Editing Literary criticism (section)

=== Baroque criticism ===
The seventeenth-century  witnessed the first full-fledged crisis in modernity of the core critical-aesthetic principles inherited from [[classical antiquity]], such as proportion, harmony, unity, [[decorum]], that had long governed, guaranteed, and stabilized Western thinking about artworks.<ref>Jon R. Snyder, ''L’estetica del Barocco'' (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005), 21–22.</ref> Although [[Classicism]] was very far from spent as a cultural force, it was to be gradually challenged by a rival movement, namely Baroque, that favoured the transgressive and the extreme, without laying claim to the unity, harmony, or decorum that supposedly distinguished both nature and its greatest imitator, namely ancient art. The key concepts of the [[Baroque]] aesthetic, such as "[[conceit]]' (''concetto''), "[[wit]]" (''[[acutezza]]'', ''ingegno''), and "[[Wonder (emotion)|wonder]]" (''meraviglia''), were not fully developed in literary theory until the publication of [[Emanuele Tesauro]]'s ''Il Cannocchiale aristotelico'' (The Aristotelian Telescope) in 1654. This seminal treatise – inspired by [[Giambattista Marino]]'s epic ''Adone'' and the work of the Spanish Jesuit philosopher [[Baltasar Gracián]] – developed a theory of [[metaphor]] as a universal language of images and as a supreme intellectual act, at once an artifice and an epistemologically privileged mode of access to truth.