Renato Barilli: Master of Method

Abstract

The paper analyzes the critical method of Renato Barilli, established in a valuable book: Culturologia e fenomenologia degli stili (1982, The Science of Culture and the Phenomenology of Styles), which has shaped generations of students at the University of Bologna, DAMS (Drama, Arts and Music Studies) degree course.

Building on Luciano Anceschi’s critical phenomenology, Barilli develops an open and flexible approach that combines attention to particular phenomena with the search for general structures. Central to this method is the use of “binaries”, borrowed from Heinrich Wölfflin, designed to schematize the dynamics of styles while preserving the unpredictability of their historical flow. From Erwin Panofsky, Barilli derives the notion of “symbolic forms”, the first bridge that ensures the connection between artistic forms and the broader context of knowledge characterizing an era. Lucien Goldmann provides the concept of “homology”, which shifts the relationship to the axis leading to the solid substrate of material culture. Finally, Marshall McLuhan delivers to Barilli the theoretical acquisition of a technology redeemed from inertia and fully restored to historical-cultural life, to the extent that a binary also applies to it: hot / cool media. Barilli synthesizes these contributions in the “culturological” method, which aims to identify the great cultural cycles, the techniques that innervate them, the stylistic developments, and the homologies between the material and symbolic layers, as well as those within the same layer.