What Language to Say the Arts?: French Rhetoric and German Aesthetics in the Eighteenth Century (Ut Pictura Poesis)

Taking its cue from Horace s saying As is painting, so is poetry ( Ut pictura poesis ), Marc Fumaroli s treatise "What Language to Say the Arts?" revisits the genesis of the conceptual turn in art. Fumaroli argues that the roots of this transition run deeper than the twentieth-century conceptualism of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. Rather, the origins of conceptual art can be found in the emergence of aesthetics as a distinct branch of philosophy in eighteenth-century Germany, a time when writers, such as Lessing, Baumgarten, Winckelmann, and Kant, tried to analyze art from a purely intellectual perspective. These thinkers positioned themselves in opposition to another, older school of thought based on a poetic approach to the appreciation of art that harkens back to classical antiquity. Fumaroli contends that this classical tradition s emphasis on pleasure and the sensual enjoyment of art is better suited than high-minded intellectualism to close the perceived gap between artistic practice and language."