Dear old things have a warm and bittersweet taste that is distinct from other tastes related to oldness like cold antiquity or sweet-and-sour recollections. This hitherto unnamed taste ought to be called nostalgia, because nostalgia today means an affectionate feeling for the past felt about a thing at hand, as its definitions in recent English dictionaries show. Nostalgia as defined above is an agreeable feeling conveyed through the senses. Since it is equivalent to what aesthetics has called the aesthetic or an aesthetic category, nostalgia deserves a due place in the discussion of aesthetics. Recognition of nostalgia as a theme of aesthetics is expected to contribute much to this discipline. Its primary contribution lies in aesthetic's enlarged scope, because our knowledge of feeling and perception (aisthesis) advances through it. Its secondary benefits include encouraged specialized investigations into the expression of nostalgia in works of art and avoided political exploitation of nostalgia by revealing the fictitious character of the "past."

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The theory of paintings argued by Roger de Piles(1635-1709) laid more emphasis on visual pleasure of paintings than its function of instruction. Therefore, while many contemporaries considered judgement on paintings to be inseparable with such criteria as historical facts, theological validity, geometric correctness of perspective, and verisimilitude borrowed from poesy, de Piles insisted that such criteria were not the essential parts of painting. For de Piles, the fundamental principle of paintings consists in its visual effect and the ability to imitate things. If so, however, one critical problem remains unsolved : how could de Piles describe paintings without these criteria? In this paper, I will show following points as to this problem. First, his description was not exclusively aimed to reconstruct a narattive from which the subject matter of a painting was taken: rather, it aimed to cover experience of viewing paintings. Secondly, de Piles inserted into his descriptions views of his own which was warranted by not some universal criteria but his taste or imagination. Finally, while explanation of paintings by many contemporaries intended to determine absolutely valid views of paintings, what he attempted in his descriptions was to persuade his readers by means of his words.

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The Italian Futurists participated actively in the areas of applied arts. However, due to the variety of their activities, each area has not been explored equally. The purpose of this study is to reveal the significance of clothes and fashion in the Futurism. The Futurists showed interest in fashion embodying the concept of speed, for they regarded the velocity as sacred. They had interest in clothes themselves as well. Giacomo Balla presented the new Futurist clothes in his manifestoes. The clothes are characterized by three concepts; "change", "functionality" and "influence upon spirit". For Balla, clothes were not works of art, but in fact were tools. His idea of clothes had importance for the Futurists in this respect, because the arts were tools to inform or realize their ideas. Only from this point of view, however, it is impossible to find differences between clothes and other applied arts. For this reason, it is necessary to consider the fact that Balla started with textile design when he made clothes. As understood from the discourses of the Futurists, they emphasized the significance of the Italian textile industry. Because of this industrial characteristic, the Futirists regarded the fashion as a priviledged domain.

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From the beginning of the 1940s, Italian cinema critics have called the commercial films produced under the fascist regime "white telephones". This specific term indicates the white and brilliant visual texture many popular films shared in those days. This visual texture originated in the Hollywood cinema, which dominated the world market including Italian one. Italian cinema industries tried to assimilate a Hollywood-like production to overcome the long-lasting crisis from the 1920s. As a result, Italian screens were covered with white shining lights. This paper aims to reveal the significance of the "white" vision in the Italian cotemporary culture, focusing on the properties of cinema, namely the expressive medium of light and the most powerful economic system of the last century. From this point of view, we can discover another aspect of the first talky colonial film, Lo squadrone bianco, which is renowned for a fascist propaganda.

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The concept 'temps' as ballet terminology was born with the birth of danse classique in the 17th century, following the concept of the same term established in the music theory in the same period. The term, which denotes a unit of dance movement basically, had been re-defined repeatedly through ballet history, especially in relation to the concept 'pas'. However, in current ballet theories traditional ideas of 'temps' seem to have disappeared, and the term can be seen only in names of some ballet steps. Why did the concept emerge in the ballet, how was it understood in the different periods of the ballet history and why did it become unused? To answer these questions I, at first, traced the original idea of this term in the music. Then I examined the various definitions of 'temps' and usages of this term found in main dance books since the 17th century. Viewing over transformations of ballet steps under the influence of the concept 'temps' through ballet history, it can be noticed that, though the concept is no more used in the theory today, it remains alive practically in actual ballet movements.

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In the baroque period, the body of French courtiers was educated in dance lessons. Therefore the most basic motion in the dance of that time, which was called mouvement, dominated rhythmic character of their bodies. Mouvement is a bending of the knees followed by a rise of the body and a straightening of the knees. The energy of the rise from the sink stresses the measure, but these motions are executed quite fluently and have no instant that divide time into beats. Because of these characters, the dancer count beats upward. Music has to cooperate with this bodily feeling in some ways, and notes inegales is one of them. Notes inegales is a convention in which notes with equal written values are performed with alternation of long and short durations. This convention has some characters in common with mouvement. For example, it conceals gaps between beats and makes the performance more graceful. Still more, the duration of the sound has great importance under this convention. Experience of this duration requires concentration on the progress of the sound. Here it builds up the mutual relationship with the rhythmic character of the body.

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