Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper): Band I,5: Second Characters u.a.

Inhalt:

Second Characters / Schriften zur Kunst: A Letter Concerning Design / Ein Brief über die bildnerische Darstellung
The Judgment of Hercules / Das Urteil des Herkules
Plasticks; Raisonnement sur le Tableau du Jugement d’Hercule
Letters & Billets on Hercules; Plasticks (Draft)
Projet d’une Espece de Portraiture moderne
Instructions to the Printer
Notes on Art
The Picture of Cebes
Greek, Latin and French Quotations in ›Second Characters‹

Shaftesbury’s writings on the visual arts have previously either never been published or, although available in print, not presented in the form of a reliable critical edition. This volume remedies that situation. Although his ›Second Characters‹, planned as companion-piece for ›Characteristicks‹, was unfinished at the time of Shaftesbury’s death, the surviving fragmentary collection of texts provides a valuable insight into the author’s aesthetics, offering at the same time a fundamental contribution to our knowledge of eighteenth-century art theory. – In Shaftesbury’s instructions to the Italian painter Paolo de Matteis were put to paper as ›The Judgment of Hercules‹, a tract which stands in terms of contents between the traditional »ut pictura poesis« and Lessing’s ›Laokoon‹. The English version is accompanied here by not only a new German translation, but also Shaftesbury’s original French text, as well as colour plates showing the three versions of de Matteis’s painting. ›A Letter Concerning Design‹ (edited here with a German translation), with its far-reaching political implications, and ›Plasticks‹ – the impressive torso of what was intended as a systematic discussion of art history and theory – similarly reveal the importance for scholarship today of Shaftesbury’s thinking on art.