18th Century Sensibility and Classical Theory

In the eighteenth century period of art history, divergences between the classical concepts of art and the new empirical view of sensibility divided the European art world. The classical theorists were bound to the Aristotelian view of art as means to bring about morality through its participants. The principle of sensibility, founded from the non-artist world, questioned the subjectivity vs. objectivity distinction in morality and beauty. Two writers on this discussion, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Freidrich Schiller, marked their views on poetry and theater to further explain the motivations…