Modern Art

Is Art Modern?
Kristeller’s
‘Modern System of the Arts’
Reconsidered
James I. Porter
Downloaded from bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org at Sultan Qaboos University on November 12, 2010

Kristeller’s article ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics’ is
a classic statement of the view, now widely adopted but rarely examined, that aesthetics
became possible only in the eighteenth-century with the emergence of the fine arts. I wish to
contest this view, for three reasons. Firstly, Kristeller’s historical account can be questioned;
alternative and equally plausible accounts are available. Secondly, ‘the modern system of the
arts’ appears to have been neither a system nor an agreed upon entity, but only a historical
construct of Kristeller’s own making that matches up with no known historical reality. Thirdly,
while the concept of the fine arts existed in the eighteenth century, the assumption that it
had an impact on the rise of aesthetic theory remains unproven and unnecessary. A more
satisfactory account of aesthetic thought in antiquity can be given, once the ‘fine-arts’
objection has been cleared away.
What was the first man, was he a hunter, a toolmaker, a farmer, a worker, a
priest, or a politician? Undoubtedly the first man was an artist. . . .
Man’s first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one.
Barnett Newman (1947)
Consider the famous anecdote about Sophocles in Ion of Chios (FGrHist 392 F6).
At a dinner-party on Chios the presence of a very handsome young male slave
prompts Sophocles to quote a phrase from Phrynichos, to which a literal-minded
schoolmaster takes exception, and Sophocles flattens him by citing instances of
poetic licence in the use of colour-terms from Simonides and Pindar. . . .There is
abundant evidence that in preliterate cultures the composition of songs is a pro-
cess in which discussion and criticism, often passionate, play an important part—
and inevitably so, because any aesthetic reaction implies preference, and preference
implies criticism. Is anyone prepared to say that the conversation described in Ion
fr. 6 was impossible in the Bronze Age? I, for one, am not.
K. J. Dover (1993)
In 1951–52, Paul Oskar Kristeller published an article in the Journal of the History of Ideas
that proved to be a classic, ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of
Aesthetics’. Classic is perhaps too modest a description, as the leading ideas in Kristeller’s
piece were subsequently adopted as established orthodoxy among historians and
British Journal of Aesthetics Vol 49 | Number 1 | January 2009 | pp. 1–24 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ayn054
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2 | JAMES I. PORTER
philosophers of art and by intellectual and cultural historians, and they are now more or
less legion.1 More recently, his views were developed at book length by Larry Shiner,
though with no real change in substance.2 Classicists, who stand least to gain from Kris-
teller’s views, have been remarkably quiet about them, and a few have adopted them (see
below). The challenges to Kristeller’s central ideas have been, to my knowledge, mini-
mal. In short, we are having to do here no longer with an academic thesis, and not even
with an orthodoxy, but with a dogma.
My intention in the present paper is to confront Kristeller’s article directly, as I believe it
contains a number of untenable and potentially quite damaging assumptions and conclu-

sions, both about the history of art and aesthetics (ancient and modern), and about the fun-
damental nature of aesthetic reflection and inquiry. I will begin by summarizing Kristeller’s
views. Then I will show how his position rests on a narrative description of what it depicts,
one that is by no means unassailable. Alternative stories are available, and these offer dra-
matically different pictures of the same ground that Kristeller covers in his essay. Thirdly, I
will demonstrate how the evidence Kristeller seeks to muster for his argument in fact stands
in contradiction to his primary claims, taking Charles Batteux as my chief exhibit (Batteux is
Kristeller’s key and best single witness).Then I will turn to the fallacy of aesthetic autonomy,
the emergence of which Kristeller’s historical picture is designed to explain. At issue here is
whether aesthetic reflection (or theorizing) is conceivable in the absence of a theory of aes-
thetic autonomy, and consequently whether art itself is conceivable as a category of thought
before the eighteenth century. Kristeller’s answer is ‘No’, but this seems wrong in every
possible way—historically, logically, and methodologically. Finally, I will offer a few hints as
to how one can go about conducting a more satisfactory account of the rise and evolution of
aesthetic thought in classical antiquity, once Kristeller’s objections have been cleared away.
Kristeller’s views about the modern system of the arts (so-called) are as vital to the way we
grasp the Greek and Roman past as they are to the way we grasp the modern world. What
follows will pertain to both.
The Modern System of the Arts

By ‘modern system of the arts’ Kristeller understands ‘the irreducible nucleus’ of five art
forms that together comprise the fine arts (beaux arts): painting, sculpture, architecture, music,
and poetry. Decorative arts, engraving, gardening, dance, theatre, opera, ‘and finally elo-
quence and prose literature’ were added as an afterthought, historically speaking; these, in any
event, never won universal consensus, unlike the five previous arts, which did.The point is that
1 Kristeller’s view is adopted by Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, first published in 1977
(Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1978), pp. 6–7, who claims to be following Bosanquet (but see at n. 7 below). Cf. Philip Alperson
and Noël Carroll, ‘Music, Mind, and Morality: Arousing the Body Politic’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 42, no. 1
(2008), pp. 1–15; here, p. 1: ‘In the eighteenth century the Modern System of the Arts was born. . . . These are what
we might call the arts with a capital “A”’. Kristeller’s original article has been widely anthologized, most recently in
Peter Kivy (ed.), Essays on the History of Aesthetics (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1992), pp. 3–64. An
influential abridged version appeared as Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘Origins of Aesthetics: Historical and Conceptual
Overview’, in Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1997), vol. 3, pp. 416–428.
2 Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
IS ART MODERN? KRISTELLER’S ‘MODERN SYSTEM OF THE ARTS’ RECONSIDERED | 3
the fine arts so constituted are set off from crafts, sciences, ‘and other human activities’: they
enjoy relative autonomy, are freed from utilitarian objectives, and are guided by no moral
agendas.This separation is supposed to have occurred in the eighteenth century.3 The ancients,
by contrast, had no such unified conception of art or beauty. A series of negative comparisons
ensues. The ancients did not separate moral beauty from beauty in art. They did ‘not treat
music or the dance as separate arts but rather as elements of certain types of poetry, especially
of lyric and dramatic poetry’.The ‘emancipation of instrumental music from poetry’ occurred
only late in the day.The social and intellectual prestige of painting, sculpture, and architecture
‘was much lower than one might expect from [the] actual achievements’ that were made in

these areas. ‘No ancient philosopher . . . wrote a separate systematic treatise on the visual arts
or assigned to them a prominent place in his scheme of knowledge’ (p. 174). In short,
we have to admit the conclusion, distasteful to many historians of aesthetics but grudg-
ingly admitted by most of them, that ancient writers and thinkers, though confronted
with excellent works of art and quite susceptible to their charm, were neither able nor
eager to detach the aesthetic quality of these works of art from their intellectual,
moral, religious and practical function or content, or to use such an aesthetic quality
as a standard for grouping the fine arts together or for making them the subject of a
comprehensive philosophical interpretation. (ibid.)
Kristeller is far from being alone in his disparagement of the ancients’ capacity for aes-
thetic reflection. The kernel of his historical thesis derives from Julius Schlosser’s Die
Kunstliteratur, while his philosophical assumptions are derived at least in part from R. G.
Collingwood, as Kristeller acknowledges.4 Another early exponent of the same view is
Schlosser’s contemporary, Erwin Panofsky, who accuses Plato of failing to think aestheti-
cally because he was unable to separate metaphysical from aesthetic questions. Accord-
ingly, Plato was incapable of contributing to art theory.5 This conclusion about Plato is
3 Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts’, in Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays (expanded
edition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 1990), pp. 163–227, 165. While Kristeller does not use the expression
‘aesthetic autonomy’, he invokes the concept through functionally identical ideas, such as the ‘separation’ or
‘distinction’ of the arts from ‘other human activities’ (ibid.), especially from ‘morality’ (p. 199), and not least
through the invocation of ‘(modern) aesthetics’ as a self-standing discipline (p. 165, and passim), which he takes to
represent this very separation—as does Shiner, who adopts the language of ‘autonomy’ in Kristeller’s wake (Shiner,
The Invention of Art, pp. 4, 13–14, 23, 305, etc.). Incidentally, Collingwood, one of Kristeller’s influences (see next
note), is explicit on this point: ‘The aesthetic experience is an autonomous activity’ (R. G. Collingwood, The Principles
of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), p. 40).
4 Julius Schlosser, Die Kunstliteratur: Ein Handbuch zur Quellenkunde der neueren Kunstgeschichte (Vienna: A. Schroll & Co.,
1924), pp. 46–55; Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts’, p. 174 n. 79, etc. Collingwood, The Principles of Art,
esp. pp. 1–56 (whence the distinction between fine arts and crafts (or ‘useful arts’); the denial to Plato and other
ancient Greeks of any concept of art; and the view of what counts as aesthetic autonomy); Kristeller, ‘The Modern
System of the Arts’, p. 164 n. 3; cf. ibid., p. 166 n. 12. For strikingly similar views, see also Władysław Tatarkiewicz,
‘Art and Poetry: A Contribution to the History of Ancient Aesthetics’, Studia Philosophica, vol. 2 (1937), pp. 367–418.
5 Erwin Panofsky, “Idea”: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie (Leipzig: B. G.Teubner, 1924; repr. of 2nd edn,
Berlin:Volker Spiess, 1993), p. 2. Ernst Cassirer holds a similar view: ‘Eidos und Eidolon’, first published in 1924, reprinted
in Birgit Recki (ed.), Ernst Cassirer, Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Meiner, 1998), vol. 15, pp. 135–163, esp. p. 137.
4 | JAMES I. PORTER
later assented to by Eva Keuls on grounds that would, moreover, exclude Kant from the
history of aesthetics—for instance, given Plato’s failure to privilege artistic beauty over
natural beauty.6 To be sure, Plato in particular has not lacked his advocates, among them
Bernard Bosanquet, Edgar Wind, Pierre-Maxime Schuhl, Bernhard Schweitzer, and, from
an unsuspected quarter, Erich Auerbach in his book on Dante from 1929, each of whom
produced powerful appreciations of Plato’s aesthetic theories.7 Nor has Kristeller’s view
gone unchallenged here and there, though the nearly otherwise unquestioned orthodoxy
it has enjoyed is astonishing.8 Nevertheless, it is one thing to appreciate Plato and quite
another to come to grips with the underlying thesis of Kristeller’s positions, which require

