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Encyclopedia of Aesthetics

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DOI: 10.2307/3177243

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KELLY, MICHAEL, ed.
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics 4 vols.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 2,208 pp., 90 b&w illus., $495.00 cloth
(0--19--511307--1 the set)

Writing a review of a work on aesthetics for a journal read by art historians seems rather like
extolling the merits of beef to a group of vegetarians. It is not a popular subject and on the
face of it there seems to be no reason why it should be. Journals of aesthetics are not normally
illustrated and aestheticians seem to take no interest at all in particular works of art.
Aesthetics is approached at a level of generality that would appal the typical art historian.
Ernst Gombrich is on record as saying, “Frankly, I am ... somewhat uneasy when I am
confronted with disquisitions about ‘the artist’ or ‘the work of art’ without being told whether
I am expected to think of the Temple of Abu Simbel or a screenprint by Andy Warhol.”
Though he did go on to say, “Yet we historians of the arts would be lacking in gratitude if we
ever forgot that our disciplines are in fact the offspring of aesthetics - whether or not the topic
was known by that name or not.” 1 The crucial expression here is “whether or not the topic
was known by that name or not”. On the terms of this encyclopedia, art historians are
implicitly aestheticians without being consciously aware of it. If we take aesthetics to refer to
critical reflections on art, nature, and culture, including philosophical aesthetics, the field
extends to include the theorists of the various arts, cultural theorists and, implicitly, art
historians.
It may be argued that art historians have some working concept of the aesthetic that
informs their choice of subject matter and its description. Certainly there is a notion of
descriptive relevance brought to bear on artists’ procedures that implies some notion of what
an artist was doing by painting a picture in one way rather than another. What were the
Impressionists up to, for example? What are the implications of the vocabulary that one uses
to describe their work? What sense does it make to speak of recording an impression as
opposed to creating the effect of one? What was Raphael up to in painting the Stanze in the
Vatican, what kinds of categories would be appropriate for describing the resulting images? It
might be thought that answers to these questions could be given in a clear and unequivocal
way. Perhaps they can. But answering those questions depends on recognizing their
significance and being self-critical of the categories that one brings to bear. One of the essays
that led to Erwin Panofsky’s publication of Studies in Iconography was titled “Zum Problem
der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst” (The problem of the

1
E. H. Gombrich, “The Necessity of Tradition” in Tributes (London: Phaidon 1984), p.
185.
description of works of art and the interpretation of their meaning). 2 Panofsky’s essay was
part of a much wider German movement of critical self-understanding. From the other side of
the Atlantic it seems that there is a similar movement afoot now, marked by such publications
as Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff’s Critical Terms for Art History and Mark Cheetham,
Michael Anne Holly and Keith Moxey’s The Subjects of Art History. Christopher Wood’s
recent book The Vienna School Reader is potentially significant for contemporary art history
in the same way that Frederic Jameson’s Aesthetics and Politics was for literary theorists in
the early 80s.
It is interesting, though, that in the early 20th century significant questions of
aesthetics were raised for art historians by art historians, not by professional philosophers. Of
course, the art historians studied in philosophy faculties, and those that took philosophy
courses must have absorbed some philosophy into their blood. Similar critical pressures
could, though, come from elsewhere. Ernst Gombrich is a case in point. His tutor Julius von
Schlosser was a close friend of Benedetto Croce and never ceased to extol the merit of the
latter’s views. Gombrich attended a course of lectures on the history of ethics given by Moritz
Schlick, the leader of the famous Vienna Circle of philosophers. While Schlosser was an
exemplar of the self-critical historian, it was Karl Bühler who offered a combination of
semiotics and psychology that Gombrich would later take into Art and Illusion. Gombrich’s
essay “Wertprobleme und mittelalterliche Kunst” (Kritische Berichte 1937) was more
indebted to psychology than to aesthetics. Gombrich had also developed a critical position
toward historicism before he had ever met Karl Popper. His attraction to Popper’s work was
based on a congeniality toward his views.
