The female centaur: for a first vocabulary of creativity

What is creating? Who has the power to create? Is anyone who builds something a creator? Does creation only happen when other people see something new placed in front of them? Is discovery the same as creation? Nicola Gardini brings into play mutually incompatible concepts like art and nature, novelty and tradition, image and object, genius and capability, freedom and rules, individuality and world, knowledge and intuition, intention and chance, originality and reality, truth and fiction. A committed investigator of the Latin and Greek lexicons, paying careful attention to the historical metamorphosis of concept, Gardini reconstructs the stages in an ancient conversation on creativity, highlighting notions of interest and change. His examples come from poetry, philosophy, rhetoric, and classical art critique. What emerges is a first vocabulary of references, which provides some fixed points and also helps to measure the millenary mutation of these references: suggesting that today’s definitions of creativity should be positioned in the perspective of becoming.