more than a casual dismissal. His position is strong, at least rhetorically. The question is
whether it can hold up to a more sustained scrutiny, one it seems not yet to have found.
These concerns stem from an interest of my own in recovering the traditions of aesthetic
reflection in Greece and Rome, which Kristeller’s position effectively prohibits from the
outset. If art and aesthetics, conceived as quasi-autonomous activities, are modern con-
structs, how can we go about treating these phenomena in antiquity? The problem, so stated,
is badly formed. But to say this is hardly enough to get an argument off the ground. One
must first confront the source of the problem, which lies in the way in which it was first
formulated in its most recognizable form today, namely in Kristeller’s article from 1951.
Alternative Historical Views

There are difficulties with Kristeller’s picture, starting with its historical validity. Is it even
true as a description of the state of the arts in the eighteenth century? This depends on
where one looks. Clement Greenberg gives a radically different picture of the same era in
his equally renowned 1940 essay, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’. In his view, the arts were
dominated by a single art form by the time the seventeenth century arrived in Europe—
namely literature. ‘A confusion of the arts’ resulted, whereby each art sought to assimilate
itself to the dominant literary form, ‘pretend[ing] to conceal their mediums [so] as to anni-
hilate [these] seemingly in favor of illusion.’9 Greenberg’s analysis of the situation of the
6 Eva C. Keuls, Plato and Greek Painting (Leiden: Brill, 1978), p. 56, and passim. See also Alexander Nehamas, ‘Plato and
the Mass Media’, in Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 1999), pp.
279–299 (citing Kristeller).
7 Bernard Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic, first published in 1892, 2nd edn (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956), e.g. p. 1: ‘But the
thing [‘Aesthetic’] existed before the name’; Edgar Wind, qe V F b V: (Laws, II, 671D): ‘On Plato’s Philosophy of Art’, in
id., The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art, first published in 1932, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1983), pp. 1–20; Pierre-Maxime Schuhl, Platon et l’art de son temps (arts plastiques), first published in 1933, 2nd, revised and
augmented edn (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952); Bernhard Schweitzer, Platon und die bildende Kunst der Griechen
(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1953); Erich Auerbach, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (Berlin:W. de Gruyter, 1929), pp. 8–15.
8 For three differently critical views of Kristeller, see Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern
Problems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 2002), pp. 7–9; Charles Martindale, Latin Poetry and the Judgment of Taste: An
Essay in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2004), pp. 31–33; and Walter G. Leszl, ‘Plato’s Attitude to Poetry and the
Fine Arts and the Origins of Aesthetics: Part I’, Études platoniciennes, vol. 1 (2004), pp. 113–197, esp. 117–130.
9 Clement Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, in id., The Collected Essays and Criticism, first published in 1940,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986–93), pp. 23–38, vol. 1, p. 24; emphasis in original.
arts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is worth quoting at length, not only for the
polar contrast it makes with Kristeller’s historical picture, but also for its striking similari-
ties with the situation of the arts of antiquity as depicted by Kristeller:
Painting and sculpture, the arts of illusion par excellence, had by that time [i.e. the
eighteenth century] achieved such facility as to make them infinitely susceptible to the
temptation to emulate the effects, not only of illusion, but of other arts. Not only
could painting imitate sculpture, and sculpture, painting, but both could attempt to
reproduce the effects of literature. And it was for the effects of literature that 17th and
18th century painting strained most of all. Literature, for a number of reasons, had

won the upper hand, and the plastic arts—especially in the form of easel painting and
statuary—tried to win admission to its domain.
Greenberg, to be sure, is not all that happy with this self-erasure of the arts and their media
in the face of literature, and he wastes no time saying so in the next breath:
Although this does not account completely for the decline of those arts during this
period it seems to have been the form of that decline. Decline it was, compared to
what had taken place in Italy, Flanders, Spain and Germany the century before. (pp.
24–25)
In a word, the non-literary arts had become the ‘stooges’ of literature. Thus, in the place
of a nucleus of five beaux arts forms enjoying well-defined boundaries, Greenberg points to
a strong collaborative fusion (or ‘confusion’) of the arts under the umbrella of literature,
much as Kristeller would later describe ancient music and dance as adjuncts of ancient
poetry. Greenberg’s analysis of the arts in Enlightenment Europe stands Kristeller’s pic-
ture on its head.The modern system of the arts, so described, is not only confused. It is also
a sign of ‘decline’. And in no way does it constitute a radical breakthrough in the history of
thought, not least because it barely constitutes an ordered system at all. Lessing’s Laokoon
(1764), with its rigorous distinction of painting and poetry, is best understood as a reaction
to this situation of the arts (whence the title of Greenberg’s essay).
Nor is Batteux (1713–1780), whom Kristeller introduces as the inaugurator and per-
fecter of the modern system of the arts, a disconfirming example for Greenberg. Quite the
contrary. The system he lays out in his masterwork, Les beaux arts réduits à une même principe,
with its clear origins in Aristotle’s Poetics, only confirms Greenberg’s impression that lit-
erature is the dominant model of analysis in the eighteenth century. Compare what Batteux
writes in his Avant-propos:
This is what produced this little work, wherein it is quite evident that poetry should
occupy pride of place, owing as much to its dignity as to the fact that poetry was its
occasion. . . . It was thus in searching for a single definition of poetry that this work was
formed, almost without design and by a progression of ideas, the first of which was the
germ of all the others.10
10 Charles Batteux, Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe (Paris: Durand, 1747; repr. Johnson Reprint Corporation:
New York, 1970), pp. ix, xiii. Cf. ibid., p. 262.
6 | JAMES I. PORTER
And in fact most of his treatise is taken up with poetry, as was true of its model, the Poetics.
So much for a lateral distribution of the arts.
Worse still, Greenberg’s picture of decline deepens over the next century, and it isn’t
until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with the debut of the avant-garde, dated by
Greenberg to Courbet’s new realism and the rise of Impressionism in his wake, that the
arts finally asserted their autonomy. By this self-assertion of the arts Greenberg means the
assertion of their independence from literature (understood more broadly as ‘subject mat-
ter’) and their discovery of properly expressive forms and media—a discovery that is
quickly traded in for new illusory effects, involving a renewed confusion of the arts, this

time salutary, because they subserved no single art form in particular. What is more, and of
particular relevance to the present essay, the breakthrough of the new, as it were, system of
the arts in the late nineteenth century happened to coincide with a new, studied pursuit of
‘materialistic objectivity’, ‘a new flatness’ (Greenberg’s aesthetic rallying cry in the 1940s
and 1950s, and even later), a new, ‘almost complete absorption in the very physical quality
of [the] medium’, a new rapture at ever ‘more immediate and more powerful sensations’,
and, finally, ‘a new confusion of the arts’, as each art form sought to borrow ‘the proce-
dures and effects of some other art’, whether this was music seeking out coloristic effects
in Impressionism, or painting returning the favor with its moods and rhythms, or poetry
imitating painting and sculpture (e.g. through imagism).11
Greenberg’s history of art could not be more diametrically opposed to Kristeller’s than
it already is.12 Where in the eighteenth century Kristeller sees crystallization, co-ordina-
tion, and system, Greenberg sees decline, conflation, and confusion. Where Kristeller sees
clean lines and horizontal differentiation (with the arts walled off and compartmentalized),
Greenberg sees opacity and vertical subordination (under literature—a trait that Kristeller
reserves for antiquity13). Where in the next century Kristeller sees formal purity and aes-
thetic autonomy, Greenberg sees an intense cross-pollination of the arts, albeit sans subor-
dination (especially in the latter part of the century). Incidentally, what kind of materialism
or even functional specificity does Kristeller allow to his systematized arts? The answer is
obvious: next to none. They exist as colourless elements of a total system, which has one
purpose only: to classify the arts. (The limitations of classification as a criterion of art and
of aesthetic reflection will be discussed below.)
A third alternative historical view is available, according to which the rise of modern
aesthetic theory was due not to an obsession with formal purism and questions of autono-
my, but to the rise of empiricism and sensualism during the Enlightenment—whence Al-
exander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s treatise on the science of sensate perception (sensa) and
sensate representations (representationes sensitivae) from 1735 (Meditationes philosophicae
de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus) and his Aesthetica from 1750, to take just these two
instances, which are usually cited together as the single founding moment of modern
11 ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, pp. 28–31. Cf. Charles Baudelaire, Curiosités esthétiques, L'art romantique, et autres oeuvres
critiques, ed. H. Lemaître (Paris, Éditions Garnier Frères, 1962), p. 104, noting this very blending together of the
arts, albeit lamenting it as a form of decadence.
12 One methodological difference needs to be pointed out: Kristeller’s evidence about the arts is drawn from
contemporary treatises on art, while Greenberg’s is partly derived from observations about the arts themselves.
13 See Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts’, p. 169 (on Plato and Aristotle).
aesthetic theory, though opinions vary, and British empiricism has an equally rightful claim
to the honour.14 If this is right, and it is a commonplace view today, then aesthetics was
engaged from the first with a mapping of the senses, while whether the so-called modern
system of the arts is the fruit of this activity or not remains an open question. Another in-
stance of this tendency to empiricism is none other than Kristeller’s hero, Charles Batteux,
who was influenced indirectly by Locke’s empiricism through Voltaire’s sensualism, and
who later went on to translate Epicurus and to defend Epicureanism in his La morale
d’Épicure, tirée de ses propres écrits (1758).15
Once again, if we take this historical approach, then Kristeller’s focus comes up short,

for it presents the problem of Enlightenment aesthetics as one of a rational containment,
when in fact what seems to have been at stake was, in Jacques Rancière’s terms, a ‘distribu-
tion of the sensible’.16 Nor is the system of the fine arts an issue on the empiricist view.
Baumgarten ignores it, and so do Hume, Burke, Lessing, and (for the most part) Kant.17
On this alternative picture, modern aesthetics, true to its name, comes about with a sud-
den attention to empirical sensation. (Aesthetics, after all, derives from the Greek word
aisthêsis, which encompasses sensation, perception, and feeling—this is what Baumgarten
was alluding to with his coinage.) Sensation is eventually rationalized and the philosophical
discipline is born, though in time the need for a renewal of the senses is felt and another
surge in the direction of materialism occurs midway through the nineteenth century.18
Hence the reassertion of materialism in art with the later avant-garde as described by
Greenberg and the ‘new confusion of the arts’ which this refocusing of the sensible brings in
its train, the arts being prone to sensual conflations by their very promiscuous nature. Much
the same occurs at different moments in antiquity too—a tendency that, in Kristeller’s
eyes, would disqualify antiquity from entertaining deeper thoughts about the nature of
aesthetics. By worrying about walls and ladders (hierarchies) and not about experiential
forms, Kristeller puts the emphasis in the wrong place.
14 See Jerome Stolnitz, ‘On the Origins of “Aesthetic Disinterestedness”’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 20,
no. 2 (1961), pp. 131–143: ‘The British did not invent and never use[d] the words “aesthetic” or “aesthetics”, but it
is simply frivolous to allow this to decide who ‘created’ aesthetic theory. The British were the first to envision the
possibility of a philosophical discipline, embracing the study of all of the arts, one which would be, moreover,
autonomous, because its subject matter is not explicable by any of the other disciplines.’ Here, the obvious
candidates are Locke, Hume, Burke, Addison, Priestley, and others.
15 For the general thesis about the concurrence of the rise of empiricism and materialism and the rise of aesthetics, see
Stolnitz, ‘Locke and the Categories of Value in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory’, Philosophy, vol. 38, no.
143 (1963), pp. 40–51; Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), ch. 2; Dabney
Townsend, ‘Lockean Aesthetics’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 49, no. 4 (1991), pp. 349–361.
16 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New
York: Continuum, 2006).
17 Kant knows about the fine arts (CJ §§ 51–53). But he measures them according to their approximation to the free
beauty of nature as received by the imagination.
18 Cf. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, pp. 32–33: ‘The proto-materialist impulse of [early German aesthetics]
soon surrenders to a full-blown formalism; indeed no sooner has sensation been ushered into the court of reason
then [sic] it is subjected to a rigorous discrimination.’ But the pendulum eventually swings back the other way again,
starting with the second half of the nineteenth century, as the accounts by Greenberg, T. J. Clark, and others make
abundantly clear.
8 | JAMES I. PORTER
Charles Batteux on Les Beaux Arts (1746)

Big-picture problems aside, it is questionable whether the distinctions sought after by Kristeller
were ever actually achieved even in the eighteenth century. Batteux’s Les beaux arts réduits à une
même principe (1746), adduced by Kristeller as ‘the decisive step toward a system of the fine
arts’, is a case in point, as it flatly contradicts nearly every element in Kristeller’s argument:
The decisive step toward a system of the fine arts was taken by the Abbé Batteux in his
famous and influential treatise, Les beaux arts réduits à une même principe (1746). . . . He was
the first to set forth a clearcut system of the fine arts in a treatise devoted exclusively to

this subject.This alone may account for his claim to originality as well as for the enormous
influence he exercised both in France and abroad, especially in Germany. Batteux codified
the modern system of the fine arts almost in its final form, whereas all previous authors
had merely prepared it. (Kristeller, 'The Modern System of the Arts', pp. 199–200)
True, Batteux does organize the fine arts around a principle (the imitation of nature) and
he does limit membership in their club by virtue of this same principle (the fine arts are
indeed restricted to five: music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and—here, unlike in later
authors, perhaps—‘the art of gesture or dance’, p. 6). And he further acknowledges that
each of these arts imitates in its own manner, while all of them have as their primary object
the provision of pleasure (p. 7). (As we shall see in a moment, the first and more basic
criterion of imitation undermines the impression that pleasure is the primary—necessary
and sufficient—criterion of good poetry.) Even so, there is nothing remarkably modern
about these claims, which are explicitly drawn from Aristotle, Horace, and Plutarch. In-
deed, citing Aristotle’s Poetics, chapter 1 in Greek, Batteux derives four of his five beaux arts
and their criterial difference from this source alone: ‘la Musique, la Danse, la Poësie, la
Peinture, sont des Arts imitateurs [. . . Poët. cap. I]’.19 Sculpture, the fifth item on Batteux’s
list, does not appear in the opening sections of the Poetics or in any other section of that
treatise, but it does appear elsewhere, for example in Aristotle’s Rhetoric: ‘painting, sculp-
ture, poetry—and every product of skilful imitation’.20 In terms of the Querelle des Anciens
et des Modernes, already fairly exhausted by the time, Batteux comes down as a balanced
moderate, conceding different capacities to the ancients and to the moderns, while re-
maining heavily classicizing and generally favourable to the ancients.21 Batteux, after all,
was Professor of Rhetoric at the Collège Royal de Navarre in Paris (1745–1750) and then
assumed the chair of Greek and Roman philosophy at the Collège de France in 1750.
Nevertheless, Kristeller seeks to palliate Batteux’s classicism by suggesting that Aristo-
tle and Horace are mere starting points for Batteux’s theory, and that the principle of imi-
tation gave Batteux a respectable cover—‘the appearance of ancient authority’—as he went
about his true business, which was to ‘group the fine arts together’, while in Batteux’s
later reception, the principle ‘could be replaced’ once the system ‘had been so firmly
19 Batteux, Les beaux arts, p. 18.

20 Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.11.1371b6–8; trans. Roberts. Batteux, Les beaux arts, p. 6 (where sculpture actually appears
fourth in order, after painting and before dance).
21 Cf. Batteux, Les beaux arts, p. 183 with the ensuing discussion on the question of the relative capacity for metrical
and rhythmical harmonies and cadences in Greek, Latin, and modern poetry, ‘en faveur des Anciens’.
established as no longer to need the ancient principle of imitation to link them together’
(p. 200; emphasis added). This seems utterly wrong, as Batteux’s title suggests by itself: Les
beaux arts réduits à une même principe does not mean that the principle in question (imitation)
is being reduced to the beaux arts. Quite the contrary, it is the beaux arts that are being reduced
to the classical—and indeed, Aristotelian—principle of imitation. In fact, the entire concept
is in Batteux’s eyes ancient, not modern: ‘the principle of imitation, which the Greek phi-
losopher [sc. Aristotle] establishes for the beaux arts, astonished me’ when Batteux first
encountered the Poetics (p. viii). Nor does Batteux have the slightest inkling that the beaux
arts came into existence in his own century. (Indeed, it is unclear whether any other eigh-

