2. We may cite Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio (“Ragioni del bello secondo i principi di San Tommaso,” Civiltà cattolica, 1859–1860), Vincenzo Fortunato Marchese (Delle benemerenze di San Tommaso verso le belle arti, Genoa, 1974), Pierre Vallet (Idée du beau dans la philosophie de Saint Thomas d’Aquin, Louvain, 1887), J. Biolez (Saint Thomas et les Beaux Arts, Louvain, 1896), Domenico M. Valensise (Dell’estetica secondo i principii dell’Angelico Dottore, Rome, 1903), Paolo Lingueglia (“Le basi e le leggi dell’estetica secondo San Tommaso,” in Pagine di d’arte e di letteratura, Turin, 1915), Octavio Nicolas Derisi (Lo eterno y lo temporal en el arte, Buenos Aires, 1942), as well as—but after Maritain—Leonard Callahan (Theory of Aesthetics: According to the Principles of Saint Thomas, Washington, DC, 1928), Adolf Dyroff (“Über die Entwicklung und der Wert der Ästhetik des Thomas von Aquin,” Archiv für systematische Philosophie una Soziologie, 1929), Carlo Mazzantini (“Linee fondamentali di una estetica tomista,” Studium, 1929), Thomas Gilby (Poetic Experience: An Introduction to Thomistic Aesthetic, New York, 1934), Josef Koch (“Zur Ästhetik des Thomas von Aquin,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik, 1931), Francesco Olgiati (“San Tommaso e l’arte,” Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica, 1934), down to Mortimer Adler who, in his Art and Prudence (1937), attempted to apply Aristotelian aesthetics, seen through a Thomistic lens, to the cinema. Among these commentators perhaps the most original was Maurice de Wulf with his Études historiques sur l’esthétique de Saint Thomas d’Aquin (Louvain, 1896), which underscored the psychological elements in Thomistic aesthetics. Less historiographically reliable was his Art et beauté (1920), mixing as it does, and as did many similar works, philosophical historiography and militant metaphysics.
[Translator’s note: It may be useful to point out that in what follows Eco will be using the term “aesthetic,” not only with reference to the artistic experience, but in its broader sense of the appreciation of beauty. This is made clear in his 1956 dissertation on Aquinas, now translated into English by Hugh Bredin as The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas: “The concept of the aesthetic refers to the problem of the possible objective character, and the subjective conditions, of what we call the experience of beauty. It thus refers also to problems connected with the aesthetic object and aesthetic pleasure. The experience of beauty does not necessarily have art as its object; for we ascribe beauty not just to poems and paintings but also to horses, sunsets, and women—or even, at its limits, to a crime or a gourmet meal” (Eco 1988: 3).]
3. Let us not forget that in 1944 he published a collection of essays entitled De Bergson à Thomas d’Aquin, essais de métaphysique et de morale (New York: Éditions de la Maison Française).
4. See my “The Poetics and Us” [“La Poetica e noi”] in Eco (2004b).
5. It is a known fact that nowhere in the Sherlock Holmes stories does Arthur Conan Doyle have his hero utter the famous phrase “Elementary, my dear Watson,” and yet the remark is as frequently cited as “To be or not to be.” The same thing has occurred with this formula of Maritain’s, which has continued to be repeated as authentically Thomistic by a multiplicity of authors. Even De Munnynk (1923), writing as a critic of Maritain’s method, continues to quote “pulchrum, est id quod visum placet” without batting an eyelid.
6. “id quod visum placet, ce qui plaît étant vu, c’est-à-dire étant l’objet d’une intuition.… Contemplant l’objet dans l’intuition que le sens en a, l’intellect jouit d’une présence, elle jouit de la présence rayonnante d’un intelligible qui ne se révèle pas lui-même à ses yeux tel qu’il est. Se détourne-t-elle du sens pour abstraire et raisonner, elle se détourne de sa joie, et perd contact avec ce rayonnement. Pour entendre cela, représentons-nous que c’est l’intelligence et le sens ne faisant qu’un, ou, si l’on peut ainsi parler, le sens intelligencié, qui donne lieu dans le coeur à la joie esthétique” (1927: 252–254, n. 55).
7. “C’est une vue simple, bien que virtuellement très riche en multiplicité, de l’oeuvre à faire saisie dans son âme individuelle, vue qui est comme un germe spirituel ou une raison séminale de l’oeuvre, et qui tient de ce que M. Bergson appelle intuition et schéma dynamique, qui intéresse non seulement l’intelligence, mais aussi l’imagination et la sensibilité de l’artiste” (1927: 277–278, n. 93).
8. Discovered in 1869 and at first attributed to Thomas, by the time Maritain was writing, the consensus inclined toward attributing it to Albertus Magnus (so much so that in 1927 Mandonnet would classify it among Thomas’s Opuscula spuria). Maritain had therefore a number of indications that ought to have encouraged him to a greater prudence.
9. See Maritain (1920: 42–44, 48–49, and 185–186, n. 73).
10. See Maritain (1920: 207, n. 130, and 217, n. 138), and Maritain (1935: 33, n. 1).
11. See, for a fuller treatment, Chapter 3 in the present volume.
12. See John of St. Thomas (1930). The terminus or term is “id, ex quo simplex conficitur propositio” (“that out of which a simple proposition is made”) or “vox significativa ad placitum ex qua simplex conficitur propositio vel oratio” (“a vocal expression significative by stipulation, from which a simple proposition or sentence is constructed”) (Deely 1985: 24); while the sign or signum is “id, quod potentiae cognoscitivae aliquid aliud a se repraesentat (“that which represents something other than itself to a cognitive power”) (Deely 1985: 25). “Essentialiter enim consistit in ordine ad signatum” (“For the being of a sign essentially consists in an order to a signified”) (Deely 1985: 218). See also Deely (1988) and Murphy (1991).
13. “Secundum autem diversificantur gradus prophetiae quantum ad expressionem signorum imaginabilium quibus veritas intelligibilis exprimitur. Et quia signa maxime expressa intelligibilis veritatis sunt verba, ideo altior gradus prophetiae videtur quando propheta audit verba exprimentia intelligibilem veritatem.… In quibus etiam signis tanto videtur prophetia esse altior, quanto signa sunt magis expressa” (“Secondly the degrees of this prophecy are differentiated according to the expressiveness of the imaginary signs whereby the intelligible truth is conveyed. And since words are the most expressive signs of intelligible truth, it would seem to be a higher degree of prophecy when the prophet … hears words expressive of an intelligible truth.… In such like signs prophecy would seem to be the more excellent, according as the signs are more expressive”) Summa Theologiae trans. by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, II–II, 174, 3.
14. Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry began life as a cycle of six A. W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts given at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in the spring of 1952, and was published in 1953 for the Bollingen Foundation by Pantheon Books. Our quotations are taken from this edition.
15. It is worth remarking that, in the second chapter of the book, Maritain appeals once more to the Scholastic theory of art, expounding it faithfully. But he continues to imply that primary intuition, a notion foreign to Scholastic theory, must preside over the organization of the operative rules. For Maritain creative intuition is the fundamental rule on which the artist’s fidelity depends, and by whose standard it should be judged. For the medieval mind, on the other hand, the rules precede the productive act and its mental conception.