academic year 2024/25

Academic Coordinator: Simone Furlani

Period: Second semester

Duration: 28 hours

Program: The 17th century is the era of Bernini, Caravaggio, Guido Reni, and Artemisia Gentileschi; of Shakespeare, Calderón de la Barca, and Gryphius; of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Newton. It is a century marked by the rise of two opposing conceptions of time: one viewing it as finite, measurable, and representable, and the other as infinite, boundless, and ineffable.

Despite some solid reference points, interpretations of the Baroque era remain far from unified. The spirit of the Baroque embodies both crisis and awareness, decay and rational understanding, disenchantment and openness, a sense of death, and, consequently, an appreciation of life. These nonlinear dynamics continually revive the "Baroque enigma" in subsequent eras.

By oscillating between art, theater, and philosophy, the course will explore key examples and meanings of 17th-century aesthetics and the 20th-century attempts to define the ‘Baroque’ paradigm. The course will culminate in the analysis of two seminal works that revisit and reinterpret key 17th-century authors and have become classics in contemporary aesthetics and philosophy:

• The Origin of German Tragic Drama by Walter Benjamin
• The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque by Gilles Deleuze