Lorenzo Lattanzi

Scuola Normale Superiore - Pisa

Art history, natural history, and the science of antiquity: J. J. Winckelmann's recovery of ancient culture in Italy

2010-2011

Lorenzo Lattanzi obtained his PhD in Philosophy from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa (2006), where he was later appointed research associate (2007) and post-doctoral fellow in History of Classical Art and Archaeology (2008-2010). He has held research fellowships from the Freie-Universität in Berlin, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in München and École Normale SupÉrieure in Paris. In 2010, he was fixed-term Lecturer in Aesthetics in the PhD Program of Management and Development of Cultural Heritage at the IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca. He wrote two books, L'estetica musicale dell'Illuminismo tedesco (Palermo, 2001), and Linguaggio e poesia in Moses Mendelssohn (Pisa 2002), which was awarded the "Castiglioncello-Costa dei Tirreni" Philosophy Prize in 2003. He is the author of several papers on eighteenth-century epistemology and aesthetics. In 2004, he also published the first Italian translation of M. Mendelssohn's major aesthetic works. He is currently working on a new Italian translation, with introduction and commentary, of Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums and Anmerkungen über die Geschichte der Kunst. His research focuses on modern aesthetics and art criticism within the frame of the history of ideas and studies in the Classical tradition. His current interests include the aesthetics of German Neoclassicism; cultural transfers between French and German Enlightenment theories of sentiment and sensibilitÉ; and the relationship of the Sublime with the ideas of Grace and the Tragic, from ancient rhetoric up to Kant and Schiller.