A. Pinotti

Gothic as Leaf, Gothic as Crystal: John Ruskin and Wilhelm Worringer

John Ruskin and Wilhelm Worringer shared an idee fixe: the Gothic. If we read the Formprobleme der Gotik (1911) by the German art historian, comparing it with The Nature of Gothic, the approach of the two books coincides in many points. First of all, they are both discursive texts, not overtly scientific — in the tradition of rigorous artistic historiography — yet capable of exerting a deep influence far beyond the specific discipline,2 combining the theoretic with the intuitive. Ruskin and Worringer strive towards an intuition of the essence of Gothic. Both extend the concept of Gothic style from an artistic category to a spiritual category (Ruskin’s ‘gothicness’,3 Worringer’s ‘secret Gothic’4): a definition which is irreducible to its mere historical medieval limits, and is polemically opposed to the Classic, and which is able to blow ‘like a wild north wind’,5 even along the more remote paths of art history. Both employ Gothic as a key to reading their own historical time — for Ruskin Victorian England, for Worringer expressionist Munich — and finally as a vehicle for the manifestation of their poetics.

Stimmung and Einfühlung: Hydraulic model and analogic model in the theories of empathy

6. ConclusionsThis synthetic survey of the models on which theEinflihlungstheorie is based has showed the deficiency of a pattern and the oscillation of a distinction.The hydraulic model, which following a radical subjectivism is specified as a projection or transfer of pathemic contents from the subject into the object, experiences a crisis if confronted with the rights of the object, which claims to be empathized in this way or in that way. Such a claim induces to recognize a character proper to the object, which does not accept to be reduced to a mere neutral container ready to receive the subjective pathemic contents.Consequently, the distinction between empathy towards the human and empathy towards the sub-human — which appeared to be a major difference —vanishes, since the relation with the object (natural or artistic) is specified in terms of intersubjectivity andalter-ego.The subjectivistic hydraulic pattern is not just substituted by an opposite, objectivistic pattern, which would create the same difficulties, only upset; but rather by ananalogic model, in which sense is established in the correlation between subject and object, and on the aesthetic ground of the qualitative affinities, which determine a horizon of style.It is an analogic model which characterizes, in Husserl, the constitution of the transcendental intersubjectivity: empathy becomes the condition of possibility of the comprehension of other subjects in their typic or stylistic structure.InAesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft Max Dessoir severely criticizes the theorists of empathy because they hyposthatize organic metaphors creating a “schablonenhafte Versprachlichung.”44 Empathy is certainly metaphor, yet not in the sense of a figurative expression, but as a realmetapherein ortransfert: as translation of sense — not from a full to an empty vessel, but rather in the circular form of the analogic circuit.

A Question of Character: Analogy and the Empathic Life of Things

In various disciplines, the debate on empathy has focused on empathic experiences within the inter-subjective context, either between two individuals or among groups. But this is only one side of the coin. Since ancient times, subject–object and even object–object relationships were described as “animation”, or “personification”, in a way that we would today call “empathic”. Pinotti explores these objectual implications of empathy. He criticizes the projective “hydraulic” model of communicating vessels – from subject to object – which builds the hermeneutical mainstream paradigm of such relationships. With recourse to the Gestalt theory of expression, “realistic” phenomenology, and the theory of symbolic forms, he proposes a characterological approach that acknowledges the originary expressive and pathemic character of things as the fundamentum in re of objectual empathy.