The editor of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Michael Kelly, writes in his preface that
the work is intended to “revitalize the field”. (vol. 1, p. xi) At first sight this might seem
paradoxical. Surely a publication of a work this ambitious must mean that there is a ready and
willing audience for it; Oxford University Press is highly sensitive to its potential market. In
fact, given its girth, it would seem to signal the advent of a golden age of aesthetics. But
notice that “the entries in the encyclopedia have been written by more than five hundred
philosophers, art historians, literary theorists, psychologists, feminist theorists, legal theorists,
sociologists, anthropologists, and others who reflect critically on art, culture, and nature.”
(vol. 1, p. xii) Philosophical aesthetics, as it is understood in philosophy departments, has a
limited role to play in the encyclopedia. This is against the background of a subject
increasingly dominated by philosophers in the aesthetics journals, particularly the Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism and British Journal of Aesthetics, aesthetics textbooks and even
Blackwell’s Companion to Aesthetics. In the 1993 celebration issue of the Journal of

2
Erwin Panofsky, “Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken
der bildenden Kunst”, Logos 21 (1932): 103 – 19.
Aesthetics and Art Criticism twenty four out of twenty eight contributors were philosophers
and in the 2000 celebration volume of the British Journal of Aesthetics eleven of the twelve
contributors were philosophers. Despite this drift to philosophy, there is still a strong audience
for aesthetics in its most general and extended sense. The encyclopedia lays claim to the
interest of that audience and the degree to which it is reviewed in journals within that
extended field should offer some criterion by which to judge its success.
How is one to proceed? One draft of this review contained a long list of separate
entries intended to display the range of historical, cultural, disciplinary, and thematic choices.
That proved, on reflection, to be as appetizing as a list of ingredients in a cook book. Another
way to proceed is by commenting on the nature of the project itself.
The idea of combining aesthetics with the humanities and the social sciences harks
back to the German interest in Kunstwissenschaft, which was committed to the belief that it
was possible to have a properly scientific approach to the study of art. One of its leading
lights was Max Dessoir, who founded and edited the Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine
Kunstwissenschaft from 1906 to 1937. He also published a book entitled Ästhetik und
allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft and was instrumental in organising the first Congress on
Aesthetics in Berlin in 1913. To this day the congresses have attracted an extraordinary range
of speakers; it is not unusual to find scientists mixed in with philosophers, art historians,
literary theorists, musicologists, sociologists, psychologists and practicing artists. A recent
event, again staged in Berlin, had a neurophysiologist, psychoanalyst, classicist, art historians,
and a philosopher discussing “Das Bild: Image, Picture, Painting”. The aesthetician
concluding the event reminded the speakers and audience that the discussion of the topic
should not allow itself to be dominated by the professional philosophers. What other people
had to say was just as significant for discussing the subject and raised issues that were of
direct and urgent consequence to the philosophical debate. Philosophers are unconsciously
located within a particular moment of history and possibly quite naive about the field of
extension of “Das Bild”. They are inclined to talk about pictures as if they were self-evident
objects.
Dessoir’s book was significant for its efforts to integrate the findings of various
disciplines in its commentary on the aesthetic characteristics and values of the various arts.
Neither his journal nor, most certainly,the congresses achieved. Although mother philosophia
gave birth to the different scientia of economics, sociology, anthropology and psychology, all
of which containing within themselves different disciplinary approaches, she still has yet to
give birth to aesthetics. There is no such arch discipline. The result for this encyclopedia
could be called a Babel of voices. This extends to the subject’s sense of its self-identity. The
point of entry for this problem is a truncated version of Paul Kristeller’s classic article “The
Modern System of the Arts” presented as the essay “Origins of Aesthetics: Conceptual and
Historical Overview”(vol.3, pp.416-428).
