Abstract

“The theory of art is its own history”. Thus writes Friedrich Schlegel in Dialogue on Poetry, defining aesthetics in a way that decidedly departs from Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment and prefigures Hegel’s position, although Hegel will almost always turn out to take a polemical stance toward the Romantics. In the few years between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, there is a shift from an aesthetics of nature to an aesthetics of art, from an aesth...