Description
Book SynopsisMusing in Florence in June of 1858, Nathaniel Hawthorne said of himself, I am sensible that a process is going onand has been, ever since I came to Italythat puts me in a state to see pictures with less toil, and more pleasure, and makes me more fastidious, yet more sensible of beauty where I saw none before.This is a book devoted to the reflective analysis of the enterprise in which many of us, like Hawthorne, find ourselves engaged: the cultivation of our taste. Charles Wegener writes for and from the standpoint of thoughtful amateurs, those who, loving the beautiful and the sublime, wish to become more fully the sort of person to whom these goods reliably disclose themselves. Here traditional aesthetic analysis is redirected to a search for the norms that tell us how we use our intelligence, our imagination, and our senses in becoming more fastidious, yet more sensible, exploring such concepts as disinterestedness, catholicity, communicability, austerity, objectivity, and authority.
