Il tardo Illuminismo come «epoca storica» europea e la rivoluzione estetica di Denis Diderot

Abstract

1989, the year that marked the end of the communist utopia, launched worldwide a phase of complex critical rethinking of the traditional interpretations of the past. By that time historians of the Enlightenment began to call into question the old paradigm that tied the winning project and the ultimate and deepest meaning of the Enlightenment to the French Revolution. Instead of it, they fully seized the European dimension of a big cultural transformation that has been marking and still marks western life. In this way the last decades of the century before the Revolution have begun to reveal the independent wealth and originality of the culture of the so-called Late Enlightenment. Denis Diderot was certainly one of the stars of that particular season, especially thanks to his great aesthetic revolution, that revisited the artistic phenomena in the light of the growing public opinion, of a new communicative aesthetic, and of a political before than philosophical redefinition of the relationship between imagination and reason and among the subject creator, the artistic product and the active participation of the viewer.