Kristeller’s valuable essay traces the history of the concept of art from classical
antiquity through the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the present day and offers a strong
reminder of the historical specificity of our concept of “art”. What it does not do is relate the
different historical experiences and uses of the arts to the various categories under which they
have been understood. The information is there, in textual sources, but it is still waiting to be
rescued and interpreted. Among the encyclopedia’s entries: “Greek Aesthetics. See
Architecture, article on Early Greek Aesthetics; Aristotle; Classicism; Hellenistic Aesthetics;
and Plato”, “Roman Aesthetics”, “Medieval Aesthetics. See Aquinas; Arab Aesthetics;
Augustine; Beauty; Icon; Islamic Aesthetics; Origins of Aesthetics; Plotinus; Religion and
Aesthetics; Rhetoric; and Russian Aesthetics, article on Religious Aesthetics” and
“Renaissance Italian Aesthetics”. In his preface the editor states that this is done on the
grounds that “at every moment of its history, aesthetics has been related in complementary
and critical ways to the art of its time.” (vol. 1, p. xiii) But how does one determine what is
the art of its time without an available concept? The claim is made that the “the Greek word
for art, techne, is closer to the English work craft.” (1, ix) Bearing in mind the connotations of
the expression “arts and crafts” it is actually closer to the words technique and skill, being
applicable to writing and speaking as well as painting and sculpting. As Göran Sörbom has
convincingly argued, the theory of mimesis is not a theory of art. 3 Plato used painting to
explore the difference between truth and falsity in images and the differences between images
and reality. His theory of beauty was not connected to Art, which the Greeks didn’t know
about, but to the Good, which they did. Neither Plato nor any other writers until the 18th
century had a theory of aesthetic experience although, as we all know, the word was borrowed
from the Greek word aisthesis (for which see entry “Origins of Aesthetics,” article “History
of Aisthesis”).
For a multi-disciplinary encyclopedia philology offers a better point of entry into
Greek aesthetic concepts than philosophy. While Sörbom’s philological Mimesis and Art:
Studies in the Origin and Early Development of an Aesthetic Vocabulary is mentioned in the
bibliography for “Mimesis”, it is not cross-referenced in the blind entry for Greek aesthetics,
and not referred to in any of the multiple entries under “Plato”. J. J. Pollitt’s similarly
philological The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History and Terminology is mentioned
in the bibliography for “Hellenistic Aesthetics: Visual Arts,” which was written by an art
historian, where a rather different picture emerges from the one presented by Plato in book 10

3
Göran Sörbom, “The Theory of Imitation Is Not a Theory of Art: Some Stages in a
Conceptual Tradition” in Jeanette Emt and Göran Hermerén, Understanding the Arts:
Contemporary Scandinavian Aesthetics (Lund: Lund University Press 1992).
of his Republic. Artists’ ambitions were not to hold a mirror up to nature, as Plato caricatured
the matter, but to create artifacts embodying a number of refinements, famously summazised
by Quintilian in Institutio Oratoria 12, 10, 1-10. Another rhetorician, Cicero, reversed Plato’s
sense of the relationship between the Idea and the work of art and the effect of that reversal
survived into posterity via the central role that rhetorical theory had to play in an education
based on the liberal arts. In this context it is remarkable that the encyclopedia does not carry
an entry for “Idea”, which was to become a cornerstone of academic theory in the 17th
century and carry a heavy burden of critical theory up to the present day. 4
We know that art collecting and connoisseurship emerged in classical antiquity, so
why did the academic discipline of aesthetics have to wait for 18th century Europe? The
answer to that question must lie in the distinctive amalgam of ideas that went into the
formation of the subject. In this connection M. H. Abrams’s essays have been very
illuminating and would repay reading, indeed, incorporating into the encyclopedia, perhaps
instead of Kristeller’s classic, and well-known, essay. 5
On the topic of mimesis, Peter Kivy had a very good point when he wrote “how could
so great a philosopher as Plato have said something so wildly implausible as that the poets,
like the painters, practice the art of imitation? The answer would seem to be - and this, I think,
we tend to overlook or forget because of the way we typically experience poetic fiction - that
the Greeks of Plato’s day were not readers. It is clear both from the Ion and the Republic that
Homer was not typically experienced as a good book to curl up with, but as a dramatic
recitation.” 6 Once again, the point must be made that the aesthetic theory of mimesis emerged
in the eighteenth century on the back of a novel idea of art.
The historical entries in this encyclopedia work within traditional notions of the
history of aesthetics. It is extraordinary that Munro C. Beardsley’s Aesthetics from Classical
Greece to the Present, published in 1966, is still the latest comprehensive history of the
subject. The author of the entry “Aquinas” quotes Kristeller’s suggestion that “the attempt to
conceptualize an aesthetics in accord with scholastic principles is a modern projection” and
observes that this “does not amount to a general denial of the category of the aesthetic” (vol.
1, p. 78). This is fair enough until one asks the question, “How is the category of the aesthetic

4
For a critique of Panofsky’s classic study, see E. H. Gombrich “Idea in the
Philosophy of Art: Philosophy or Rhetoric?” in (ed.) M. Fattori and M.L. Bianchi, Idea: VI
Colloquio internazionale del lessico intellettuale europeo ( Rome: Edizioni dell’Atheneo
1990), 411-20.
5
His name was not cited in the index but these two essays were cited in the
bibliography for “Autonomy: Historical Overview”: M.H. Abrams, “Art-as-Such: The
Sociology of Modern Aesthetics” and “From Addison to Kant: Modern Aesthetics and the
Exemplary Art” in Doing Things with Texts (ed. Michael Fischer) (New York: Norton 1991).
Note also “Kant and the Theology of Art”, Notre Dame English Journal 13 (1981), 75-106.
6
Peter Kivy, “Differences [The Presidential Address]”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 51 (1993), 130.
constituted?” Meyer Schapiro addressed this question in his essay “On the Aesthetic Attitude
in Romanesque Art” (1947), coming to the conclusion that “the aesthetic of Thomas is
inadequate for characterising or judging the beauty of mediaeval art; and his theory of art, on
the other hand, admirable as an account of what is involved in fabrication in general, offers
little to an understanding of the mediaeval work designed for aesthetic, expressive ends. He
does not seem to know that there is a making that aims at beauty and expression.”
(Romanesque Art: Selected Papers London 1993, p. 24). There is an interesting contrast, here,
between the philosopher aesthetician and the art historian, with realities rearing their ugly
heads again. It is one thing to talk about the beauty of God’s creation and yet another to talk
about what historically gained the audience’s attention in human artifacts. The documentary
material that has been published by art historians has a central role to play in the history of
aesthetics and is neglected at the aesthetician’s peril. Imagine an alternative medieval
“aesthetic” based on the notion of fright in connection with the following text: “[The
Florentines] set up a stage on barges and boats in the river, and on this they represented the
resemblance and the appearance of hell with flames and other suffering and torment, with
men disguised as demons, terrible to behold. Others who figured as the naked souls of people,
were put through those various torments with horrible howls and screams and tempest which
seemed loathsome and frightful to hear and to see. Because of the novelty of the show many
citizens had come to look.” 7 Rather than scour texts for references to art and to beauty to
construct hypothetical aesthetic theories it would be more helpful to track down references to
the ways in which images were experienced and used. In this context, James Marrow’s
“Symbol and Meaning in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and the Early
Renaissance”, repays philosophical reading for its critique of disguised symbolism and its
development of a theory of emotional response to religious imagery. 8 This may turn into a
hypothetical “poetics” of the religious visual image but at least it would be rooted in reality
rather than in a realm of abstraction.
On the subject of spectator’s actual responses, rather than their theorised responses, it
would have been useful to supplement the entry for “Icon” with an entry for “Idol”, utilising
Cyril Mango’s “Antique Statuary and the Byzantine Beholder”. 9 This would have nicely
bridged the gap to the entry for “Iconoclasm and Iconophobia”. Both would have been neatly
supplemented by an anthropologist’s commentary on symbolism and belief. A special entry
for “Symbol”, rather than the blind reference to “Cassirer; Goodman; Langer; Metaphor;

7
Teresa G. Frisch, Gothic Art 1140 - c.1450 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall 1971),
70.
8
Simiolus, 16 (1986), pp.150-169.
9
Dumbarton Oaks Papers, XVII (1963), pp. 65 ff.
Semiotics; and Symbolism”, with a discussion of Dan Sperber’s stimulating book Rethinking
Symbolism (1988) would have been particularly productive.
The topos of images springing to life that one encounters in Byzantine sources is a
familiar enough tale in European literature. The inclusion of an entry for Japanese aesthetics
might have drawn attention to an important cultural difference. In the Western tradition
“springing to life” is regarded as the work of magic rather than the force of the image itself.
