Initiation from the end. Late and early style in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's "Der Tod des Tizian"

Abstract

The text aims to confront the concept of late style, coined by T. W. Adorno about the last Beethoven, facing from a particular perspective an early incomplete text by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Der Tod des Tizian, where the Austrian writer imagines young students of the Venetian master who await his death and his last painting. The text makes it possible to link late style and so-called "early style", problematically comparing the question of the generation and "natural" evolution of the artwork with the philosophical question of the tradition to be transmitted, as is concretized in the philosophical and anthropological figure of initiation to a secret doctrine of art and thinking.