflections on art worked out by poetics and rhetoric. Baumgarten's "persuasio aesthetica" well indicates the relationship between aesthetics and rhetoric.

Emilio Garroni, Notes on Batteux's "Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe"
In the author's opinion, rereading Batteux today cannot mean attempting to see in his wellknown treatise what the critical literature is supposed to have failed so far to see but really has seen, and often clearly, but on the contrary revisiting the already known Batteux against a general background which is no longer cramped within the limits of a socalled "history of aesthetics", as a "philosophy of art", which has always existed, at least in an implicit form or came into being in the 18th century. The aim of these "Notes" is to give precise brief indications for a rereading of Batteux as an author helping to define aesthetics as a new attitude "critical", also and precisely in the sense that this word was to take on in Kant - of philosophical reflection with respect to the traditional knowledge which does not challenge the possibility of it existing or that of philosophy itself existing: it is hence, from a critical demand of this kind - which first asserted itself in the field of pragmatics and politics, and then extended to the theory of knowledge and language - that aesthetics, and the primary of "art" in the modern sense, find a more adequate explanation, one which is more pregnant in meaning, and also more respectful of history. From this point of view there is a rapid reexamination of the notions of "nature", "imitation", "need", "pleasure", as well as "expressioncommunication", and the possibility is shown of giving a coherent interpretation of them, in harmony with eighteenth-century aesthetic thought, such as to constitute for Kant himself an important basis of reflection.

Appendix: J. Koller, Outline of a History and Bibliography of Aesthetics
This little known text by J. Koller (Entwurf einer Geschichte und Literatur der Aesthetik ) is here presented, for the first time, in an Italian translation, because of its major historical value. On the one hand it is the first unitary outline of the history of aesthetics proper; on the other hand, it is the earliest example of a historiographical model which was to be highly successful in the more complex and sophisticated historiographic exploits of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (from Zimmermann to Croce) and is still largely considered valid in our own day. It is an exegetic model for which aesthetics as a philosophical science was only to come into being in the eighteenth century, with Baumgarten, and was to be refunded on a solid basis with Kant. Hence there are evidently two leitmotifs in the Entwurf: first of all the idea that the theories of art and the beautiful which developed from antiquity up to the time of Baumgarten belong not to the "history" but to the "prehistory" of aesthetics; secondly the belief that only Kant succeeded in unifying in a single "powerful" philosophical principle the avenues attempted by the inchoate aesthetic debate in the eighteenth century. So today, when that historiographical model (after Gilbert and Kuhn and after Tatarkiewicz) is undergoing profound revision, it is interesting to read Koller's forgotten essay, and at the same time to realise how the successful hypothesis informing it already enjoyed considerable credit among those who dealt with aesthetics in the late eighteenth century, and at last to discover that Koller's own text, above all in the comments on the various works mentioned, is essentially a "collage" of passages taken from Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Kunste and from the more or less anonymous reviews present in the most important German aesthetics and literature reviews of the age (notably the "Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek").