Raphael needs his hands: aesthetics and science of art in Dino Formaggio

Abstract

Dino Formaggio’s philosophical investigations on the issue of the artistic technique embrace all the crucial questions related to aesthetics as a philosophical discipline, both en the sense of a theory of sensation and en the sense of a theory of art. Within this frame, this paper aims at exploring en particular the relationship of Formaggio with the German tradition of the «general science of art» (allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft) and the so-called «history of art with no names» (Kunstgeschichte ohne Namen): en the context of the Italian aesthetic debate his works contributed en a fundamental way to approach under a different and new perspective authors like Fiedler, Dessoir, Utitz, Riegl, whose first reception by Benedetto Croce had interpreted en a deforming idealistic manner.