Luca Vargiu

Beginning with an article by Hans Robert Jauss, which detects in Hans Belting some "unease" towards hermeneutics, this paper claims instead that Belting, in his studies, manifests deep hermeneutic awareness, among other things indebted in many respects to Jauss' reception theory itself. Nonetheless, it is still possible to notice some "unease," which emerges in the way Belting considers hermeneutics among the "methods and games" of history of art. In this regard, Belting's analysis – concerning the relationship between iconology and hermeneutics and between philosophical and art historical hermeneutics – appears densely loaded with meaning but also partial. This is due to the fact that he limits himself to critically discussing only one tendency, well represented, in his eyes, by Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Sedlmayr, the latter being the only representative of art historical hermeneutics that Belting takes into account.

Following the correspondence between Boehm and Mitchell, the paper discusses some focal points related to the so-called iconic, or pictorial turn: the difficulty in writing a history of the Bildwissenschaft, the role of the medieval studies, affinities and differences between the European and the American approach to image, the Italian and French reception, the meaning to attribute to the word ‘turn’, and the relationship among the iconic or pictorial turn, the visual studies and more traditional disciplines such as aesthetics and art history.

Even though the past few years have witnessed an increased interest in Emilio Betti’s thought, there are still important aspects of his work that need to be investigated, including his hermeneutics of art. Brief references to it have been made, but there have been only tentative attempts to identify a comprehensive aesthetic approach in Betti’s work. Of great relevance in this context is the one text where Betti’s hermeneutics has been interpellated in relation to historic and artistic interpretation, that is, a 1965 essay by Hans Sedlmayr, the renowned art historian of the “New Viennese School.” In the vast corpus of Sedlmayr’s works, this is the only text where Betti is mentioned. However, in this essay the references to the theory of the Italian jurist and philosopher are so numerous as to reveal him to be Sedlmayr’s privileged interlocutor. Betti, too, was an attentive reader of Sedlmayr. He even includes the Austrian scholar among the thinkers who were for him a “source of productive inspiration.” The profound impact of this inspiration may be gauged most particularly in Betti’s reflections on modern art in his General Theory of Interpretation. The present volume focuses on the long-distance dialogue that Betti and Sedlmayr established independently from each other, a dialogue that has previously gone unnoticed. The author, Luca Vargiu ([email protected]), reconstructs this dual, reciprocal reading, reevaluating the contributions of Betti and Sedlmayr to the lively debates in the field of art historical-hermeneutics.