Japan, by contrast, presents the familiar artistic motif of the painting springing to life of its
own accord. There’s obviously food for thought here in a future comparativist study of
aesthetics.
The encyclopedia offers contributions on “aesthetics” in China, India, the Islamic
world, “Japanese aesthetics: Historical Overview; Kire and Iki” and Latin America, enriched
“by integrating non-Western perspectives into discussions of central aesthetics concepts,
principles and issues (e.g. Japanese appreciation of nature).” (vol. 1, p. xiii) The logic of such
entries gives cause for worry. The entry for “African Aesthetics” contains all of the problems
raised in relation to the Royal Academy’s exhibition Africa: The Art of a Continent (October
1995), and one may share the reservations expressed by the title of Anthony Appiah’s
catalogue essay “Why Africa? Why Art?” Similar concerns were occasioned reading the entry
for “Islamic Aesthetics”, which was written to determine “whether there is a distinct Islamic
aesthetic theory to capture the multiple traditions of Islamic art”. (vol. 2, p. 535) Why should
there be an Islamic aesthetics any more than there should be one for Judaism, which has
similar multiple traditions? An entry for “Arabic Aesthetics” reads strangely with its citations
from 20th century texts. Without consulting the separate entries on “Islamic Aesthetics” and
the individual Arabic scholars one might be pardoned for thinking that it is about 20th century
writers. While medieval Arab scholars were no more writing about aesthetics in an abstract
sense than Aquinas they did have very interesting things to say about specific matters to do
with music and the literary arts. The entry “Islamic Aesthetics: Islamic Music” has significant
things to say about the “nonprominence and nonseparateness of the aesthetic”. (vol. 2, p. 537)
“Buddhist Aesthetics”, by the way, has a blind entry “See Chinese Aesthetics, historical
overview article; Japanese Aesthetics, historical overview article”. This is ironic considering
that Buddhism was born in India: will we really get any further than we do with “Islamic
Aesthetics”?
Turning back to Europe, the entry for “Renaissance Italian Aesthetics” could have
been much more interesting than it was. It would have been useful to recognize the rhetorical
habit in Renaissance thought and the impact that it had on the statement of philosophical
doctrines. From a philosopher’s point of view Marsilio Ficino was pretty terrible but he was a
good humanistà. 10 Neither as a philosopher nor as a humanist would he have seen any point
in constructing a system of aesthetics to validate contemporary artistic practices. The new
theorists of painting and the literary arts in the 15th and 16th centuries had rhetoric and
poetics on their minds, supported by philosophical utterances when they felt the need. 11 They
weren’t too fussy about consistency. There is also the important question of how much artists
and humanists had to do with each other. Gombrich invited us to think about the circle that
Lorenzo Ghiberti moved in and the impact of a notion of Art on his practice, something that
would surely interest an aesthetician.12 Michael Baxandall’s Giotto and the Orators, not
referred to in this entry, invites us to consider the effects of writing on painting using terms
drawn from rhetoric. Charles Hope and Elizabeth McGrath have published the thought-
provoking essay “Artists and Humanists,” which invites us to reconsider the actual
relationships between these personalities in the Italian Renaissance.13 What actually was the
institutional dynamic of the discourses surrounding humanism and painting? How were
philosophical notions used to pitch into the situation? The notion that an abstract
philosophical embodiment of all of these discussions could be arrived at owes more to Hegel
than it does to the real history of philosophical aesthetics. Instead of attempting to synthesize
an implicit Renaissance aesthetics from a motley assortment of texts to arrive at the
conclusion that the “global quest for harmony” was more important than anything else (vol. 4,
p. 136) it would have been more productive to engage in a pedestrian quest for the origins of
18th century aesthetics. The ingredients were there in a nascent state: the fascination with art
for its own sake; the problems of judgement; the urge to transfer categories from one art to
another and to make comparisons; the entangling of ideas drawn from rhetoric, poetics and
philosophy; the emergent idea of creativity; and particularly, with Baldassare Castigliano’s
Cortegiano (not mentioned) the notion of a civilized pursuit of the arts.
There is a lineage between Renaissance courtly manuals, gentlemen’s manuals of the
17th century, art theoretical texts such as Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy’s De Arte Graphica
(1667), and the Spectator papers and discussions of taste in the 18th century. Immanuel

10
As an example of his poor philosophy and good rhetoric see his letter ‘in praise of
philosophy’ in The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, volume 3 (London: Shepeard Walwyn 1981),
18 -21.
11
On this topic see E.H. Gombrich “Idea in the Philosophy of Art: Philosophy or
Rhetoric?” in M. Fattori and M.L. Bianchi, Idea: Atti del VI Colloquio internazionale Roma,
5- 7 gennaio, 1989 Atti Lessico intellettuale europeo ( Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo 1990), 411
-20.
12
E. H. Gombrich “The Renaissance Conception of Artistic Progress and its
Consequences”, Norm and Form (London: Phaidon 1966) followed up by “From the Revival
of Letters to the Reform of the Arts: Niccolò Niccoli and Filippo Brunelleschi” reprinted in
Richard Woodfield (ed.) The Essential Gombrich (London: Phaidon 1996).
13
In Jill Kraye (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) stands at the end of
this line. Section 1 of the latter discusses “the distinct objects of the feeling of the Beautiful
and Sublime”, section 2 “the attributes of the Beautiful and Sublime in Man in General” and
section 3 “the distinction of the Beautiful and Sublime in the Interrelations of the two sexes”,
followed by section 4, on “National Characteristics, so far as they depend upon the distinct
feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime”. There is a discussion of this text in the entry “Kant,
Immanuel: Feminism and Kantian Aesthetics,” but the rest of the entry for Kant, including
articles on “Kant on Beauty” and “Kant on the Sublime,” focuses on the Critique of
Judgement. To pick up on Kant’s remarks on national characteristics, the Encyclopedia has a
readable entry for “Sensibilité,” which observes that “French writers did not polarize
sensibility in relation to sex and gender nearly as much as did their British counterparts, at
least not until the last few decades of the century; rather, even the most hard-boiled
philosophes prided themselves on their sensibility, and saw nothing unmanly about
cultivating this quality.” (vol. 4, p. 278) The bibliography misses Alice Laborde’s
L’esthétique circéenne (Paris 1969) which might have offered a different perspective. The
entry mentions Denis Diderot’s Éloge de Richardson, however, without speculating on the
reasons for the enormous popularity of Samuel Richardson’s novels in France. What was it to
be manly in either England or France in the 18th century? Turn to the entry for “Diderot and
the Salon” in “Diderot, Denis” and you will read, “Diderot’s awareness of the erotic
component of visual experience, intensified by a sustained encounter with Edmund Burke’s
Philosophical Enquiry in 1765 -1767, was exceptional among eighteenth-century writers on
art (as opposed to artists themselves). As a result, interesting relations can be mapped out
between his criticism and recent work on gender, sexuality, and reception.” (vol. 2, p. 42)
Winckelmann’s equally popular Reflections on the Imitation of the Ancients (1755) also
provides room for speculation. The entry “Winckelmann” comments: “not only does
Winckelmann split the classical Ideal into the sublime and the beautiful, but he genders them
in surprising ways. Edmund Burke’s association of sublime with male and beauty with female
has provoked recent comment. One might compare Winckelmann’s suggestion that the ‘high’
Ideal resists and finally overwhelms sensuous embodiment: Potts sees here ‘an allegory of
desire, as if the masculine Idea ravishes the helpless figure of woman.’” (vol. 4, p. 457) The
entry for “Burke” claims that “judgments of taste provide the elements for a psychological
analysis that moves in the direction of a political psychology” (vol. 1, p. 319) without
recognising the role that biology plays in his aesthetics through the connection between sex
and beauty. A feminist reading of his Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful would be very
interesting. It could take as its starting point Alex Potts’s discussion in Flesh and the Ideal:
Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (Yale 1994, pp. 114-7).
