It initially struck me as strange—even self-deluding—for a collection of essays that announces its regret at “how seldom nowadays specific artworks and artistic practices are seen as explaining, clarifying, requiring, or embodying the distinctive set of concerns articulated in that philosophical discipline we call aesthetics” to spend so little time on close reading, formal analysis, description, and other methods that prioritize the particularity of the aesthetic object (1). A contribution on metaphysical poetry by Andrew Cutrofello, for example, though largely concerned with John Donne, does not quote a single word of his verse. But the revisionist project editor Paul A. Kottman has in mind involves an understanding of the artwork that contravenes many of the assumptions that ground formalist practices. The artwork does not reflect aesthetic concepts—beauty, integrity, freedom—that are extrinsic to it; instead, it instantiates those concepts by virtue of its own capacity for self-reflection. Any method that situates art as an example of what exists beyond, behind, or even within it fails to answer its most insistent demands.

This notion of art’s insistence appears in the collection’s title, and other recurring terms like claim and urgency combine to create a version of aesthetics marked by mutual need and receptivity: art presses itself upon us, and our response to it matters. Which is to say that if one of the aims of the volume is to assert the vitality of pre-Kantian aesthetic thought, Kottman and his contributors have no interest in developing a genealogy of concepts like disinterestedness and purposiveness. Instead, the definition of aesthetic autonomy at work here has less to do with self-sufficiency than with a more radical, world-seeking freedom, less with Kant than with Hegel. Kottman’s own essay, a supple and rigorous account of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art as demonstrations, from within discursive activity, of the freedom to bring that activity to a conclusion, makes the stakes of aesthetic autonomy clear: “Modern art, Hegel thinks, is a practice that raises the question of its own status and legitimacy as a practice—and in this sense, at least, manages to transcend classical art’s restrictedness to its status as art” (122). The story that is so often told about the origins of aesthetics excludes the early modern period because, supposedly, its artworks remained dependent on religion, moral instruction, and other self-evidently authoritative cultural practices. The Insistence of Art resets that discussion by describing the freedom of art precisely in terms of its ability to solicit relations with what lies beyond it and thereby to call its own limits into question.

With this modified definition of autonomy, the volume identifies relational and even intersubjective modes of encounter with artworks—phenomenology, hermeneutics, and, crucially, ethics—as characteristically early modern forms of aesthetic experience. Victoria Kahn’s contribution on allegory beautifully illustrates the larger point about aesthetics emerging out of artistic practice: an allegorical mode of reading became, over the course of the Renaissance, the definitive response to figurative language, whether theological or fictive, and indeed blurred the boundaries between the two categories—so much so that, for a writer like Milton, “hermeneutics constitutes one’s relation to God” (45). Rachel Eisendrath’s astonishing essay on epitaphic poetry also looks to hermeneutics in order to describe an aesthetics that disrupts processes of reification. A reading of Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of a Woman Inspired by Lucretia shows how the separate depictions of the silent, suffering subject at the moment of self-killing, and of the inscription offering the lesson of sexual purity, make the viewer aware of the violence that is done in making a person into an example: “Lotto’s painting has in this way opened a space that allows the viewer to become critically aware of this collapse of experience into objects” (62). In a comparison of Caravaggio’s 1598 and 1603 versions of the Sacrifice of Isaac, J.M. Bernstein traces a shift from Abraham to Isaac, from the invisible to the visible, from faith to ethics: in its instantiation of the secular, the later painting creates the specifically historical conditions of its both demanding and heedful autonomy: a fittingly urgent conclusion to an urgently needed book.