The present volume brings together some of the papers presented at the Seminar "From Baroque to PostModern" (Baltasar Gracián: Dal Barocco al Postmoderno) which was sponsored by the International Study Center on Aesthetics on the occasion of the first Italian edition of the Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio of Baltasar Gracián (Palermo, October 10-11, 1986).

Miquel Batllori, On the current interest in Baltasar Gracián
After long periods of oblivion, in recent years there has been renewed interest in Baltasar Gracián, in particular as regards his two most significant works: Agudeza and Criticón. Recent translations of the Criticón (into Rumanian, Czechoslovakian and Russian), the reprinting of Agudeza (1984), and above all some translations of the latter work for the first time into French, and now into Italian too, and lastly the growing critical interest, are enriching the cultural profile of Gracián, helping to shed light on the Baroque aesthetic, of which he was certainly one of the greatest and most representative exponents.

Emilio Hidalgo-Serna, The philosophical problem of "Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio"
Acuteness of mind, though addressed to poetry, does not elude, but indeed enriches, philosophy and logic. A series of logical and philosophical considerations demolishes the old Crocian prejudice which saw Gracián as a rhetor with a love of "concepts", the epitome of the Baroque formalistic "ornatus", and instead advances an unusual theoretical and historical profile in which Gracián turns out to be an attentive and shrewd reader of the philosophical throughout of his age. Acuteness of mind then becomes the cutting edge of the individual "ingenio" digging deep into appearances in order to reshape the singular vision of reality. Hence, not a formal and demonstrative logic of an Aristotelian type, but a highly modern epistemological and logical attitude geared to the perennial search for the instantaneous correspondence between concept and truth, with a view to expression and communication by means of imaginative language. Finding rediscovering reality and translating it into truth that man can deal with, this is the difficult task of the acute mind.

Aurora Egido, Variety in Baltasar Gracián's "Agudeza"
It sounds like an analysis of the obvious: variety is the key feature in the Baroque. And yet a deeper investigation of this topic shows up many unsuspected facets contradicting the commonplaces about the Baroque aesthetic. It is Gracián who starts the querelle about uniformity in allegory, which runs all through Agudeza, about the classics of antiquity (Quintilian, Horace, Cicero), and about the tenets of humanism, especially Italian humanism. At the same time, variety is a means serving an aesthetic end: it prevents tedium, forming, together with difficulty, the aesthetic taste and pleasure; moreover, variation produces multiple and manifold concepts and models, which are constantly changing and different, and this contributes much to the creation of beauty. Thus variety is not only "ornatus", as it concerns "elocutio", but also "dispositio" and "inventio". Variety is like an infinite variation on the theme (a musical example which reminds us of Paul Valéry) through which poetic counterpoint creates the artistic whole, impressing its own rhythms on the models and indeed the interpretations of life.

Mercedes Blanco, The art of ingenio and the heroism of novelty
Gracián can be seen as the daring theorizer of a new "ars" which is not satisfied with Dialectic and Rhetoric but, drawing on both, creates "ex nihilo" a new statute of the relations between the object as narration and thought. The man endowed with "ingenio" discovers new and unsuspected demands from reality and for them he coins unforeseen and acute nuances of concept and expression. In this sense, man can turn out to be a hero and at once an ingenious writer. The two aspects, judgement and "ingenio", which Gracián opposes methodologically, together live a common life in the relations they necessarily have with one another; for the universal is true only in the particular, that is to say judgement acquires solidity only through the occasion realized by "ingenio". In this sense, the "art of acuteness", made into a system by Gracián, goes beyond Rhetoric and Dialectic; and though the ambitious project of the Jesuit does not fully succeed, his work remains highly useful, because it represents the prestigious culmination of the Baroque hope of setting up, with "agudeza", the most effective instrument for interpreting and expressing the infinite variety of reality.

Benito Pelegrín, The Ancients and the Moderns: from Gracián's "Agudeza" to his "Criticón"
The aim is to sum up in a unitary system, historically and theoretically linked together, all the writings of the Spanish Jesuit, placing at the head two works, Agudeza , which is the theoretical treatise, and Criticón, which is Gracián's own attempt to apply it. From this attempt to outline a unitary system there emerges the robust pedagogical-rhetorical vein in Gracián, a Gracián concerned to experience and interpreter his own age to the full, rejecting, or rather mediating, the opposition between "Anciens" and "Modernes" in a circular vision of history. Thus we discover an aesthetic (or rather a literary technique) in which the privileging of "inventio" does not appear to be empty originality or sterile imitation with abundance of conceits, but acute and ingenious interpretation of things and models: rich writing, which is daring and difficult but is inebriated with the fullness of living. In the end Gracián himself attempts total synthesis of the poetic world and reality in the novel Criticón, which appears to be the possible stylistic allegory of Agudeza .

