II
Taste (Italian, gusto) seems to have been connected
for the first time with beauty in Renaissance Italy.
Filarete wrote in 1464: Ancora a me solevano piacere
questi moderni; ma poi, ch'io comenciai a gustare
questi antichi, mi sono venuti in odio quelli
moderni.... (“I also used to like the Moderns; but,
as soon as I began tasting the Ancients, I came to hate
the Moderns....”; Quellenschriften, 1890). Other
Renaissance views include F. Rinuccini, who used gusto
as a synonym of “right judgment” (Rinuccini, 1840).
Gusto is used in connection with beauty by
Michelangelo (Buonarroti, 1863), by Ariosto in 1532
(Ariosto, 1532), by Leone Ebreo in 1535 (Leone Ebreo,
1929), by Cellini and Varchi (Cellini, 1857; Varchi,
1857-58), by Dolce in 1557 (Dolce, 1557), by Zuccolo
in 1623 (Croce, 1946b), by Graziani in 1671 (Graziani,
1671), but only occasionally; it does not become an
important notion in Italian aesthetics until C. Ettorri's
Il buon gusto ne' componimenti rettorici (1696), and
then probably under Spanish or French influence. Af-
terwards, its fortune was assured, as shown in 1708 by
a work of L. A. Muratori, Delle riflessioni sopra il buon
gusto... (1708), and by the foundation in Palermo
in 1718 of an “Accademia del buon gusto”
(Mazzucchelli, 1753-63). For Muratori, taste (also
called giudizio and dritta ragione) is a power of judging
individual cases which cannot be decided according
to universal rules (Baeumler, 1923). In fact, the first
extensive use of “taste” as a mysterious, instinctive
power enabling man to make the right choice in the
different circumstances of life, as the foundation for
a civilized behavior, occurs in the works of the
Spaniard Gracián, in 1647 (Borinski, 1894); but he also
uses it in a specifically aesthetic sense (Gracián, ed.
del Hoyo, 1960). Nevertheless, taste had (in Gracián's
day) not yet become a central notion in Spanish aes-
thetics: Feijóo, in his Razón del gusto (1727-30), still
applies this term indiscriminately to food, drink, music,
etc., identifying it with the feeling for the pleasurable.