teenth-century writer knows this either.) Kristeller is rewriting Batteux’s study for him,
which would be unthinkable without its classicism and without its principle of imitation.
There is no modernist battle cry here, and not a whiff of a realignment of art around a new
axis of aesthetics, let alone autonomy. But that is not all.
Kristeller’s promotion of the modern system of the arts is coupled with a critique of the an-
cients, on the grounds that antiquity lacked any such system. But this critique is strikingly odd,
as it reads, in fact, like a critique of Batteux. Here are Kristeller’s reasons against antiquity:
Passages have been collected from the writings of Plato and Aristotle from which it ap-
pears quite clearly that they considered poetry, music, the dance, painting and sculp-
ture as different forms of imitation. This fact is significant so far as it goes, and it has
influenced many later authors, even in the eighteenth century. But aside from the fact
that (i) none of the passages has a systematic character or (ii) even enumerates all of the
‘fine arts’ together, it should be noted that the scheme (iii) excludes architecture, that
(iv) music and the dance are treated as parts of poetry and not as separate arts, and (v)
that on the other hand the individual branches or subdivisions of poetry and of music
seem to be put on a par with painting or sculpture. (pp. 171–72; my numeration)
This set of claims contains several problems, and even fallacies, which I will simply list in
order: (i) the work that furnishes Batteux with his model of the system of the fine arts hap-
pens to be Aristotle’s Poetics, and that work is heavily systematic throughout, far more so
than Batteux’s own; (ii) many of the ancient passages in question concerning the various art
forms do in fact occur together, as in Aristotle’s Poetics, as Batteux was the first to admit;
(iii) architecture is discussed in Plato’s Sophist and elsewhere in early and later antiquity
(we know of entire treatises on the art), but that is irrelevant: on Kristeller’s own admis-
sion, architecture does not form part of the original ‘nucleus’ of the five fine arts for Bat-
teux (these, Kristeller says, comprised ‘music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and the dance’,
p. 20022); indeed, one has to wonder where and how Kristeller arrives at his nucleus of five
fine arts, which looks to be his own, and which differs markedly from Batteux’s (Batteux
includes dance but not architecture); in the place of any historical references, we are mere-
ly given bluff assertion (one that is manifestly false): ‘these [sc. Kristeller’s] five constitute
the irreducible nucleus of the modern system of the arts, on which all writers and thinkers
22 Cf. Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts’, p. 202: ‘D’Alembert . . . now includes architecture, . . . thus
removing the last irregularity which had separated Batteux’s system from the modern scheme of the fine arts’. Cf.
Batteux, Les beaux arts, p. 6.
10 | JAMES I. PORTER
seem to agree’ (p. 165; emphasis added);23 (iv) is plainly false for any ancient author I am
aware of;24 it is unclear what the sense of the phrase ‘on a par’ is in (v), nor what ancient
evidence might bear out the apparent meaning of (v)—or even why the arts’ being so
ranked should matter on Kristeller’s own terms (painting and sculpture ought to have been
relegated to inferior positions on his reading of the ancient evidence, not to a position of
equality; cf. p. 174; quoted on p. 7 above).
There is a further obstacle. If Kristeller is hoping to discover in the modern system of
the arts a conceptualization of aesthetics that renders aesthetics immune from moral con-
siderations (and he undoubtedly is), Batteux is not his man.25 On the contrary, Batteux

makes it unmistakably clear that nothing could be further removed from his mind than the
separation of art and morals. The first section of Part Three, Chapter 3 bears a title that says
it all: ‘General Rule of Poetry: To Join (Joindre) the Useful (l’utile)’—a category that in-
cludes morals—‘with the Pleasurable (l’agréable)’ (p. 156). The language repeats terms
from early on in the treatise: ‘the pleasurable and the useful should be brought together in
poetry and in prose’ (p. 50). The terms are, moreover, drawn directly from Horace’s fa-
mous paradigm of prodesse and delectare, as the next page confirms:
In effect, if in nature and the arts, things affect us (nous touchent) in proportion to the
connection (le rapport) that they have to us, it follows that works that have the double
connection of pleasure and utility will touch us more than those which have only one
of the two. That is the precept of Horace:
Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci,
Lectorem delectando, pariterque monendo.
[Whoever blends usefulness and sweetness wins every point,
both delighting and instructing the reader. (Ars poetica, vv. 343–344)]
(pp. 156–157; emphasis as in Batteux)
As one reads on, it becomes clear that Batteux firmly believes in the moral mission of po-
etry. Poetry’s role is not senseless hedonism: it has a content; it treats of objects in the real
world; and it has a purpose, which is not to violate the orders of truth and propriety
(sagesse); if anything, the mission of poetry is to contribute to truth and propriety, if need
be by ‘concealing’ its hard precepts under the more palatable guise of pretty images, and
by helping to remove the harmful passions, which it is the job of pleasure to perform
(pp. 157–162). Hence,
23 Leszl, ‘Plato’s Attitude to Poetry and the Fine Arts’, p. 119 suggests that Kristeller’s source is (perhaps unconscious-
ly) Hegel, and this may be right. But Kristeller fails to discuss Hegel, who presents problems of his own (see below).
24 Tragedy is not equivalent to the genus ‘poetry’, hence it is hardly an exception. Aristotle is well aware that music
and dance are separate arts from poetry that happen to form part of tragedy (and some other performed kinds of
poetry), but are not part of, for example, lyric; epic is sung but not danced. Aristoxenus’ Elements of Harmony has
nothing to do with poetry, etc. More correctly: Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts’, p. 169.
25 Kristeller’s thesis about the modern system of the arts is narrower (more historically circumscribed) than his views
about aesthetic autonomy (see n. 3 above), even if the two converge in the end, whereby the former in effect comes to
stand for the latter rhetorically, while representing the latter’s cause historically. More on this source of confusion below.
The aim of poetry is to please, and to please by stirring the passions. But in order to
give us a perfect and solid pleasure, its role is, and has been, never to stir any passions
except those which it is important for us to feel vividly, and not those which are ene-
mies of propriety (ennemies de la sagesse). (p. 157)
And so too, it should not surprise us that, given the choice between the aesthetically pleas-
ing Vergil and the more morally rewarding Horace, Batteux is prepared to cast his vote
with the latter. For Horace’s works are ‘more instructive for us today’ (p. 162).26 Not for
nothing does Horace supply the book’s motto on the title page: ex noto fictum [sc. carmen]
sequar (‘I will pursue [poetry] that is made of what is known’ (Ars poetica, v.240)). Horace

is exemplary of the way all poetry in any age should be. And yet, Batteux must go back to
Horace to find this universal exemplum.
Interestingly enough, the same sort of argument about moral content applies to the
perception of aesthetic forms, a question that Batteux arrives at when he asks whether a
poem without versification or with its parts in disarray remains a poem or not. The answer
he gives is that such a poem does remain a poem, the primary criterion being that it ‘dis-
play objects’ and that the objects be imitative, as if poetry’s quality derived from this qual-
ity of its objects and not from any intrinsic features of the physical medium of poetry itself
(p. 153). The position is improbably strained (it leaves unclear what defines poetry as op-
posed to prose), but it is at least consistent with Batteux’s starting (and reductive) assump-
tion that poems are essentially imitative of reality.27 And for the same reason, Batteux is
willing to concede that, while poetry’s primary object is not moral instruction, neither is
poetry conceivable in the absence of content, whether moral or other. After all, imitation
is the first criterion of art, then comes pleasure. Of interest to us here is how, in denying
formal features to poetry’s essence, Batteux paints himself into a corner opposite that of
aesthetic formalism—and, one should have thought, opposite that of anyone who holds a
rigorous view of aesthetic autonomy of the sort described by Kristeller.
Assume that you have a poem whose verses have been contorted, dispersed, their me-
ters broken, their features ruptured—
the poetry of things [viz. poetry viewed with respect to its content, not its form]
persists nonetheless (la poësie des choses reste toujours); one rediscovers it again in [the
poet’s] dispersed parts.
Invenias etiam disjecti membra Poëtae.
[You will discover the limbs of even the dismembered poet. (Horace Serm. 1.4.62)]
26 Nor does Batteux appear to have changed his tune in his later work on Aristotle, Les Quatre Poëtiques d’Aristote (Paris
1771), vol. 1, p. 283, where he holds that ‘poetic experience is “une sorte d’apprentissage du malheur”, preparing
us for life’ (Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), p. 351).
Batteux’s Aristotelianism, in his own version of it, is deeply ingrained.
27 The position follows, in a way, logically from Batteux’s Aristotelianism. Poems are poetic not by virtue of their
verse-structure, but by virtue of their peculiar and genre-specific imitative character (Les beaux arts, p. 146). In other
words, pace Kristeller, Batteux’s theory of the beaux arts is as much a theory of their distinction from one another as it
is one of their grouping, as it was for Aristotle in the Poetics, with imitation providing the first isolating feature, and a
set of follow-up criteria providing finer distinctions (i.e. the objects, media, and manner of imitation).
This does not prevent one from disagreeing that a poem without versification will not
be a poem. (p. 146)
More simply put, poetry minus versification is and remains a poem, but poetry minus
(poetic) content does not (for otherwise poetry could not be imitative at all), while poetry
containing morally objectionable content is bad poetry, plain and simple. Good poetry,
meanwhile, will display morally approved content. And once it is combined with norma-
tive designs, Batteux’s imitative criterion becomes unflinchingly utilitarian. Indeed, the
purely formal definition of poetry (qua imitative of content) seems calculated to pave the
way for poetry’s moral, normative stipulation. Here are some of the proper passions that

