Rosario Assunto
Rosario Assunto (28 March 1915 – 24 January 1994) was an Italian philosopher, art theorist and landscape aesthete.
Biography
Assunto was born at Caltanissetta, a comune in the central interior of Sicily. He received his doctorate in jurisprudence in 1938. From 1944 to 1951, he studied philosophy under "critical ontologist" and Kant specialist Pantaleo Carabellese (1877–1948) at Sapienza University.
He became an assistant to Carabellese and, after his death in 1948, to Luigi Scaravelli (1894–1957). In 1955, he became a private lecturer and from 1968 to 1980 Assunto was professor of aesthetics at the University of Urbino. In 1981, he moved to Rome, where he taught the history of Italian philosophy. He stood aloof from the movimento del Sessantotto (the Italian '68 movement) as an elitist individualist and withdrew from public discussion from the 1970s onward. Contributing to this was the increasing dominance of linguistic and sign-theoretical approaches in philosophy, which made Assunto's positions seem oldfashioned.[1]
Assunto maintained numerous contacts with avant-garde artists. He was married to the art historian Wanda Gaeta, who died young.
In 1991, his work on the garden and the landscape and his positions in favor of their recognition were awarded the Premio Internazionale Carlo Scarpa, granted by the Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche of Treviso: "to Rosario Assunto and his battle of ideas for the good governance, care and defense of gardens and landscapes; for the affirmation of their non-substitutable value as heritage of memory and places thought and realized to live contemplation", award that was intended to be strongly symbolic since the jury thus intended to recall "the diversity of weapons", including that of "pure speculation", with which "we can participate in the construction of a deeper and critical sensitivity of man towards nature".
Living more and more isolated after the death of his wife, he died of a tumor at the age of seventy-eight.[2]
Writings
Assunto dealt intensively with ancient, medieval, and neoclassical theories of the beautiful. He became best known in Germany for Die Theorie des Schönen in Mittelalter ("The Theory of the Beautiful in the Middle Ages"), in which he systematically sets forth the basic concepts of medieval theories of the beautiful by citing their most important representatives since Augustine. He shows that the concept of aesthetics, as introduced by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1750, can at best be applied metaphorically to medieval theories of art.
Medieval philosophy conceives painting and sculpture as purely mechanical crafts that serve to adapt matter to form, which is always already present in the mind of the artist. Thus they contribute to the daily visualization of the idea of the beautiful. Beauty is always also an instrument of moral instruction; it is meant to evoke emotions that influence the conduct of life. This function of art is gradually lost, beginning with the Florentine Trecento. Parallel to the spread of nominalist positions in scholastic discourse, the beauty of art subsequently becomes increasingly subjectively determined, culminating in humanism and neoclassicism. The work of art as such thus only signifies itself, it becomes a purely aesthetic sign of itself and detaches itself from ritual action and myth.
Since Romanticism (interrupted only by the epoch of realism and naturalism), according to Assunto, works of art and literature again become carriers of meaning similar to those of the Middle Ages: they represent archetypes or myths, but now in a secular guise. As for Dante (from a theological point of view) and Sigmund Freud or Herbert Marcuse (from a psychotherapeutic point of view), they have an anagogic function; they are more than "signs without the world," not just "ornament, cultural sublimation, or private pastime," but rather they embody supersensual "symbolism." For Marcuse, art liberates man from the achievement principle; for Thomas Mann, it connects individual consciousness with general consciousness, with myth.
Assunto distinguishes between vertical (anagogical) and horizontal meaningfulness. Vertical is the exploration of the past and the abysses of the soul that gives meaning to the present. Horizontal (social or historical) meaningfulness is the reference to other sections of the world, to the polis, social life, institutions. This is exemplified by the art and literature of surrealism, which seeks to change the world, or the works of Bertolt Brecht or Luigi Pirandello, the Italian film school of neorealism, but also literature that refers to philosophical questions and thus beyond itself.