 The entry for “Genius”, a much discussed phenomenon in the 18th century, contains a
worthwhile article on “Genius and Feminism”. This points out, “Until the work of feminist
scholars in the 1980s, the sexual politics of the language of genius was simply not noticed by
the writers of hundreds of monographs on this subject.” (vol. 2, p. 296) Possibly not among
the scholars, but it is noticeable in Émile Zola’s L’oeuvre (1886).
Strangely enough, the encyclopedia includes no entry for the marquis de Sade, who is
simply mentioned en passant. Neither is there an entry for Pornography. We are referred
instead to the entry for “Obscenity,” which comprises articles on “Aesthetics in Obscenity
Law” and “Obscenity in Art”. It is curious that with such an emphasis on the study of the
beautiful, which has had a long connection with the morally good, there should be no interest
in the question of the aesthetic representation of the evil. In fact, neither “Good” nor “Evil”
are in the index, although an entry under “Ugliness” can be found. An entry for “Fuseli,
Heinrich” would have been useful to complete the tour; his translation of Winckelmann’s
Gedanken popularized it in the United Kingdom and his erotic and macabre imagery formed
an interesting underside to the cult of the beautiful.
Philosophers date the birth of aesthetics as we understand it from Alexander
Baumgarten’s Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (1735). He
warrants just a page in the encyclopedia. But what would be the effect of establishing a
rhetorical lineage rather than a philosophical one? The entry under “Rhetoric” starts, “The
connection of rhetoric and aisthesis (sensation) is originary and strong” (vol. 4, p. 151) and
later continues, “The history of rhetoric is marked not simply by the continuous development
of formulas, but by the enduring contestation of its claims to value by philosophy.” (vol. 4, p.
154) This is perfectly true and the entry for “Rhetoric: Exemplarity” demonstrates how the
notion of the exemplum entered into Kant’s Critique of Judgement and was captured from
rhetoric for philosophy. Judgement cannot proceed from a rule, it is “a particular talent that
cannot be studied but only practiced [geübt].” (vol. 4, p. 157) Here, by the way, we reach the
heart of the problem of aesthetics as it is experienced by its teachers: how can a philosopher
establish what an aesthetic phenomenon is without instilling in her students what it might be,
without the power of example? Thus it comes about that people involved in the practice of art,
and its history, feel frustration with the abstractedness of the philosophers. This explains an
attack by an “art professor”, Benjamin Karp, in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism for
1947 on the “the meaningless wordage of George Boas, professor”:
I have just read his article.... If that worthy philosopher has any real feeling for a work of art
he ought to attend a class in creative writing to learn how to express a genuine feeling or a
genuinely felt idea. ... No wonder Aesthetics has a reputation for being a mess of
meaningless mouthings. … I should like to offer to Prof. Boas the suggestion that he confine
himself to the silence that is most likely to give a philosopher like himself the air of wisdom
he parades.” 14
The later development of the philosophical discipline of aesthetics is common
knowledge, and the encyclopedia provides an interesting and inclusive range of entries to
cover this ground. The entry for Kant demonstrates his overwhelming interest for
aestheticians of all stripes: “Kant, Immanuel: Survey of Thought; Kant on Beauty; Kant on the
Sublime; Kant on Nature and Art; History of Kantian Aesthetics; Kant and Art History; Kant
and Hermeneutics; Feminism and Kantian Aesthetics; Kant, Duchamp and Judgement.”
Kant’s own movement from his early Observations on the feeling of the Beautiful and
Sublime (1764) to the famous Critique of Judgement (1790) marked a transition from sociable
chatter to technical philosophy. The earlier work could have been written by any
Enlightenment gentleman philosopher; the latter has the literary style of a crabbed academic
German philosophy professor. The entry on “Kant and Art History” raises a number of issues
pertaining to art historiography. Many of the ideas that have been fastened on to Kant were
actually post- (not neo-) Kantian in their origins, more closely allied to a writers like Schiller,
Fichte and Schopenhauer. Kant believed that concepts of space, time and causality were
synthetic a priori. He did not believe that the world was the mind’s construction, that is an
oversimplification of his position. Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927) was not
neo-Kantian, it was Hegelian: synthetic a priori categories are not relative to culture. The time
and effort that aestheticians spend on understanding Kant puzzles me though I suppose that it
is a philosophical rite of passage that demands comprehension of his system.
