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.
Über den Autor Marc Fumaroli
![]()
Marc Fumaroli is a scholar of French classical rhetoric and art. He is a member of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Société d’histoire littéraire de la France, and the Académie française. Fumaroli received from the Académie française, before being elected a member, the Monseigneur Marcel Prize in 1982 and the Critique Prize in 1992, and he is president of the Société des Amis du Louvre. He won the Balzan Prize for Literary History and Criticism in 2001, and is the author of numerous books including L'Âge de l'éloquence, Héros et orateurs, L'École du silence, and Trois institutions littéraires. Richard Howard received a National Book Award for his translation of Les Fleurs du mal and a Pulitzer Prize for Untitled Subjects, his third volume of poems. He is the translator of the NYRB Classics Alien Hearts and The Unknown Masterpiece.