In Il paesaggio e l'estetica (1973) Assunto shows that man seeks and creates his own landscape not only in real terms, but also mentally. In several works he also develops a theory of the garden. In this he was influenced by the German Romantic view of nature. In Ipotesi e postille sull'estetica medioevale (1975) he deals with the poetry of Dante. Intervengono i personaggi (col permesso degli autori) (1977) is a collection of satirical-philosophical stories.
See also
Works
- "Teatro, cinematografo e radio," Civiltà fascista, Vol. VII, No. 1 (1940)
- "Il teatro nell'estetica di Platone," Rivista italiana del teatro, No. 4 (1943)
- Heinrich von Kleist, Michele Kohlhaas (1946; editor)
- "Essere e valore nella filosofia di C. A. Sacheli," Rivista di storia della filosofia, Vol. II, No. 3/4 (1947)
- L'educazione estetica (1950)
- Educazione pubblica e privata (1950)
- La pedagogia greca (1952)
- Forma e destino (1957)
- L'integrazione estetica. Studi e ricerche (1959)
- Teoremi e problemi di estetica contemporanea. Con una premessa kantiana (1960)
- La critica d'arte nel pensiero medioevale (1961)
- Estetica dell'identità. Lettura della Filosofia dell'arte di Schelling (1962)
- Giudizio estetico, critica e censura. Meditazioni e indagini (1963)
- Die Theorie des Schönen in Mittelalter (1963)
- Stagioni e ragioni nell'estetica del Settecento (1967)
- L'automobile di Mallarmé e altri ragionamenti intorno alla vocazione odierna delle arti (1968)
- L'estetica di Immanuel Kant (1971; editor)
- Hegel nostro contemporaneo (1971; with Raffaello Franchini and Mario Pensa)
- Il paesaggio e l'estetica (1973)
- I. Natura e storia.
- II. Arte, critica e filosofia.
- L'antichità come futuro. Studio sull'estetica del neoclassicismo europeo (1973)
- Ipotesi e postille sull'estetica medioevale. Con alcuni rilievi su Dante teorizzatore della poesia (1975.)
- Libertà e fondazione estetica. Quattro studi filosofici (1975)
- Intervengono i personaggi (col permesso degli autori) (1977)
- Specchio vivente del mondo. Artisti stranieri in Roma, 1600-1800 (1978)
- Alfred Hohenegger. Esploratore del possibile (1979; with Gustav René Hocke ans Elio Mercuri)
- Infinita contemplazione. Gusto e filosofia dell'Europa barocca (1979)
- Filosofia del giardino e filosofia nel giardino. Saggi di teoria e storia dell'estetica (1981)
- La città di Anfione e la città di Prometeo. Idea e poetiche della città (1984)
- La parola anteriore come parola ulteriore (1984)
- Il parterre e i ghiacciai. Tre saggi di estetica sul paesaggio del Settecento (1984)
- Verità e bellezza nelle estetiche e nelle poetiche dell'Italia neoclassica e primoromantica (1984)
- Ontologia e teleologia del giardino (1988)
- Leopardi e la nuova Atlantide (1988)
- La natura, le arti, la storia. Esercizi di estetica (1990)
- Giardini e rimpatrio. Un itinerario ricco di fascino attraverso le ville di Roma, in compagnia di Winckelmann, di Stendhal, dei Nazareni, di D'Annunzio (1991)
- La bellezza come assoluto, l'assoluto come bellezza. Tre conversazioni a due o più voci (1993)
- Il sentimento e il tempo (1997; edited by Giuseppe Brescia)
- L’antichità come futuro. Studio sull’estetica del neoclassicismo europeo (2020)
Notes
- ↑ Paolo Nicita, "Assunto Scandaloso Esteta," La Repubblica (13 May 2006).
- ↑ Antonio Debenedetti, "Rosario Assunto, Filosofo delle Forme", Corriere della Sera (25 january 1994).
