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Anticlassicism: Late Renaissance Poetics and Aesthetics Beyond the Classical Paradigm (Preliminary Considerations)
Abstract
The article attempts to classify the non-classical threads within Late Renaissance poetics and aesthetics. It draws inspiration from Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz’s Modern Aesthetics (Polish: 1967, English: 1974) and from the recent A Companion to Anticlassicisms in the Cinquecento (2023). This paper firstly names several examples of anti-classical opinions, expressed explicitly by the mild critics of the doctrine of imitatio (G. B. Cinzio, L. Salviati, G. P. Lomazzo), or by Francesco Patrizi’s in his radical anti-mimetic and anti-Aristotelian poetics. It secondly points out several examples of anti-classicism implicit and implied in the transformed Aristotelian ideas put forward by T. Tasso and M. K. Sarbiewski. And thirdly, it discusses ideas dissociating themselves from classical doctrines and introducing non-classical aesthetic categories (F. Patrizi, J. Mazzoni, G. Comanini). The article underlines the role of critical quarrels over Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Dante’s Comedia as well as the reinterpretation of the Aristotelian poetical concepts of mimesis, eikos, thaumaston in the formation of anti-classical thought in the Late Renaissance.
Non-classical tendencies comprise: the nobilitation of fantasy, the interpretation of fiction in terms of sophistical deception, the definition of mimesis as imitazione phantastica (J. Mazzoni, G. Comanini) and poetica della maraviglia (F. Patrizi).
The author makes a clear distinction between non-classical traits that show up as modifications of classical ideas in many theories on the one hand and programmatic anticlassicism on the other. She suggests that the latter should contain all of the following three levels: (1) critical discussion with ancient doctrines, (2) questioning the usefulness of classical concepts i.a. mimesis, imitatio, (3) validating new, non-classical aesthetic categories (i.a. maraviglia, terribilità).
Keywords:
anti-classicism, Renaissance classicism, Late Renaissance poetics, Late Renaissance literary criticism, Late Renaissance aesthetics, mimesis, imitationDetails
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