Dante's aesthetics of being

"Despite the absence of tracts about beauty and art, aesthetic issues did command the attention of people in the Middle Ages. For Dante, however, aesthetics was the discourse of being and could not be narrowly defined. The aesthetic became the domain in which Dante considered not only form and proportion but questions of love, identity, and perfection of the self."--Jacket.

"Warren Ginsberg expertly guides us through Dante's work. He distinguishes between early texts such as the Vita Nuova, in which the aesthetic offers only a form of knowledge between sensation and reason, and the Comedy, in which the aesthetic is transformed into a language of existence. In his study, we are able to follow Dante's lifelong attempt to justify the truth of the aesthetic as he struggles to define himself as a poet and human being."--Jacket.