If the mind penetrates deeply into the facts of aesthetics, it will find more and more, that these facts are based upon an ideal identity between the mind itself and things. At a certain point the harmony becomes so complete, and the finality so close that it gives us actual emotion. The Beautiful then becomes…

Aesthetics (also spelled æsthetics or esthetics) is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty.[1] It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste.[2] More broadly, scholars in the field define…

Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word iconography literally means “image writing”, and comes from the Greek εἰκών “image” and γράφειν “to write”. A secondary meaning is the painting of icons in the Byzantine and Orthodox Christian tradition. Still in…

Prologue: A Typical Iconoclash     (Figure 1) This image comes from a video. What does it mean? Hooligans dressed in red, with helmets and axes are smashing the reinforced window that is protecting a precious work of art. They are madly hitting the glass that splinters in every direction while loud screams of horror…

This paper addresses what is arguably one of the most fundamental questions in the debate on depiction: What is a Picture? It offers a critical discussion of traditional theories of pictorial representation, such as the Resemblance Theory, Conventionalism, and the Illusion Theory. The paper also examines the crucial notions of ‘seeing as’ and ‘seeing in’…