On the tenth anniversary of the death of Cesare Brandi (1906-1988), the International Study Center on Aesthetics has decided to honour his memory with a volume that collects the essays written by three Brandean scholars (Luigi Russo, Emilio Garroni and Paolo D'Angelo) in the early 1990s, when the publishing house Editori Riuniti reprinted the "dialogues on the arts" that Brandi had originally published between 1945 and 1957.
The essays included in the present volume do not simply guide the reader to a clearer understanding of some of Brandi's most important texts on aesthetics, but also propose a theoretical contextualization and a first attempt to historicize those texts. Luigi Russo's introduction to Carmine or on Painting (1992) inserts Brandi within the broader context of 20th-century Italian scholarship on aesthetics, foregrounding his theoretical originality and how such originality was not always appreciated when Carmine was first received. Emilio Garroni's introduction to Celsius or on Poetry (1991) discusses Brandi's theory of poetry by focusing on his revision of Kant's theories of schematization and language, while Paolo D'Angelo's introductory essay to Arcadio or on Sculpture and Eliante or on Architecture (1992) reinterprets Brandi's conflictual, but always illuminating, relationship with modernity.
These three essays thus provide a broad introduction to Brandi's most important texts on aesthetics. Those texts by Brandi, together with his General Theory of Criticism (which was written in 1974 and has now been republished by Editori Riuniti, at the same time as the present sylloge, in a new volume edited by Massimo Carboni) do not only constitute an indispensible interpretive tool for anyone who wants to understand Brandi's approach to criticism and art history, but also represent one of the highest and most significant moments in our century's tradition of scholarship on aesthetics.