Arguing that art came from intuition, Croce claimed that it is the expression of the artists' emotion. Eco instead emphasized art as form, indicating that he was already moving toward the reader-based strategies of his later work. Additionally, Eco's ambitious positing of broad and essential connections between medieval and modern thought anticipates one of the most familiar strategies in both his essays and novels. Eco's thesis was first published as
Il problema estetico in San Tommaso (1956), then revised and enlarged as
Il problema estetico in Tommaso d'Aquino (1970; translated as
The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 1988). A more concise version of many of the ideas in his doctoral thesis appears in the essay "Sviluppo dell'estetica mediavele," published as a chapter in
Momenti e problemi di storia dell'estetica (1959), and translated by Hugh Bredin as
Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (1986). Eco later revised and enlarged the essay as
Arte e bellezza nell'estetica medievale (1987).
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