Overview

In the Italian Cinquecento medical and art-theoretical discourses intersect in the semantics of capriccio. The innovative and transgressive potential of capriccio was simultaneously denounced as pathological and as an existential risk. Hans Joachim Dethlefs reconstructs the history of the term capriccio within the context of the early modern re-evaluation of the imagination. The study brings together art history, linguistics, and the history of knowledge, revealing the extent to which notions of creativity were marked by ambivalence in this period. In doing so, it sheds light on how modern ideas of invention, deviation, and individuality first emerged - far beyond the confines of art history.

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9783837682137

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Hans Joachim Dethlefs, born in 1952, taught at the Department of German Studies of the Università degli Studi di Genova, as an associate professor at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, and as a professor of German and European Art History at the Institute for German Studies of Chuo University in Tokyo until his retirement in 2023. His research focuses on early modern art theory and the development of modern artistic terminology from L. B. Alberti to Goethe.

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