Bull Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth

Vico and Neapolitan Painting
Course Book
ISBN: 978-1-4008-4974-1
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Reihe: Essays in the Arts

How the philosophy of Giambattista Vico was influenced by eighteenth-century Neopolitan painting

Can painting transform philosophy? In Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth, Malcolm Bull looks at Neapolitan art around 1700 through the eyes of the philosopher Giambattista Vico. Surrounded by extravagant examples of late Baroque painting by artists like Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena, Vico concluded that human truth was a product of the imagination. Truth was not something that could be observed: instead, it was something made in the way that paintings were made--through the exercise of fantasy.

Juxtaposing paintings and texts, Bull presents the masterpieces of late Baroque painting in early eighteenth-century Naples from an entirely new perspective. Revealing the close connections between the arguments of the philosophers and the arguments of the painters, he shows how Vico drew on both in his influential philosophy of history, The New Science. Bull suggests that painting can serve not just as an illustration for philosophical arguments, but also as the model for them--that painting itself has sometimes been a form of epistemological experiment, and that, perhaps surprisingly, the Neapolitan Baroque may have been one of the routes through which modern consciousness was formed.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bull, Malcolm

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Philosophie: Allgemeines, Methoden
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: Barock, Klassizismus

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments ix

Prologue xi

ONE Vico 1

TWO Icastic Painting 43

THREE Fantastic Painting 69

FOUR Theological Painting 101

Epilogue 121

Notes 127

Index 141

Über Autor(innen)

Malcolm Bull is university lecturer in fine art at the University of Oxford. His previous books include Anti-Nietzsche, The Mirror of the Gods, and Seeing Things Hidden.