Through some pages of Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas we see some medieval solutions to the platonic drama of a beauty defined by numbers and measures, however with suprasensible roots: how can we say beautiful what cannot be measured? If Beauty is Harmony and Proportion, consequently how can it derive from a suprasensible beauty? How will it be possible to express aesthetic judgments that go beyond measurement? The medieval answers to these questions are far beyond the postmodern uncertainties, maintaining (...) paradoxes. (shrink)

The work tries to see the relation between neoplatonism and tradition Judaic-Christian in the thought of Augustine of Hippo, by means of the study of its doctrine of the time. The paper considers specially the relation between time and eternity, considering here specially the problem of time (book XI of Confessiones) in the context of the mensura/modus subject.

Can a material object refer to the divine without attracting to itself devotion and veneration? And, in particular, can a depiction call to mind a reality that subtracts itself from its materiality? There are thus two problems here: whether the divine (God and what pertains to Him) can be rightly said to be represented by an object and whether, in any case, such an object runs the risk of becoming an idol, a little God, an imitation of God. The paper (...) concentrates on the history of the status of images, depending on religions, and the recurrent idea of taking necessarily away the “others”. People belonging to “other” religions are regarded as guilty, idolater, heretic, far away from the true God and the best practises to adore Him. A central year is the 787 CE, for the Nicea II Council, but also for the reactions about it. With all the Platonic-Augustinian suspicion of fictions, the so-called Libri Carolini apportions to images the sole role of bringing to mind the materiality of what is represented thus denying the power of referring to the supersensible: paradoxically, the more an image is “true” and the greater the similarity between the image and its object, the greater is its freight of falsity, insofar as it increases the deception worked on the spectator. The ideas of the Carolingian court cannot be divorced from an artistic production that tended ever more to disconnect a precise meaning from the images made in stone or with the brush, and in due course increasingly regarded sacred history as a pretext for proposing imagines formosae. (shrink)