Amy Cooper

“‘Speaking Pictures’: from Aesthesis to Aesthetics” offers a history of aesthetics that traces not, as is so often the case, to the eighteenth century but instead to the sixteenth century. Although the word “aesthetic” comes from a Greek word for “sensory perception” it remains unclear how or why it evolved to mean, instead, the philosophical study of art. There are many excellent studies of individual aesthetic concepts—on beauty, for example, or judgement, or the autonomy of art. But by focusing on traditional aesthetic categories, such studies implicitly presuppose a Kantian framework in their approach. “Speaking Pictures” argues that the cultural and historical conditions which led to the emergence of the aesthetic in Kant and others traces back to the close association of the representational arts and premodern accounts of sensory cognition theorized not just among philosophers but among poets and dramatists in the late medieval and early modern periods.