"Shells, leafwork, picture frames, hummingbirds, wallpaper decorations, hems of clothing - such are the examples Kant's Critique of Judgement offers for a "free" and purely aesthetic beauty, Menninghaus's book demonstrates that all these examples refer to a widely unknown debate on the arabesque and that Kant, in displacing it, addresses genuinely "modern" phenomena. The early Romantic poetics and literature of the arabesque follow and radicalize...