Per un confronto tra Plotino e l’Anonimo del Sublime sulla bellezza ideale

The paper attempts to philosophically compare the treatise On the Sublime and the theory of beauty expounded by Plotinus, particularly in his writing On the Intelligible Beauty (Enn. V 8 [31]). I argue that the points of contact between the two authors on this topic can be reduced to four main principles: a) the dependence of beauty’s realization on a status of ecstasy that exceeds every sensible manifestation of it; b) the independence of beauty from any judgement subject to the variations of time and place; c) the power of beauty to show the ideal truth in this world; d) the immeasurable nature of beauty that, essentially, goes beyond mathematical canons of order and proportion.