Preface

Translator's Note

Aesthetics in Medieval Culture

Historiography
The Medieval Aesthetic Sensibility
Thomas Aquinas
The Possibility of Aesthetic Pleasure
Plan of the Research

Beauty as a Transcendental

The Problem
The Aesthetic Vision of Things
Aquinas's Texts
Modern Interpretations
Beauty as a Transcendental in Thirteenth-Century Philosophy

The Function and Nature of the Aesthetic Visio

The Problem
Medieval Texts
Aquinas's Texts
The Aesthetic Visio
Intellectual Intuition in Aquinas

The Formal Criteria of Beauty

The Texts
The Concept of Form
Proportion: The Historical Data
The Concept of Proportion in Aquinas
Integritas
Claritas: The Historical Data
Claritas in Aquinas

Concrete Problems and Applications

The Beauty of the Son of God
The Beauty of Mankind
The Beauty of Music
Play and Playful Verse
The Symbolical Attitude
Universal Allegory
Scriptural and Poetic Allegory
Aquinas's Theory of Allegory
Didactic Parabolism
A Thomist Poetics
Aquinas and Dante

The Theory of Art

Art and Invention
The Ontology of Artistic Form
Artistic Form and the Aesthetic
On the Possible Autonomy of the Fine Arts
The Ambiguity of Art's Autonomy

Judgment and the Aesthetic Visio

The Function of the Aesthetic Visio
The Nature of the Aesthetic Visio

Conclusion

The Central Aporia in Aquinas's Aesthetics
The Dissolution of the Concept of Form in Post-Thomistic Scholasticism
Aesthetic Categories and Medieval Society
Thomistic Methodology and Structuralist Methodology

Notes

Bibliography

Glossary

Index

Umberto Eco teaches at the University of Bologna and is the author of many books, including Theory of Semiotics, The Role of the Reader, and The Open Work, as well as the best-selling novels The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum.

Read More by Umberto Eco:

• The Open Work
• Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
• The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce