Art and beauty in human education: the classic model

Abstract

The text aims at reflecting upon the value the classical Greek world has attributed to poetic art and beauty. An educational value, or rather “paideutic”, very different from what modernity has bestowed on the “fine arts”. In this notion, in fact, we find one of the most direct historical effects of the crisis that the Greek conception of poetic art went through in the Hellenistic-Roman world. A crisis which then deepened because of the profound transformations that took place in ancient culture at the time of the achievement of the Christian religion and of its aversion to the Greek idea of beauty.

Starting from a reflection on the modern concepts of “art” and “taste”, we will try to grasp all the anachronism of the Greek concept of beauty and, hence, both the sense of the transformations Christianity brought about the Greek canons, both how much modern aesthetics owes to such transformations.