Paradoxography: the natural history of art history

Author(s)

Antônio Leandro Gomes de Souza Barros

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
• Defense date: 2019-03-29

Examining board members

Luiz Cesar Marques Filho; Cássio da Silva Fernandes; Alexandre Ragazzi; Aldo Lopes Dinucci; Claudia Valladao Mattos

• Advisor: Luiz Cesar Marques Filho

Abstract

Known as the encyclopedia of the ancient world, the Historia Naturalis (77d.C.), work of Pliny the Elder, contains in his last books our oldest reference art history. In this sense, Book 35 ("of painting") stands out as its critical core: for its extension and organization, but mainly for the question that opens between the ineluctable loss of his paintings and the incalculable and varied series of recurrences which they have obtained throughout art history (among artists, works, historians, critics and theorists). Therefore, from the manifest disjunction that characterizes it between the coverage of its repercussion on artistic thought and the degrees of visual ignorance of the commented works, our hypothesis is that it is possible to identify in the plinian text certain constitutive singularity of a whole historiographic tradition. Namely: that art can be understood by the effects it produces, by a particular effectiveness, perhaps even to preserve some independence of the existing piece. Then, and precisely through the criticized plinian style of writing composed of anecdotes, the objective is to clarify the importance of those anecdotes as structural construction of a transtemporal critical category, not only subject to be recognizable but also theoretically grounded. To do so, we review his critical fortune by referring the recurrences to the scope of an aesthetic discussion in antiquity. We do this by relating the most recent international works on Pliny and his work, as well as working on the already incontrovertible affinities of his thought with Stoic philosophy. Nevertheless, without characterizing a work of philological bias, but rather, before and only, of criticism in art history. In other words, a research more on interlocution of old and contemporary artistic questions than on translation or reinterpretation of texts, works, fragments or traces. Therefore, what matters is the possible relations opened by the plinian text with the historiographical artistic reflections. Given this, the "paradoxography" that entitles the research is configured: reference to the old genre of relating the disjuncts and to explain or to historicize the nonexistent (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 14/10059-5 - The history of art in book 35 of natural history: philosophemes and revisions
• Grantee: Antônio Leandro Gomes de Souza Barros
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate