Sensible idea and pictorial image: the relationship of artistic genres in German aesthetics

Abstract

The analogy between painting and poetry, as suggested in the Ars Poetica of Horace, was not interpreted in the same way by the German aesthetics thinkers of the early eighteenth century. As we will try to show, in some authors this analogy is much more connected with the sensitive nature of art as a whole rather than art as a imagistic reference. On the one hand, this position can be identified in the critical work of Gottsched, which tries to mitigate the importance of the descriptive aspect of poetry. On the other hand, we find in the theoretical investigation of Baumgarten an approach according to which what unites the various kind of art is not their relation with the sense of sight or even the primacy of pictorial image over poetic discourse. It can be located at that plane which Baumgarten defined as below the threshold of distinctness and consciousness.