ABSTRACT
The dilettantism project proved to be the most important document on the concept during the period of Weimar Classicism. In the decades after Johann Wolfgang Goethe's death, the terms 'Dilettant' and 'Dilettantismus' become less common in German critical discourse. The term 'dilettante' is rarely used in French before the 1820s, although the earliest recorded use is in Charles de Brosses's Lettres familieres ecrites d'ltalie en et 1740. The meaning of the French term 'dilettante' gradually expanded from melomane to denote a general art lover. Geerald Antoine argues that the French concept of dilettantism has its origins in Romanticism, tracing the association of dilettantism back to the 'Querelle des Bouffons', and proposing the hypothesis that the French aficionados of Italian music in the 1760s showed early signs of the Romantic temperament. It can be concluded that the German conception of the term after Weimar Classicism retained its essential ambivalence.
