Includes bibliographical references (pages 355-359) and index.
CONTENTS NOTE
Text of Note
Art history and the cultural amnesia of modernity and postmodernity -- Classicism : the nature of beauty, the fragility of goodness -- The Laocoön : the challenge of tragedy and the metaphysics of Plotinus -- The Judeo-Christian tradition : aesthetics and beauty reconciled -- The Renaissance, Mannerism, and the Baroque : from a qualitative to a quantitative universe -- The modernist-postmodernist tradition : the subjective-objectivity of the "Enlightenment" and the decline of beauty -- Ways of worldmaking : Nietzsche's rebirth of tragedy -- Western culture at the crossroads : the history of art and the postmodern eschaton -- Subject, object, and responsible freedom in the pursuit of beauty.