Invert It If You Want to Understand It. Left and Right in the Mythic and Aesthetic Space

In the age of the slide projectors everybody could easily experience the mistake of a slide loaded upside down or left-right inverted: what should be up is down, and vice versa; what should be on the right appears on the left, and vice versa. If in the case of the upside down inversion the acknowledgment of the error is almost instantaneous, in the case of an inverted laterality things might be trickier and the right disposition not so easy to detect. Back in the Twenties of the last century, Heinrich Wolfflin not only was a pioneer in adopting the double projector for the comparison of images, but also was one of the first art historians and theorists to reflect upon that mistake and the crucial consequences—syntactic, semantic, symbolic, pragmatic—of the lateral inversion of images. Such an inversion does not only occur when misusing an optical device like the projector, but is also a structural element in the “controparte” relationship between an original drawing and a derived image (tapestry or engravings, for example), and an exploratory procedure in the preliminary studies of the postures of the characters prepared by major and minor artists. Moreover, it frequently appears in cases of homage, plagiarism, copy and fake. In my paper I will address the question of lateral inversion in images on the background of a more general account of laterality as a crucial factor in human experience as referred to the human being as an animal which is organized according to a bilateral symmetry around a vertical axis. Such an organization impacts on manifold levels: from the physiological to the mythical, from the neurological to the symbolic, from the chemical to the aesthetic (both in the sense of a theory of art and of a theory of bodily knowledge).

Un punto delicato. Breve nota su sensibilità e stile

In my paper I address Guido Davide Neri’s reading of Panofsky’s art theory formulated in his German works. I particularly focus on the critical objections raised by Neri in his introduction to the Italian anthology of Panofsky’s essays La prospettiva come “forma simbolica” e altri scritti, that he edited in 1961. In this text Neri rejects a dualistic rigid opposition of natural physiology of vision and cultural stylistic representation, as supported by the neo-Kantian Panofsky in his seminal essays on the iconological levels, and advocates a more nuanced approach, capable of connecting sensibility and style.

Sindrome cinese. Benjamin e la soglia auratica dell'immagine

In the first half of the Thirties Walter Benjamin offers two radically different interpretations of the legend of the Chinese painter who disappears in his own painting after having trespassed the threshold dividing the representative space of the image from the actual space of reality: in Berlin Childhood around 1900 the anecdote is presented as a positive example of tactile identification between subject and object; in the versions of the essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility the vanishing painter becomes the paradigm of the optical contemplation of cultual auratic images. In my paper I will try to clarify such interpretative switch from nearness to farness, exploring three major issues in Benjamin’s thought: the question of the threshold between reality and representation in painting, theatre and cinema; the criticism of empathic identification (shared by Benjamin with Brecht); the admiration for Chinese culture, expressed by Benjamin in many passages of his work, and metabolized in a peculiar conception of “Chinese dialectics”.

Editoriale - Per il verso giusto: destra/sinistra, alto/basso, davanti/dietro nell'immagine

Things are not the same when, even remaining the same, they are placed on the right or on the left, above or below, in front or behind. In the concrete space of our daily experience, in the space of myths and religions, we are not confronted with a neutral, homogeneous, infinite and isotropic spatiality, indifferent to directions. On the contrary, the possibility of a meaningful movement in space, rooted in my own body and in its praxis (as Kant shows in his pre-critical and critical essays devoted to the space regions and to orientation), is assigned to the three main axes (above/below, right/left, front/behind) and their correspondent differences. The same applies for the space of images and pictures. The present issue of “Aisthesis” aims at exploring how the articulations above/below, right/left, front/behind produce a difference – syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and symbolic – in the iconic domain, and at investigating what theoretical models can be employed in order to understand such difference.

NEUROESTETICA, ESTETICA PSICOLOGICA, ESTETICA FENOMENOLOGICA : LE RAGIONI DI UN DIALOGO

1. Quale estetica? Aisthesis come koine Perche scegliere di affrontare qui le ragioni di un possibile dialogo della neuroestetica con l’estetica psicologica e fenomenologica, e non, poniamo, con quella ermeneutica di ascendenza heideggeriano-gadameriana o quella “critica” francofortese o quella neoidealistica crociana? Per una duplice motivazione, di carattere genealogico e insieme tematico. Sotto il profilo della loro genealogia, le recenti ricerche neuroscientifiche sull’esperienza artistic...