Remo Bodei, Reverence for astuteness: prudence and agudeza in Baltasar Gracián
"Curiositas" and experimentalism, these are the main ingredients making up the cultural paradigm of the Baroque 17th century, in which Gracián's conceptual Herbarium (as J. L. Borges calls it) rightfully claims a place. Gracián diagnoses a conceptual fibrillation of the gnoseological rhythm of reality and then suggests the appropriate therapy: a poetic filter, both epistemological and poetic, aiming at variegated individuality. The Spanish Jesuit ably shuffles the classic categories of Chance (Tyche), occasion (Kairos), necessity (Ananke) and goal (Telos) in new and ingenious ethical and poetical modulations, devising a new "phronesis" in which action and knowledge find pragmatic correspondence. However, one must never show one's cards openly: dissimulation, which is a mixture of astuteness and prudence, becomes the most opportune strategy, in view of a truth which is never "desnuda", and of which "agudeza" can only reveal the thousand folds.

Romolo Runcini, The world's unrest and the order of acuteness
In Catholic Baroque culture - concerned in Spain, after the disastrous outcome of the Thirty Years' War, to face the maturity achieved by science and to discipline the centrifugal energies of art which had liquidated the canons of Aristotelian rhetoric - the ethical and aesthetic work of Baltasar Gracián appears as a profound reexamination of the human condition. To the man of the world, the intellectual on whom it is incumbent to know society («tanto se vive cuanto se sabe»), the Spanish Jesuit attributes the duty of public responsibility in choices regarding the way of living and the prestigious pleasure of savouring beauty and the imagination exhibited in artistic fictions, forms of behaviour both directed at the formation of a virtuous personality. In his treatise Agudeza y arte de ingenio the rapport between subject and object is linked to the dynamic equilibrium between contradictory events and values reflecting the world's unrest: an equilibrium, an order achieved by the perfect aesthetic artifice, "agudeza", in which the conflict between appearance and reality finds its counterpart in the tension of an image with boosted meaning in which the world is renewed through language.

Mario Perniola, Intermediate knowledges
The knowing Baroque man rejects philosophic and religious radicalism and becomes the instrument of less harsh intermediate knowledges, and not for the sake of mere convenience, but as a precise mental and ethical strategy. There are two axes in these intermediate forms of knowledge. 1) "Techne", close to subjectless rationality, "a being capable of" in the service of the practical result. In this way the enigmatic and paradoxical "metis", of the Greeks acquires the same characteristics as those which Gracián attributes to "ingenio" free from scientific necessity, whose proper category is "transit", connection, intermediation. 2) "Possession", the heart and the passions, the Platonic divine mania; here too there is subjectless emotivity: a great silence which becomes the capacious container of a single and total openness to the world, with the explosion of full, ingenious, subtle and acute expressiveness. In the work of Gracián the two aspects are blended together: technique is oracle and vice versa, in the vertiginous sketch of the Baroque dimension.

Guido MorpurgoTagliabue, Why we are not and in what way we are Baroque
One must avoid the danger of catapulting the Baroque into the PostModern: one would necessarily fall into a substantial bad parody. In effect, in the Baroque two tendencies coexist: the intellectualism of "docere-delectare", through the manifestation of artifice and the technique of «all the more difficult, all the more beautiful»; and secondly, the psychopedagogical procedure of "delectare-movere". It is in this bipartite situation that the relations between dialectic and rhetoric and between tragic catharsis and comedy are played out. Freud brings together the two loci of acuteness of mind, the witticism, and of the fantasy of the unconscious. But the heart of the matter remains the relationship between art and mass media. In the Baroque this relationship was governed by the principle of identity; in avantgarde Modernism goes by that of contradiction; in PostModernism relations are set up between contraries, which however often find mediocre compromises. The common traits - for instance, the enjoyment of artifice, the pleasure of ingenious transgression, the complexity of the emphasized detail - have different roles and a different degree of importance in the Baroque and the PostModern. In point of fact, the PostModern is not a neoBaroque, but rather a Baroque turned upside down: no longer a blending of art and consumption, but a powerful influence of consumption on art.

Franco Fanizza, Baltasar Grácian and the contemporary aesthetic conscience
After the crisis of the great systems of aesthetics, the contemporary aesthetic conscience, rather than feeling exhausted and defeated has seen the chance to open up both to the desire for new aesthetic dimensions and to the desire to reconsider the image of its own "modern" history. It appears, indeed, to want to come up again in its genuine fullness, after freeing itself of the old abstract "Reason/Taste" dichotomy. The recovery of a work like Gracián's Agudeza y arte de ingenio by today's aesthetic culture responds precisely to such a need for liberation. Gracián's «gran gusto para todo» enables the contemporary aesthetic conscience to get out of a very parochial and limited aesthetic pattern and to regain the richness of the "animae emporium".