Winckelmann: history of art between the form and the norm

Author(s)

Pedro Fernandes Galé

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2016-09-12

Examining board members

Marco Aurélio Werle; Pedro Sussekind Viveiros de Castro; Luis Fernandes dos Santos Nascimento; Marcio Suzuki; Oliver Tolle

• Advisor: Marco Aurélio Werle

Abstract

This thesis is an enquiry of Winckelmanns works that aims to the presentation of the structures of seeing that had arose as an approach to the works of art and that became the conceptual basis of a history of art that is in fact an aesthetical construction. From his first works, that had been written when the author was a librarian at Nöthnitz to the main works of the roman period, we tried to show a path that is to be thought as attached to the work of art, a contemplation of the arts that does not make great moves without the direct experience of beauty. Beauty comes from the transcendence of a norm to be embodied in the immanence of some works of ancient art that have reached the conceptual beauty in the materiality of the earthly world. The way of doing that, has been constructed, with a surprisingly coherence of some aspects of his theory and with some paradigm changes around the possibilities of seeing. In the major work History of the art of antiquity the tools that were to be acquired in a sort of relationship with the arts of the past that allows the spectator to see towards the embodied surface of the work of art are linked to a dynamics of historical possibilities that arose in the internal movements of societies but the criteria that elects the works is always to be thought as an aesthetic movement. Winckelmann, as an art thinker, established some movements of seeing and concepts that were in the basis of the newborn discipline of aesthetics. His history is as an aesthetics in form of history, and the consequences of that were proliferous, as can be seen in the flourishing debates of the binding of art, philosophy and history in the end of the eighteenth century. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 11/21897-3 - Winckelmann: the descriptive power as historical formation
• Grantee: Pedro Fernandes Galé
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate