Poetry, Art, and Beauty

What does it mean to be beautiful in classical and European literature and the arts? How do poems and works of visual art embody beauty? How is the idea of beauty defined by thinkers from Plato to Benjamin and Danto? Works include Sappho, Plato, Aristotle, Catullus, Horace, Petrarch, Kant, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Rilke, Benjamin, Stevens. Works of art considered range from the Lascaux caves through renaissance classical painters like Giotto and Raphael to contemporary installations.