In modern art, central importance is accorded to the diverse experiences of physical and mental violence. The resultant question of the forms of presentation of violence and the reasons for taking pleasure in tragic objects is however one which was already posed in Classical Greece in a comparable fashion. The studies in this volume arose from a symposium run by the Collaborative Research Centers on Esthetic experience and the dissolution of artistic limits. After reviewing the history of the 5th century B.C. with its intensive experience of violence, they examine the tension between violence and aesthetics in the fields of myth, cult, and literature with particular reference to tragedy and visual art.

Bernd Seidensticker und Martin Vöhler, Freie Universität Berlin.