Peter Kivy, an eminent aesthetician whose professional interests extend into the philosophy of
music, has argued:
When music was talked about as a fine art in the eighteenth century, I venture to suggest that
it was more often than not music with a text or, as in the case of Du Bos, for example,
instrumental music that was fundamentally descriptive: storm music, battle music, things of
that kind. ... As a matter of fact, on my view, the correct reading of eighteenth-century
philosophy in this regard is that there are two musical arts: the fine art of musical text setting
and the decorative art, usually estimated to be of little value, of absolute music, compared by
Kant, you will recall, with wallpaper and “designs à la Greque”. 15
Kivy’s words on Kant and music also seem to be applicable to abstract art. Despite the
prevalence of the term “about” to describe contemporary art, I have yet to see any rigorously

14
Lydia Goehr, “The Institutionalization of a Discipline: A Retrospective of The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and the American Society for Aesthetics, 1939-1992”,
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (1993): 100.
15
Peter Kivy, “Differences [The Presidential Address]”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 51 (1993): 126. Kivy also remarked that Kant “could say nothing better of absolute
music than it was good for digestion.”
well worked out attempt to describe how this “aboutness” is actually achieved. An entry on
this topic, to supplement the entries on “Mimesis” and “Representation”, would have been
very helpful.
The issue of the relationship between painting and text is also very important and
raises interesting questions in relation to the visual arts. One is mindful of the various essays
on narrative by Wolfgang Kemp, including the one in Critical Terms and the entry
“Narrative: Narrative and the Visual and Literary Arts” in the encyclopedia. Art historians
will be aware that no one model can be found that will actually apply to the various different
kinds of pictorial narrative through and across history. For aesthetics, narrative is normally
treated within the domains of linguistics and literary theory; semioticians have things to say
on the subject as well. But philosophical discussion seems always to proceed from Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing’s analysis of the subject in Laocoon, despite art historians’ rich and
multiplying explorations.
In general, the abstractedness of philosophy may be contrasted unfavourably with the
apparent concreteness of other academic disciplines joining together under the umbrella of
this encyclopedia: cultural studies, feminist theory, film studies, media studies, reception
theory, structuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology. There are also useful
entries for a substantial number of celebrated contemporary thinkers – Jean Baudrillard,
Pierre Bourdieu, Jaques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, - as
well as departed figures - such as Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Jaques Deleuze,
Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Jaques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre and
Georg Simmel, for example. Certain art historians do get their own mention: Gombrich,
Panofsky, Alois Riegl, Schapiro, August Schmarsow, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Wilhelm
Worringer (no Svetlana Alpers, Michael Baxandall, Max Dvorak or George Kubler). The
general tenor of presentation, with some exceptions, is sympathetic and expository rather than
critical, not the sort of thing one generally expects from philosophy. Unlike William Elton’s
classic Aesthetics and Language (1954), which made aesthetics respectable for analytic
philosophers, this encyclopedia takes no similar stand, except when analytic aestheticians
write about their own central preoccupations. No-one does battle with Derrida, for instance,
which is a pity. Readers who would like an antidote to this geniality are advised to start with
Raymond Tallis’s Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (1988), a
book published in the same series, Macmillan’s “Language, Discourse, Society”, as Norman
Bryson’s Vision and Painting.
Having written in a spirit of criticism it is only fair to conclude with praise. This
encyclopedia is quite unlike any other reference work on library shelves at the moment. It
takes the most extended view of its subject and in this context can be favorably compared to
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Its size enables it
 to go far more deeply into a selected range of topics than the various Companions on the
market. Its contributors are generally well chosen. Some entries are idiosyncratic (look at
“Iconography and Iconology,” for example) but it is nice to encounter challenges to the
commonplace. The peculiar mixture of entries that breaks disciplinary boundaries makes it a
challenging and thought-provoking work. It has arrived at the right moment for theoretical
debates among art historians and would sit comfortably next to Critical Terms for Art History
and The Subjects of Art History.

Richard Woodfield
The School of Art and Design
Nottingham Trent University
United Kingdom
email: richard.woodfield@ntu.ac.uk

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