Lecture: Art and Geometry in the Enneads of Plotinus and their Arabic adaptation with Stefan Sperl

The Egyptian philosopher Plotinus (d. 270) and the Neoplatonic school of thought he spearheaded have for long had a major impact on art and aesthetics in both the Middle East and Europe. The presentation begins with a general introduction to Plotinus and his legacy and a brief survey of the transmission of his thought to Christianity and Islam. The relevance of Plotinus’s thought for the arts as well as their function in the cosmology he devised are then discussed by reference to key passages in Plotinus’s writings known as the Enneads. Next the presentation touches upon the influence the Enneads and Neoplatonic thought more generally may have had on the art of late antiquity and Byzantium, with particular reference to images as a means to convey, and participate in, the sacred. The Arabic adaptation of the Enneads in the 9th century CE has been linked by recent scholarship with the rise of an abstract style of artistic expression in Abbasid Iraq. The presentation will introduce passages on geometry from the Arabic text and discuss their reception by Islamic philosophy and the bearing they may have had on Islamic visual arts, including Arabic calligraphy. The conclusion reflects on the fact that Plotinus can be seen to have provided the philosophical underpinning for two opposing types of visual art, one representational, the other abstract.