With the Eye of Maria Zambrano: Between Pictorial Image and Poetic Reason

Maria Zambrano's aesthetic experience articulates itself around a center of sensible values of man. It is, in fact, the experience of an elsewhere or otherwise also with respect to the traditional way in which the aesthetic fruition has been understood. For Zambrano, aesthetic fruition is an experience in which the subject feels himself united with that ethical nucleus whose presence fills the body with the very existence of his being a creature of and in the cosmos. In our reflection, then, we would like to dwell on some aspects of Zambrano's aesthetic production, because, by rehabilitating the enchantment of a gaze oriented towards beauty it stands out from others developed in the 1900s. Being sensitive to beauty and letting oneself be enchanted by it is, for Zambrano, the only chance that the human being has to not get lost in the gloomy darkness of the world which, in so many cases, is also the one affecting his soul.