[43] Scienza nuova sec. bk. i., Del metodo.
[44] Scienza nuova sec., Ultimi corollari, § 5.
[45] Scienza nuova sec. bk. iii. ch. 3; Scienza nuova sec. bk. ii., Della metafisica poetica; and bk. iii. ad init.
[VI]
MINOR ÆSTHETIC DOCTRINES OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The influence of Vico.
This step in advance had no immediate effect. The pages in the Scienza nuova devoted to æsthetic doctrine were actually the least read of any in that marvellous book. Not that Vico exercised no influence at all; we shall see that several Italian authors both of his own time and of the generation immediately following show traces of his æsthetic ideas; but these traces are all external and material and therefore sterile. Outside Italy the Scienza nuova (already announced by a compatriot in 1726 in the Acta of Leipzig with the graceful comment that magis indulget ingenio quam veritati and the pleasing information that ab ipsis Italis taedio magis quam applausu excipitur)[1] was mentioned toward the end of the century, as is well known, by Herder, Goethe, and some few others.[2] In connection with poetry, especially with the Homeric question, Vico's book was quoted by Friedrich August Wolf, to whom it had been recommended by Cesarotti[3] after the publication of the Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), but without any suspicion of the importance of its general doctrine of poetry, of which the Homeric hypothesis was a mere application. Wolf (1807) imagined himself in the presence of a talented forerunner in an isolated problem, instead of a man of intellectual stature towering above any philologist, however great.
Italian writers: Conti.