Abstract

Most scholarship about paintings in the Western artistic tradition rests upon the assumption that the object of its analysis is authentic as in "authentic Picasso" or "authentic Rembrandt." In particular, art historical and stylistic analysis of paintings originates from the conviction that the painting in question comes from the hands of an individual painter, and therefore, from the conviction that it is what it purports to be, and was created under a specific set of circumstances. Most views of the aesthetic experience, however, question the aesthetic relevance of authenticity because they consider that origin-related properties are extrinsic to the aesthetic experience of paintings. Thus, the art historical prevalence of the authentic painted image puts to the test views of the nature of the aesthetic experience and of aesthetic meaning. ;This dissertation examines the notion of authenticity in painting vis-a-vis a concept of aesthetic meaning. In particular, this analysis deals with the question whether the fact that a painting actually is an "authentic A"---where A stands in for the name of an individual painter---is an intrinsic component of aesthetic meaning. First, I offer an analysis of the notion of aesthetic meaning vis-a-vis the aesthetic experience. Then, this analysis is put under the test of the aesthetic experience of authentic paintings. ;While most theories of aesthetic meaning analyze it from the point of view of its proper source, that is, from an epistemological point of view, I examine the content of the aesthetic experience as a semantic and ontological problem. The main idea is that the nature of aesthetic content is such that it questions the distinction, at the basis of both Formalism and Critical views of the aesthetic experience, between the qualitative and the relational properties of paintings. Aesthetic meaning includes not only the qualitative properties of the pictorial surface, but also those properties that paintings have concerning their relation with the purported author and the circumstances of their creation