good poetry should arouse in us:
The horror of crime, in whose wake follow shame, fear, remorse, not counting the
other torments: compassion for the wretched, which has a utility nearly as far-reaching
as humanity itself; admiration for great [personal] examples, who implant in the heart
the goad to virtue—voilà, confesses the whole world, such are the passions that poetry
should treat, which is not made to foment corruption in spoiled hearts, but in order to
be a delight to virtuous souls. (pp. 157–158)
One has to wonder how closely Kristeller has read his Batteux.28 Kristeller does ac-
knowledge that morals and utility have a place in Batteux’s system, but this recognition is
too limited, as it extends only to the third of three groupings that Kristeller discerns: be-
yond the fine arts ‘which have pleasure for their end’ and the mechanical arts, Batteux
‘adds a third group which combines pleasure and usefulness’, and he ‘puts eloquence and
architecture in this category’ (p. 200). This is obviously an inadequate account of Batteux,
who permits morals and utility to operate at the very heart of his conception of the beaux
arts. Indeed, he does so in virtue of the very principle of imitation that Kristeller believes
is the least essential ingredient of his system.
Kristeller’s account of the formation of the modern system of the arts in its ‘first’
and (almost) ‘final’ form is deficient in every respect. It might be objected that Batteux
figures only briefly in Kristeller’s account (a page plus), and that to fasten on to him
as I have done is to give Batteux inordinate evidential weight. Not so. Firstly, it is
Kristeller himself who makes Batteux a pivotal, indeed essential and completing, figure
in his story. Without Batteux, another Batteux would have to have been invented to
conjure up the notion of a ‘system’ of fine arts. The problem for Kristeller is that the
Batteux we have—the historical Batteux—completely vitiates Kristeller’s claims about
what it is that the modern system of the arts does, namely, the job of isolating (fine) arts
28 The same has to be asked of Shiner. See The Invention of Art, p. 83, where he reads in Batteux a threefold classification
of the arts: ‘those that simply minister to our needs (the mechanical arts); those whose aim is pleasure (the
beaux-arts par excellence); and those that combine utility and pleasure (eloquence and architecture)’. The last two
classes simply do not exist for Batteux. Nor does Batteux even accept a clean division between eloquence and the
beaux arts. Compare Batteux Les beaux arts, p. 287: ‘Since sounds in music and gestures in dance have a meaning (une
signification) just as words do in poetry, the expression of music and of dance should have the same natural qualities as
oratorical elocution: and all that we shall say here [in what follows] should apply equally to music, to dance, and to
eloquence.’
from moral and other utility. Secondly, once he is introduced, Batteux becomes a house-
hold name in the pages that follow (he is mentioned at least twenty-two times after his
initial cameo appearance). Thus, by keeping Batteux alive as a recurring point of refer-
ence in what follows, Batteux’s ‘influence’ (p. 216) is extended well beyond his first
mention (p. 199), and he becomes a major (‘enormous’) historical force in Kristeller’s
narrative.
These reservations regarding Batteux ought to set off alarms. Did the modern system of
the arts, in the form that Kristeller wants us to imagine it, ever exist at all? I believe it did
not, because that system is a historical construct that has been put together by Kristeller

himself, one that is all the trickier in that it is exemplified perfectly by no one, but is instead
elaborated through a series of fleeting cameos much like Batteux’s. While Batteux is the
foundation of this edifice, and seductive inasmuch as he uniquely names the beaux arts as a
‘system’, the remaining examples are no stronger.
Curiously, Batteux’s system effloresces and then disappears at a stroke in Kristeller’s
account. Once it is disseminated, it is either ‘taken for granted’ or ‘disputed’ in its par-
ticulars, as Kristeller acknowledges. Batteux and his system are in fact criticized—or
ignored—to a far greater degree than one might assume from Kristeller’s article.29
Such language about being ‘taken for granted’ begs huge questions. While the terms
beaux arts or fine arts and the list of five (or so) associated arts are passed on, in what
sense do they get passed on as a system? Or are they merely a list? Kristeller’s caveats,
in the guise of assumptions, give pause passim: ‘Without ever giving a definite system,
[Addison] constantly refers to gardening and architecture [neither of which comprised
elements in Batteux’s original system of beaux arts in their pure form, according to
Kristeller], painting and sculpture, poetry and music’ (p. 208; emphasis added). Further,
English writers during the second half of the eighteenth century ‘were not so much in-
terested in expounding and developing a system of the fine arts, which they took pretty
much for granted, as in discussing general concepts and principles’ (p. 211; emphasis
added).
There are two issues here. First is the question whether the ‘system’ of fine arts ever
stabilized as an agreed-upon entity as such and in a universally acknowledged form, as
Kristeller claims it did.30 On the contrary, it looks as if there was in fact no canonical
‘nucleus’, but only a loosely defined and ever-changing grab-bag of items that fell under
the newly discovered rubric of ‘fine arts’ during this era (as is often the case with such
grand rubrics). Kristeller says as much in his more candid moments, as with the case with
Addison above.31 Second is the question whether this so-called systematization had any
bearing on the rise of aesthetic enquiry in the eighteenth century in the form attributed
to this enquiry by Kristeller. Consider another pivotal example, in which both questions
29 See, for example, Hugo Blümner in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Lessings Laokoon, ed. Hugo Blümner, 2nd edn (Berlin:
Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1880), vol. 1, pp. 45–47, on Diderot’s scathing reception of Batteux’s ‘mindless
schematism’. Further details in Fernando Bollino, Teoria e sistema delle belle arti: Charles Batteux e gli esthéticiens del sec.
XVIII (Mantova: Istituto di filosofia dell’Università di Bologna, 1976).
30 See previous note.
31 See Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts’, pp. 200–202, 208, 209 n. 229, 211.
come together graphically and dramatically. It is astonishing to learn how, when architec-
ture is eventually added to the list of fine arts by D’Alembert in 1751, ‘the last irregular-
ity which had separated Batteux’s system from the modern scheme of the fine arts’ is
finally ‘removed’.32 What Kristeller suppresses here are two significant details: first,
D’Alembert added to Batteux’s list not only architecture, but also engraving; second, this
addition yielded six fine arts, with five apparently subordinated to poetry. Do we have
here one art comprised of five subspecies, or six arts arranged in some curious hierarchy
(see Figure 1)? Both answers seem to be correct. In his ‘Discours Préliminaire’ (vol. 1,
pp. xvii–xviii), D’Alembert clarifies that poetry means ‘making’ (‘la Poésie [understood

in its ‘natural (i.e. Greek) sense’] n’est autre chose que l’invention ou création’), while
the tree of knowledge maps out different subdomains of the poetic (literary) art, which
then stand in an awkward relation to the non-literary arts (the latter separated off by a
horizontal bar, but grouped together as a single set). Either way, the numbers do not add
up. The schematization is hardly as neat as Kristeller would like it to be. And it is as unlike
its predecessor (Batteux’s) as it is unlike any of its successors, some of whom would fur-
nish a flat list of fine arts that sometimes did include engraving, but not always.33 Yet,
Kristeller insists that the Encyclopedia ‘furnished the final touch’ to ‘Batteux’s system of
the fine arts’.34
The problem hardly ends here, though. Once we examine the total context of the arts
in D’Alembert’s overall system, it becomes apparent that their layout, far from support-
ing Kristeller’s thesis,35 actually demonstrates the opposite: the beaux arts are rigorously
demarcated from ‘Reason’ and ‘Philosophy’, which category in turn makes no provisions
whatsoever for aesthetics. Which brings us back to the question whether the so-called sys-
tematization of the arts had any bearing on the rise or formulation of aesthetic enquiry in
the eighteenth century. In my view, Kristeller has failed to show any connection between
these two historical occurrences. And this, too, is a point that Kristeller is willing to con-
cede on occasion, as in the observation quoted earlier about the English, who ‘were not
so much interested in expounding and developing a system of the fine arts’ as they were
interested in developing principles of aesthetics. The same point can be reiterated for
every major milestone in the history of aesthetic philosophy, be it Hutcheson, Baumgar-
ten, Hume, Burke, Diderot, D’Alembert, Kant, or Hegel, to name just these. Either
there is no connection to be found between the modern system of the arts and modern
aesthetic theory, or none has been demonstrated, or else ‘the system’ of the fine arts, in
some singular and definitive sense, never existed except as a figment of Kristeller’s
historical imagination.
There is no reason to deny that the concept of fine art existed or that it arose some-
time around the turn of the eighteenth century. That it ever attained the dignity of a
system is disputable. That the concept, let alone its so-called systematization, was (or is)
32 Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts’, p. 202.

33 Hegel, for instance, does not include engraving (see below). See also Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts’,
pp. 203, 220 (an oblique reference to the Encyclopedia’s tree of knowledge), 227.
34 Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts’, p. 200; emphasis added.
35 Pace Kristeller, ibid., and Shiner, The Invention of Art, p. 84.

Fig 1. Illustrated system of human knowledge, D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751).
a prerequisite to the emergence of aesthetic theory and the discipline of aesthetics, is an

unnecessary assumption. Worse, it is a case of post hoc ordering mistaken for causality—
not least if it can be shown, as I believe it can (nor am I alone), that the ancient Greeks
were operating with a concept of aesthetics of their own, one that is recognizable to us
today. Historically, Kristeller’s account seems not to hold up. To make matters worse, it
suffers from a series of conflations and simplifications. The argument slides along a chain
of non sequiturs, which it pretends to treat as historical consequents, from ‘system of fine
arts’ to ‘fine arts’ to ‘fine art’ to ‘art’ (or ‘Art’, p. 164) to ‘(the) aesthetic’ (understood
as the autonomy of art from moral and other spheres). At the end of the line, all the
terms turn out to have been interchangeable with one another, which makes discerning
what is being meant at any single moment a treacherous affair (classical references, as in
‘ancient works of art’, are a case in point, and we will want to come back to these prob-
lematic formulations below). Nevertheless, there are still stronger reasons telling against
Kristeller than his apparent failure to grab hold of the eighteenth century at the moment
of its ‘decisive step’ en route to the so-called modern system of the arts.

The Incoherence of Aesthetic Autonomy, Strictly Conceived
Historical arguments aside, a clean break between aesthetic qualities and the rest (in-
tellectual, moral, religious, and practical function or content) is difficult to maintain
in any context, a point that has been repeatedly made from Dewey to Eagleton to any
number of contemporary philosophers of art. Indeed, the very assertion of this kind of
break is itself typically the sign of some sort of ideological or other non-aesthetic pres-
sure that is being brought to bear.36 Hutcheson, Hume, and Kant—three figures
named by Kristeller in connection with the purported separation of beauty from mor-
als—in fact establish the opposite of Kristeller’s point: all three sought a common
grounding of aesthetics and morals in the more basic domain of human sensibility (the
sensus communis). The mere admission of causality as a source of beauty (or aesthetic
value), which can be found in both Hutcheson (Inquiry, Treatise I, Section V, § XIX) and
Aristotle (Poetics, passim), though not quite in Kant, already reveals how (apparently)
morally neutral and autonomous aesthetic values can disguise moral and other values
(here, rationality, as a prerequisite of a moral subject). Normative stipulations about
aesthetic pleasure are not innocent: they also make normative stipulations about the
nature of the human mind. Thus, Francis Hutcheson, in An Inquiry into the Original of
Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), holds that beauty’s utility and its moral value lie
in its capacity to help focus the mind.37 For ‘what stands revealed to the mind in this
state is the world’s rational and “Benevolent Design”’, which ‘gives [the beholder]
the Pleasures of Beauty’.38 The same can be said about Shaftesbury, who has a fair
claim to having founded modern aesthetics in the first decade of the eighteenth cen-
tury. But if so, then he did so on the premise that morals and aesthetics are nearly
36 Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1970); Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic. See further Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) and John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon
Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); also Wind, ‘qe V F b V’. See further at n. 42 below.
37 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold
(Indianapolis, IN.: Liberty Fund, 2004, pp. 80–81 (Treatise I, Section VIII, § II.5).
38 Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty, Treatise I, Section V, § XVIII. For further complicating
arguments, see Ronald Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins U.P., 1996), ch. 1 (‘Aesthetics and Deism’).
‘indistinguishable’.39 Even Baumgarten’s science of aesthetics was premised on the

underlying notion of a ‘sensate cognition of things’ and the progressive guiding of
‘sensate discourse to perfection’.40
For the same reasons, normative stipulations are a far cry from supporting claims about
aesthetic autonomy, which are probably incoherent in any event, though aesthetic autono-
my—in effect, pure self-reference—is what Kristeller would have the modern closed cir-
cuit of the arts achieve. On the other hand, the idea that the discipline of aesthetics might
enjoy autonomy is defensible if it is taken to mean that it sets its own criteria in its own
domain. But this is quite different from a vaguer notion of aesthetic autonomy as applied to

objects and experiences.41
Complete autonomy cannot be even imagined, for what would it mean? Even the nega-
tion of relation to a given sphere (culture, religion, morals) involves a necessary entangle-
ment in what is being refused. The fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie in 1989 for his
Satanic Verses tragically showed how inseverable these connections are, though one need
not resort to so freighted an example as this to find the same principle being put into ac-
tion elsewhere. Many of the most sophisticated theories of art on offer today deliberately
look for analogies and convergences between aesthetic and ethical forms of reflection
without compromising either—for instance, those of Kendall Walton, Elaine Scarry, or
Susan Stewart, in addition to others to be invoked below.42 Kristeller seems to be chasing
a chimera.
Aesthetic autonomy is a chimera that has held a powerful sway over the modern imagi-
nation nonetheless, and it reappears whenever anyone pursues, say, the separation of art
from life or the separation of form from content. In fact, Kristeller’s own view about the
unquestioned dominance of aesthetic autonomy since the eighteenth century may owe as
much to a movement he repudiates as it does to Kant, whose formalism inspired that
movement: aestheticism. Kristeller’s problem is that he cannot point to a moment when
the modern system of the arts and its corresponding stabilization of the aesthetic ever quite
takes hold. Not even Kant provides a good purchase for Kristeller’s purposes. His third
Critique, The Critique of Judgment, is least of all a ‘theory of beauty and the arts’ (p. 223; em-
phasis added). Kant famously scants the arts in his treatise, which constitutes a theory of
39 For the claim about Shaftesbury, see Stolnitz, ‘On the Origins of “Aesthetic Disinterestedness” ’, and others after
him; for the quotation, see Stolnitz, ibid., p. 133. Kristeller equivocates on whether to award Shaftesbury the honour
of having founded modern aesthetics, owing to his classicism and his moralism; and the same holds for the
Shaftesbury-influenced Hutcheson (Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts’, pp. 207, 208–209).
40 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Meditationes philosophicae de
nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, first published in 1735, trans. Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1954), p. 77 (§ 115).
41 A mistake not made by Stolnitz, ‘On the Origins of “Aesthetic Disinterestedness”’.
42 Kendall L. Walton, ‘How Marvelous! Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Value’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol.
51, no. 3 (1993), pp. 499–510, reprinted in id., Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts (Oxford and New York:
Oxford U.P., 2008); Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 1999); Susan Stewart,
The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 15–27. See further n.
36 above, and below on Dewey and T. J. Clark.
nature, and ultimately a theory of mind. And as soon as the aesthetic (never) does take
hold on Kristeller’s story, it crumbles away again. Thus, once we enter into the nineteenth
century,
the traditional system of the fine arts begins to show signs of disintegration. Since
the latter part of the nineteenth century, painting has moved further away from
literature than at any previous time, whereas music has at times moved closer to
it, and the crafts have taken great strides to recover their earlier standing as deco-
rative arts. . . . The excesses of aestheticism have led to a healthy reaction which is
yet far from universal. The tendency among some contemporary philosophers to

consider Art and the aesthetic realm as a pervasive aspect of human experience
rather than as the specific domain of the conventional fine arts also goes a long
way to weaken the latter notion in its traditional form. (‘Modern System of the
Arts’, p. 226)
Whether or not any of these claims about the relations among the arts is true (and it
seems to me that they are all questionable), one has to wonder whether the epithets
traditional and conventional have really been earned. Part of the problem is that Kristeller
is conflating ‘the modern system of the arts’ with claims to aesthetic autonomy. Again,
while no one would doubt that the concept of the fine arts exists in the mind of some,
the existence of a ‘system’ of the arts and its relationship to aesthetic autonomy—about
which ‘all writers and all thinkers seem to agree’ (p. 165)—remains highly doubtful
(despite Kristeller’s assurances to the contrary). The presence of a system is no guaran-
tee that claims on behalf of the autonomy of art will be made (witness Batteux), just as
claims for aesthetic autonomy do not have to be premised on art at all, let alone its
classification (witness Kant). To take two further examples, the common-sense phi-
losopher from Scotland, Thomas Reid (1710–1796), daringly found beauty to be ‘com-
mon to the thought of a mind, . . . the form of a piece of matter, to an abstract theorem,
and a stroke of wit’, insofar as pleasure is tied, universally, to the contemplation of
excellence of all kinds. Hence, ‘there are beauties of speech and beauties of thought;
beauties in the arts, and in the sciences’.43 (Elsewhere he adds ‘moral and intellectual
qualities’ to the list.44) Reid also had a working concept of the fine arts, but made little
use of it in the same work. He had, in other words, a well-developed view of aesthet-
ics, but was uninterested in either the autonomy of art or of aesthetics on the one
hand, or the question of the fine arts on the other. Then there is Hegel, whose lectures
on aesthetics are superficially organized around a system of five arts. But this is hardly
those lectures’ outstanding mark of distinction (the arts exhibit progressive stages of
43 Thomas Reid, The Works of Thomas Reid: Now Fully Collected, with Selections from his Unpublished Letters, ed. William Sir
Hamilton (Edinburgh: Maclachlan, Stewart, and Co., 1846; repr. G. Olms, Hildesheim 1983), p. 498.
44 The Works of Thomas Reid, p. 453. Beauty is tied to excellence and perfection, but is also tied to subjective feeling
(pleasure). When Reid claims that beauty ‘gives value to an object, abstracted from its utility’ (ibid., p. 498), he is
not concluding that this value creates a separate realm of objects or experience. Rather, value is added to existing
objects and experiences. Thus, one can (and generally will) take pleasure and find beauty in a thought that is of great
excellence and utility, be it moral or philosophical.
‘spiritualization’), nor does this organizing device serve aesthetic autonomy: Hegel’s
system is designed to illustrate the vicissitudes and eventual supremacy of Spirit alone
(and, to be sure, the capacity of Hegel’s system to absorb a cliché of the contemporary
art world).
Kristeller’s account trades on a further confusion, which makes it all the more frustrat-
ing to pin down. While his essay offers itself as a straightforward descriptive and historical
account (and has widely been so received), it remains emphatically partial to aesthetic au-
tonomy in its modern form, inasmuch as it stresses that the progress of the arts involved
their steady ‘emancipation’ from their background contexts, which is to say, their becom-

ing autonomous from religion, morality, and other strictures, as well as from one another—
the way ‘instrumental music’ was emancipated ‘from poetry’ in antiquity, or the way ‘the
three visual arts’ became emancipated from ‘the crafts’ in the Renaissance, or the way the
natural sciences became ‘emancipated’ from other areas of thought in the eighteenth cen-
tury, ‘thus prepar[ing] the way for a clearer separation between the arts and sciences’ (pp.
169, 183, 225). These are all presented by Kristeller as positive developments, as is the
grouping together of the arts into an autonomous systematic unity, which encouraged
theoretical reflection on art in the form of aesthetic philosophy proper—a privilege that
was unknown to, indeed unthinkable in, antiquity, which instead struggled at ‘attempts at
a classification of the more important human arts and sciences’ (p. 172). This is how the
essay unfolds, in virtually Hegelian, forced-march fashion, until the final two pages.45 Then,
suddenly, a note of relaxed historical relativism intrudes, which contradicts the urgently
linear tone of the sixty-odd preceding pages: times change, arts present a ‘moving picture’,
their distinctions are ‘arbitrary’, their hierarchies ‘rise and decline’ (pp. 226–227). And in
the last sentence from the long quotation above, in which ‘the tendency among some con-
temporary philosophers to consider Art and the aesthetic realm as a pervasive aspect of
human experience’ is singled out, Kristeller footnotes the source of the idea he is para-
phrasing here: John Dewey’s landmark book Art as Experience (1934), which is in some ways
a direct heir to Kant, and in others an exponent of a vitalist tradition that has immediate
roots in nineteenth-century German philosophy.
Dewey’s book articulates a view that undoes the whole of what Kristeller’s history
of aesthetics has narrated up to this point: namely, that aesthetics denominates an ele-
ment of human experience that is ill-captured by individual art forms (a point made
repeatedly by Dewey), and, indeed, by the domain of art generally. For, as Dewey
writes, ‘If art is an intrinsic quality of activity, we cannot divide and subdivide it.’46
45 All this is mirrored in Shiner, The Invention of Art, e.g., with its language of the premodern ‘lack’ (p. 38), gradual
‘improvements’ (p. 38), and the ‘rise’ of the modern artist and artisan (p. 56).
46 John Dewey, Art as Experience, first published in 1934, (New York: Perigee Books, 1980), p. 214. Cf. ibid., p. 222:
‘The separation of (music, too, for that matter) from such arts as painting and sculpture makes a mess of the
historical developments of the arts’; and ibid., p. 231: ‘something architectural is found in every work of art’.
Dewey might contest his inheritance of the Kantian legacy: he certainly is no fan of Kant’s cordoning off of ‘the
esthetic from other modes of experience’ (ibid., p. 252). But that is all a matter of how one reads Kant on
experience, as I argue in my forthcoming study (see n. 57 below). Dewey’s vitalism is incontestable, and at times he
sounds Nietzschean, but that is another story.
Moreover, art as an experience is, for Dewey, indivisible from all other forms of activ-
ity and experience.47
Dewey makes it quite clear that art and experience lie on a continuum that is organic—
he suggestively calls this continuum ‘the stream of living’—and that renders distinctions
between common experience and aesthetic experience fruitless (p. 7). The very idea of
‘the fine arts’ is, consequently, anathema to Dewey’s theory of art. Indeed, his book is a
sustained attack on the notion, from its first pages to the last. There are no ‘fine’ arts that
can be cut off as an autonomous domain from the utilitarian arts, let alone from daily life.48
The view that they can is the product of a capitalist culture in the service of nationalism and

militarism (his terms) and of a museum culture in the service of all three (pp. 6–8). ‘The
forces that have glorified fine art by setting it upon a far-off pedestal did not arise within
the realm of art nor is their influence confined to the arts’ (p. 6). The criticism is a good
one, and for two reasons: it recontextualizes the very premise of the fine arts, which Dew-
ey’s theory insists must be seen as radically embedded (his term again) in the processes of
society, life, and history (p. 10); and it democratizes art as an experience that is available to
anyone and virtually everywhere. Thus, Dewey insists—echoing, to a surprising degree,
Thomas Reid—that art can be found in the work of the intelligent mechanic, in the ‘cast-
ing and playing’ of an angler seeking fish, in the experience of a thought, in all ‘qualities of
sense, those of touch and taste as well as of sight and hearing’, in actions considered as
completing processes and experiences, and in ‘any impulsion toward organization of mate-
rial’. Indeed, ‘any practical activity will . . . have esthetic quality’.49 Dewey is even pre-
pared to entertain what Kristeller will deny, namely that the Greeks were capable of
‘fram[ing] a generalized conception of art’ (p. 25). Small wonder that Kristeller should
have seemed puzzled by Dewey’s theory and all that this theory represents. Dewey’s book
is a refutation avant la lettre of Kristeller’s entire thesis, which it completely anticipates and
even renders obsolete by two decades.
Glossing Dewey and his contemporaries (whoever these may have been), Kristeller
comments:
All these ideas [about the uncertain boundaries between art and non-art, and between
art and experience] are still fluid and ill defined, and it is difficult to see how far they
will go in modifying or undermining the traditional status of the fine arts and of
aesthetics. (p. 227)
47 Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 214. Cf. ibid., p. 176: ‘the common element in all the arts is the organization of energy
as means for producing a result’—a rather Nietzschean point. See previous note. Similarly, T. J. Clark, ‘Phenomenal-
ity and Materiality in Cézanne’, in Tom Cohen et al. (eds), Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) pp. 93–113; here, pp. 100–101 (in very Deweyan language):
‘the aesthetic is part of the stuff of life . . .[,] and the world . . . is unthinkable save as a texture and structure of
phenomena, of sensate “experiences”.’
48 Cf. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 26 (emphasis added): ‘It is customary, and from some points of view necessary, to
make a distinction between fine art and useful or technological art. But the point of view from which it is necessary
is one that is extrinsic to the work of art itself. The customary distinction is based simply on acceptance of certain
existing social conditions.’
49 Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 5, 10, 26, 38, 39, 78, 80, 120.
Traditional or modern—or illusory? Kristeller appears to have come full circle, and to
have returned us to a premodern lack of definition—in Greenberg’s terms, ‘confusion’.
Dewey’s theory of aesthetics points to changes that Kristeller’s vision cannot even antici-
pate: ‘these contemporary changes’, Kristeller continues, ‘may help to free us from certain
conventional preconceptions and to clarify our ideas on the present status and future pros-
pects of the arts and of aesthetics’, as well as a better understanding of their ‘historical
origins’. But Dewey is not predicting changes in art or its prospects; he is offering a changed
view of what art is, one that would apply as much to the past as it does to the present,
which is to say, one that would change our descriptive historical accounts of the past.

Had Kristeller grasped the full import of Dewey’s aesthetics, it is doubtful that he would
have ever written the essay he did. Even if he did not agree with Dewey’s aesthetic phi-
losophy completely, he would at least have been obliged to recognize either that the system
he describes was a historical construct of his own making, or else that the notion of the fine
arts grouped loosely together was an ideological illusion entertained by some but not all
historical agents over the centuries, but in any case a notion that was untrue, indeed inco-
herent, when examined in any detail. He would, in other words, have been obliged to take
a more critical view of the guiding concept of his essay from start to finish. In the process,
he might have realized that aesthetic theories have flourished independently of the concept
of fine art. And, by the same token, the ancients would not have appeared to him hobbled
in comparison to the moderns. On the contrary, they would have seemed more advanced
in some respects, and at the very least pioneering and enlightened. Alas, this is not how
Kristeller chose to read Dewey, or the ancients, or the moderns.50
The Ancient System of the Arts

Dewey puts into relief the problem that art may have no determinable boundaries today—no
specificity and no essence—and that it may never have had any in antiquity, or in the Re-
naissance, or in early modernity either. What may have changed since antiquity are not the
boundaries that delimit art, but the spheres of activity that fail to do so cleanly. The ques-
tion is of capital importance. It affects how we can claim to know and understand a culture
from the remote past. Consider the following:
As Richard Gordon has argued at length, the later [i.e. modern] associations of the
word ‘art’ and ‘artist’ are inappropriate for the pots and potters who provide most of
the source material for Greek imagery. The general term ‘art’ also tends to obscure
the very different frames in which the images of Greek culture occur. It may be of
major importance—even for ‘identification’—whether an image is found on a tem-
ple—public, state-funded, religious display—or on a cup designed for the male world
of private drinking parties; or on a perfume flask for male or female use. How images
are framed affects recognition. There is a danger in using the general word ‘art’ in that
significant nuances of contextualization may be effaced.
50 It is no small irony that in endorsing the new paradigms which are currently moving beyond the ‘old’ (i.e. modern) system
of the arts, Shiner (The Invention of Art, pp. 304–306) embraces a sensuous aesthetics.These are, of course, not really
new—which is one more reason to revisit the ancient Greek and the eighteenth-century conceptions of aesthetics alike.
So warns the introduction to a recent collection of essays entitled—on its own terms,
dangerously—Art [sic] and Text in Ancient Greek Culture.51 The point is Kristellerian again, as
a glance back at the first of the quotations from Kristeller’s essay above will show: both
positions hold that a separation of the arts in antiquity is impossible to conceive on our
current understanding of art, so much so that the term art risks misleading us into a false
identification of the nature of ancient aesthetic production altogether. Is it really the case
that the ancients had no conception of art comparable to ours? 52 Can we ever hope to ap-
proach their art on its own terms? Or worse still, in order to gain access to ancient culture,
must we abandon all hope of approaching it through what we used to call its art? Putting

the problem in this way may lead to unwarranted desperation, and probably (as I suggest-
ed) to an overinflated estimation of the autonomy of art and aesthetics today.
And yet, Kristellerians paradoxically go on talking about pre-modern ‘art’ as though
nothing had fundamentally changed after the eighteenth century. And Kristeller does so
himself, whether unwittingly or out of reflex habit or else out of some other unspecified
motive that we need not speculate about. There is something peculiar about the following,
which I quoted towards the beginning of this essay: ‘ancient writers and thinkers, though
confronted with excellent works of art and quite susceptible to their charm, were neither
able nor eager to detach the aesthetic quality of these works of art’ (p. 174). One can only
suspect that the term art here is both an abbreviation for ‘fine art’ (as on the same page,
where we find this expansion, and at p. 168, where the phrase is rightly put in scare quotes)
and an anachronism. For whose criteria are being used here to assign the label of (fine)
‘art’, let alone ‘aesthetic quality’ or ‘excellent’? Surely these are modern, retrospective
judgements, and illicit ones at that, as they all rest on a presumption about (purely) aes-
thetic judgement that is being denied to the ancients themselves. Indeed, on Kristeller’s
view, autonomous aesthetic judgement is possible only after the eighteenth century. Simi-
larly, when we read (p. 226), ‘The various arts are certainly as old as human civilization,
but the manner in which we are accustomed to group them and to assign them a place in
our scheme of life and of culture is comparatively recent’, this clouds the issue. The as-
sumption that classification does not define the arts in a fundamentally new way is highly
disputable. But then again, as I have been trying to argue, classificatory schemes may not be
the most fruitful criteria for defining aesthetic thought, let alone predictors of aesthetic
autonomy.53
More interesting than the problem of how we might discover the proper autonomy of
the arts is the problem of how we can discover their properly embedded contexts and
51 Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne, Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1994), p. 7.
52 The view is practically a cliché and widely held, for example, even by Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic
Books, 2003), p. 75.
53 The same criticism holds for W. Tatarkiewicz, ‘Classification of Arts in Antiquity’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol.
24, no. 2 (1963), pp. 231–240, who follows Kristeller (and himself; see n. 4 above) in all the essentials. Contrast
Andrew F. Stewart, Attika: Studies in Athenian Sculpture of the Hellenistic Age (London: Society for the Promotion of
Hellenic Studies, 1979), pp. 111: ‘That the Greeks had no word for “art” or “artist” has clearly little or no bearing on
the problem at hand, for the appearance of the artist as an autonomous creator well after the codification of Greek
aesthetic terminology for art was simply the result of an historical accident.’
interrelations in any age.54 Reflecting on the nature of ancient aesthetics can, I believe,
show us a way forward, even as it will lead to other, more challenging problems.
While it is true that the contexts that configured and circumscribed the uses of art in
antiquity remind us that art is always embedded in cultural and social practices, it is also
true that practices do not obtain except insofar as they are experienced. And qua experi-
enced, they carry aesthetic features that are susceptible to analysis, in ways that are at least
as meaningful as the analysis of art cut off from these features. Indeed, the pleasure one
takes in these experiences as experiences by itself constitutes a first and indispensable level
of analysis. Such a pleasure, being reflective of aesthetic value, is an aesthetic experience.55

It is for this reason that aesthetic questions are, I believe, our best bet for gaining access to
the problems of art in antiquity—not because art is the ultimate resting point for such an
enquiry, but because it represents a relay to something else: it is a window onto modes of
sensory experience, onto modes of attention generally, onto perceptual habits and cogni-
tive styles, and, therefore, onto the social relations that are embedded in things. For as
Michael Baxandall and others have so well shown, the arts are ‘deposits of social relation-
ships’, as are, indeed, the worlds inhabited by the senses.56
To view art in this way is to view it as an aesthetic phenomenon of the richest kind imag-
inable. By attending to aesthetic questions in antiquity, to the way in which the world was
perceived, sensed, and grasped—not in some unmediated way, but always thanks to the
conditioning filters of a given culture and its historical features—we can reach into the
very foundations of the problems of meaning and value in antiquity. Aesthetics, narrowly
conceived, opens onto aesthetics more broadly conceived. Indeed, it is doubtful that access
to the one (art and aesthetic experience) can be gained in the absence of the other (sensa-
tion and perception).
That is why the most productive, if least explored, way of confronting the problems of
art and aesthetic reflection in antiquity is not by addressing this or that medium or literary
or art criticism proper, but by transcending the barriers between the various art forms and
their contemplation or analysis in order to arrive at what they share in common. In doing
so, what one is acknowledging is that arts are genres of experience, while at the same time we
are expanding our conception of what may be referred to as the (ever-changing and ever-
adapting) aesthetic public sphere of antiquity in which the various art forms mingled freely
and their vocabularies were shared. This kind of approach shares more, perhaps, with
Greenberg than with Kristeller, though it is not a stranger to the spirit of Batteux either.
For what Batteux was looking for was ultimately a shared common principle that cut across
54 Panofsky’s bracing study of French Gothic architecture and scholasticism (Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and
Scholasticism, first published in 1951 (New York: Meridian Books, 1957) is a good example of this latter approach.
55 See Walton, ‘How Marvelous! Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Value’. Further, Frank Sibley, ‘Aesthetic and Nonaesthetic’,
Philosophical Review, vol. 74, no. 2 (1965), p. 165: ‘Merely to learn from others . . . is of little aesthetic value. . . . The
crucial thing is to see, hear, or feel’, etc.
56 Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, CT:Yale U.P., 1980), ch. 6; id.,
Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, first published in 1972,
2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1988). See now also Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics,
and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2006) on the collaboration of a wide array of
non-aesthetic and aesthetic languages in another predisciplinary world, Elizabethan England.
the various art forms in his day. He found it in imitation. Dewey and others found it in
experience, which I believe is a more promising avenue to take. And while it would be a
fantasy to imagine we could ever recover, in some direct and unmediated way, the original
experience of the ancients, neither should this be the goal. Sensations, the foundations of
aesthetic experience, are not only highly subjective; they are also socially shared objects of
communication—the very opposite of private and internal states of affairs. For this reason,
sensations when they appear to agents (or subjects) are not direct empirical imprints of
some outer material reality. They are prismatic reflections of the languages of sensation
whose acquisition is a prerequisite to social life. Such structures of thought are deeply em-

bedded, in ways and in places that reflect some of the most urgent questions of meaning
and value available to the ancient societies—most often, in the discourses of experience
that survive. It is here that we can go about reconstructing ancient aesthetics from a fresh
angle. The very presence of the term aesthetics in our vocabulary today is an appeal to this
commonality. But its absence from the ancient vocabulary in the modern sense is not an
argument against seeking out its earliest impulses, which also happen to be our own.57
James I. Porter
University of California, Irvine
jiporter@uci.edu
57 For a development of this argument, see James I. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Inquiry in Ancient Greece: Matter,
Sensation, and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., forthcoming).
For helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay, I am obliged to Jaś Elsner, Stephen Halliwell, Alex Potts,
Michael Squire, Ken Walton, Andrew Zissos, two anonymous readers, and the editors of BJA, in particular John
Hyman.

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Is Art Modern?

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The Modern System of the Arts

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Alternative Historical Views

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Charles Batteux on Les Beaux Arts (1746)

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19 Batteux, Les beaux arts, p. 18.

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32 Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts’, p. 202.

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a prerequisite to the emergence of aesthetic theory and the discipline of aesthetics, is an

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‘indistinguishable’.39 Even Baumgarten’s science of aesthetics was premised on the

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The Ancient System of the Arts

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