The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas

 

 

The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas A presentation of Thomas’s aesthetic theory, with interpretations from Maritain, Eco, Gilson and Lonergan, and an application to the painting Pietà de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon and Xavier Beauvois’s 2010 film, Des hommes et des dieux.

Saturday, Oct. 15, 2011 John O’Brien, SJ Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Toronto, Ontario

1. Introduction – Beauty and the Aesthetic Experience Interpretations of Thomas Aquinas’s aesthetic theory have been debated down the years, but a basic canon of its major elements is determinable, resulting in a set of criteria by which one might approach a work of art and be able to ask whether or not it might be said to be beautiful. These criteria, these three primary conditions of beauty, understood thanks to St. Thomas, are held to be integritas, proportio or consonantia, and claritas.1 Before exploring each of these three qualities, however, one might ask: in what consists an aesthetic experience? Does one consciously employ analytical criteria or makes a conscious act of judgment in front of a beautiful painting or sculpture? Or is it possible to have an experience of beauty characterized by an immediacy that precludes critical analysis? In his foundational book Art and Scholasticism, Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain felt that this was precisely what aesthetic experience was: “the repose of the intellect when it rejoices without labour or discussion; freed from its natural labour of abstraction, it “drinks the clarity of being”; for him, “The [aesthetic moment] is contemplative, uncritical, blessed.”2 But it was another 20th century Thomist, the philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco, for whom aesthetic intuition is intellectual intuition. In his doctoral dissertation, later published and still in print today as the book The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, Eco reminds us that the data of our senses give us intuitive knowledge of the sensible while it’s the intellect that gives us knowledge of the universal. Working together, their operation is known as visio or vision. Eco notes that “Lightening                                                                                                             1 2

 

Summa Theologica, 1a pars, question 39, article. 8. Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, trans. by J.F. Scanlan (New York: Scribner’s, 1930).

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knowledge, that is direct and immediate contact between intellect and sensible, does not exist in man.”3 The intellect with its universal principles is always working cooperatively with the sensible function. So who is right, Maritain posing the immediate, non-intellectual aesthetic experience or Eco, posing the direct and constant engagement of the intellect in the aesthetic experience? Are the differences between these two respected Thomist scholars irreconcilable? An apparent solution appears, however, in an insight provided by yet one more 20th century Thomist, the Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan, who articulated his argument more or less as follows: I can in fact have a spontaneous “pure experience” of art, but as a living subject, I will always bring to the experience my entire self and my intellect with its memories, associations, emotions and prior knowledge (which I can never disassociate from my being or self) – even knowledge of aesthetic principles that may inform my perception of a sculpture, poem or a sunset, but which I hold prior to conscious application of any theory.4 In other words, the problem is not an either-or scenario. I can spontaneously appreciate the delicate balance between light and shadow inherent in a Caravaggio, or the profound proportion between the theological content and visual rendering of a Fra Angelico because I might have informed myself about them as principles once-upon-a-time, but in the moment of contemplation, I do not need to consciously locate them in my memory and

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Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988). 4 Lonergan calls this seeing in a “purely experiential pattern. See Bernard Lonergan, “Art” from Topics in Education, ed. Robert Doran and Frederick Crowe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). Cfr. Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, trans. J.F. Scanlan (New York: Scribner’s, 1930).

 

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apply them. My prior knowledge of what constitutes beauty might be said to be passively engaged in the moment of spontaneous apprehension.

2. Whether Beauty is a Transcendental So what is beauty, and what are the mysterious principles that make it such? Aquinas defines beauty as simply “Id quod visum placet”5 – that which pleases by being seen. Let’s break it down briefly: by the term visum he means that which pertains to knowledge; seeing, for Thomas, is a part of knowledge. By the term placet or “pleasing”, he is referring to the object’s capacity to gratify. Not all objects that are seen or known gratify the beholder, but certain ones do, and the pleasure felt, for Thomas, is indicative of the presence of beauty (although, it is important to distinguish, the pleasure itself is not beauty). What, then, is the nature of this gratification, and from where does it come? Here again we bump up against a philosophical problem debated since the Angelic Scholar first put pen to paper: Is beauty rightly to be considered a transcendental, that is, an attribute of Being or God, like Truth and Goodness? It is Eco, again, who notes for us an almost offhand comment that Thomas makes, which should, I think, resolve the question of at least what Thomas thought. In the Commentary on Divine Names, Thomas writes almost in passing of beauty “quod est Deus” – which is God – an attribution that doesn’t get any clearer.6 Creation participates in the life of its creator insofar as it is good, true and beautiful. Eco writes eloquently:                                                                                                             5

Summa Theologica, I, q. 39, a. 8. The text actually says, “pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent.” 6 Eco, 33

 

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everything is beautiful and comes together in beauty; everything is constructed in accordance with beauty; everything shines with beauty and declares and manifests beauty; the order which the creator Good7 has assigned to things—the combining of parts, their unifying communion, their harmony – constitutes the rationale of being, goodness, and beauty.8 Within the sphere of the beauteousness of creation, the works of human art, of painting, sculpture, music and poetry, stand out, not in rivalry with it, but in co-creation as Tolkien said, and as man giving glory to God, as St. Ignatius saw man’s vocation.

3. Religious Art: Didactic or Aesthetic? The fruits of human artifice are objects of beauty when respect beauty as the primary end of art, as Etienne Gilson pointed out. According to this 20th century French Thomist, beauty in art “is given in a sensible perception whose apprehension is desirable in itself and for itself.”9 This is an important principle when it comes to the question of religious art. If religious art’s primary end is instructive or exhortative, it may work didactically, but fail miserably as art, undermining even its intellectual and inspirational power. Religious works of art, according to Gilson, precisely by imitating the act of the Creator, also participate in his beauty. They may serve to teach, to remind, and to affect their beholders with religious emotion, but this didactic end must always be distinct from and subordinate to the primary end of beauty. A sacred hymn might have theologically correct lyrics, but if the melody is bland or the relational dynamic between words and melody poor, then it fails at being beautiful. A novel whose lesson or moral is too spelled                                                                                                             7

Term appears as such in the published monograph. Etienne Gilson, The Arts of the Beautiful (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2010). 8 Eco, 29. 9 Gilson, 22.

 

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out detracts from the aesthetic power of the story, and the novel fails to be beautiful. Art might be at its best when it is serving the cause of religion, but the artist must remember his primary identity as artist, that is, that his object must serve beauty first, and in doing so, he serves truth.

4. Integrity, Proportion and Clarity So what are Thomas’s three qualities of the beautiful? Thomas does not have an article or question that deals directly with the question of beauty, but they are revealed in the revealing quote in Summa Theologica, 1a pars, question 39, article. 8: For beauty includes three conditions, ‘integrity’ or ‘perfection,’ since those things which are impaired are by the very fact ugly; due ‘proportion’ or ‘harmony’; and lastly, ‘brightness’ or ‘clarity,’ whence things are called beautiful which have a bright color.10 Let’s begin with the first. Integritas is the quality of wholeness or perfection in the object, the appropriate fullness of being. When the object has all that makes up its substance, the integrity of its parts, it may be said to have integrity.11 Maritain adds that integrity exists in beauty because “the mind likes being.”12 Proportio or proportion refers to a harmony or right ratio between parts. This means a balance between the coordinates of matter and form, essence and existence, and the quantitative and qualitative components – in other words, the relationship among a multitude of fixed items, such as colours and lines, light and shadow, foreground and                                                                                                             10

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Literally translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Second and Revised Edition, 1920. 11 Having integrity in its parts, then, means that integritas is also a kind of proportion. 12 Ibid., 24.

 

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background. There should also be proportionality in the rational or logical fit of things, even a psychological proportionality or right relation between the human senses and the object of beauty. In all of these dimensions, proportion is based upon the vital reality of the form: that there is an inner unity in the variety. Eco describes proportio as “a transcendental matrix which can realize itself in ever new and unsuspected ways,”13 which is why one person or object’s beauty is different from another’s. Maritain will add that proportion is needed in beauty “because the mind likes order.”14 Claritas, or clarity or brilliance, comes from an ontological splendour, in which the object is clear in itself. It shines forth from the form of the object or person. Clarity has both a physical sense (light and colour), and a spiritual sense (the object must be in accord with the spiritual sense of reason). Thomas would say that clarity is not of emanation of being– a Platonic idea – but of participation of form in being. Eco writes that claritas “is the fundamental communicability of form, which is made actual in relation to someone’s looking at or seeing the object.”15 Maritain adds that clarity is needed “because the mind likes light and intelligibility.”16 These three formal criteria of beauty indicate that beauty is something objective in its formal aspect, but it acquires its aesthetic quality when it is the object of aesthetic contemplation. When I gaze at the painting for a few minutes, or watch the film for a few hours, I have an aesthetic experience that is the result of the presence of these three properties. Integrity and proportion are criteria of ontological perfection, and pertain to the                                                                                                             13

Eco, 98. Maritain, 24. 15 Eco, 119. 16 Maritain, 24. 14

 

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work’s essence and existence, not to the aesthetic, while claritas is the capacity of a form to signify itself as something with integrity and proportion – but only by means of a subject’s perception of it. Thus will Thomas say that beauty in itself is “a state of equilibrium between a perfect object and the intellect”17; beauty is therefore both objective and subjective. *

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I have chosen two works of art to examine in light of these criteria. They are, perhaps, somewhat unusual, for the painting does not immediately strike one as beautiful, and a film is a complex medium. But this analysis might serve to show how knowledge of certain aesthetic principles might develop the eye to the more subtle and hidden dimensions of beauty.

5. Seeing the Form of the Pietà de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon The Pietà de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon is an anonymous painting by a 15th c. French artist.18 Does the form of this painting contain the qualities that qualify it as beautiful? Admittedly, such judgments will always be the reflection to a large extent of the subjectivity of the critic; it is the democracy of cumulative individual judgments that lends a greater weight to a work’s reputation as objectively great and beautiful. Here we will                                                                                                             17

Eco, 191. Although attributed to the French provincial artist Enguerrand Quarton, of whom the Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists writes: “there is an increasing tendency to attribute to him the celebrated Avignon Pietà (c.1460, Louvre, Paris), the greatest French painting of the period.” See The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists, s.v. “Quarton (Charonton), Enguerrand,” accessed 29 April 2011, http://www.oxfordreference.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/views/ENTRY.html?Subview=Main &entry=t3.e2012. 18

 

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limit ourselves to one individual’s judgment, my own, but in the light of a strict Thomistic paradigm of interpretation, which will contribute, I hope, to a more objective appraisal. Let us take a moment, as Lonergan would have us do with visual art, and be “pulled out of one’s ready-made world [in] a moment of withdrawal, of pause.”19 Let us gaze as this painting of the late middle ages, hanging today in the Louvre, but available to our glance thanks to digital reproduction. Of its integrity or wholeness, let us see whether is lacks any of its constituent parts. The work is clearly a pieta. Christ has been taken down from the cross (which is absent from the scene, but as with many pietàs, it is not a necessary component, since the focus is the persons). The Virgin Mary is in the center, whose clasped hands, in an expression of prayerful sorrow, point heavenward. John the Apostle and Mary Magdalene, with heads bowed, are on either side of her, each engaged in serene acts of mourning and affection: John, pulling the thorns from the head of the dead Christ, and the Magdalene dabbing her eyes with cloth while holding a cylinder of ointment. The torso of Christ lies horizontally, and is extended in an angular position on the Mother’s lap. There is also the presence of a fourth figure, the clerical donor perhaps, who is kneeling subordinately and discreetly at the far left of the group, hands clasped in prayer, perhaps an everyman who represents the contemplating believer. Perhaps he represents us. Unlike the other four figures, he does not have an inscribed halo around his head. These persons taken together contribute a certain fullness to the scene; they encompass the actual historical witnesses of the event, a contemporary of the artist, and all of us. They also represent the two main spiritual                                                                                                             19

 

Lonergan, 223.

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dispositions, both the active and the contemplative, that accompany profound religious communion with the fallen Christ. The dim silhouette of the skyline of Jerusalem is visible in the background to the upper left, and the barest trace of a Judean hill bumps the horizon on the right, giving geographical context and both temporal and spatial location to the image. Our contemplation reveals a painting that is a complete work of art, missing neither figure, setting or mood that makes it what it is – a pietà. I believe it contains the quality of integrity. Does the painting have proportion? The image is a contrast of gold and dark, revealing an almost even ratio or balance between them. The top third or so, the sky, is of a golden hue, similar in colour and brightness to the cloth held by the Magdalene, the cleric’s chasuble, and the luminescent grayness of Christ’s body. The bright elements are offset by the dark foreground of the lower two-thirds of the image, which includes the indigo of the Mother’s dress, which flows into the darkness of the earth where her son’s body will soon be descending. Does the presence of the cleric throw off the visual proportionality of the four other figures, who would otherwise be in a somewhat triangular symmetry (like Rublev’s Trinity) over the body of the Christ (who is in the place of Rublev’s Eucharistic cup)? I argue that while displacing that triangular proportion, another ratio is created by his presence, giving the whole a more linear, horizontal orientation, congruent with the earthly mourning of humanity over its dead Lord. The cleric’s folded hands and prayerful attendance also match the Mother’s in pose, creating symmetry between them. Thus there are two figures in contemplation, represented by clasped hands, and two in prayerful action, creating an undulating four-figured proportionality. Seen in another way: the majority of

 

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Christ’s body lies to the right of Mary, so the cleric adds a balance of “weight” of figures on each side. There is also proportionality in the rational or logical fit of things: the Mother and Christ are the main objects of the pathos of a pietà, with the accent on the Mother. Here, the sorrowing Madonna sets the tone for the rest of the elements of the picture, for “the upright figure of the Virgin provides an axis, and the united hands of the Virgin, which further emphasize the axiality of her figure and do much to establish a sense of sorrow driven inward by piety.”20 One notes, as well, the words inscribed in the border around the painting, which further lend it a meaning that is rationally proportionate to the visual subject: O VOS OMNES QUI TRANSITIS PER VIAN ATTENDITE ET VIDETE SI EST DOLOR SICUT DOLOR MEUS21 Derived from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, the verse is usually sung during the Tenebrae services of the last three days of Holy Week. It evokes, in the context of this painting, the sorrow of the Mother, although doubtless it refers as well to the passion of Christ (which, in reality, is the sorrow unsurpassed). Yet it is proper to a pietà that the command “Attendite” be extended in reference to the passion of the Mother. There is a meaningful proportionality between its essence as a theological truth and the expression of human pathos, and its presentation in actual visual form. The claritas or luminosity of the painting presents itself in both the physical and the spiritual sense. Since, as Eco has written, “clarity is the fundamental communicability of                                                                                                             20 21

 

Don Denny, “Notes on the Avignon Pieta,” Speculum, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Apr., 1969), 222. “O all ye that pass by the way, behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.”

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form, which is made actual in relation to someone’s looking at or seeing the object,”22 the ontological brilliance of the work must be, in a sense, self-evident to the viewer. The luminosity of the Avignon Pietà is the manifestation of the aforementioned qualities of integritas and proportio, which are necessary for an “aesthetic visio.” Our having recognized these two properties already is itself an indication that the work contains clarity, not “clarity in itself, but clarity for us”23 – since clarity is the form’s capacity to signify itself. Yet one might also note the vividness of theme, and the physical detail, line and angle in this particular work, and see that it shines both to the eye, as well as to the intellect, for there are no false strokes, no obscuring element or omission that might dull the painting’s power. Above all, it is distinctly clear that this painting signifies a certain theme: tender and serene sorrow for the fallen Christ. The interiority of the grief is almost stunning, and is present in the understatement of the emotion, which highlights its essential meaning. John’s delicate finger-work in extracting the thorns, the Magdalene’s discreet wiping of tears, the Madonna’s stricken yet prayerful repose all serve the luminosity of this subtle theme. The golden colour assists in a material way, but the piece is not known for being a chorus of vivid colours. Its luminosity is rather in its harmony and from its participation in the light of the divine mystery. The “pattern of contrasts and balances, of tensions and their resolutions”24 has created a single unity of vision. The clear structure of

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Eco, 119. Eco, 191. 24 Lonergan, 224. 23

 

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the painting, with its strong figures bent in their poses, the prominence of Christ’s body, and distinctiveness of their features, may thus be said to be a manifestation of claritas. At the end of our aesthetic experience, we might realize, as Lonergan writes about paintings, that the break from the ready-made world – by an act of aesthetic contemplation of an event of long-ago, has led us to similar emotions or spiritual dispositions as the figures, perhaps even disposing us to an interior act of love, thereby leading us, in a sense, further into God,25 for here we have glimpsed something of his intelligibility and light through the mystery of his death.

6. If St. Thomas had seen a Film - Des Dieux et des Hommes I chose the medium of a film in part because I was curious what would happen if one applied Thomistic aesthetic principles to a medium that wasn’t around in his day. Film resembles, in certain ways, the painting, since Lonergan describes painting as “merely a virtual space,”26 although film is multisensory, while the painting is merely visual; but like a painting, a film causes, par excellence, the experience of being pulled out of one’s world for a time of “withdrawal” and “pause”; it provides a moment “in which one can start afresh, release a new movement to the realization of one’s own idea of being human, to the appreciation of what it is to be a Christian…”27 In Xavier Beauvois’s 2010 film Des hommes et des dieux, one is indeed transported from one’s place in time and space to a foreign and exotic land during a turbulent time – rural Algeria during the civil war of the                                                                                                             25

Ibid., 224-25. Ibid., 223 27 Ibid., 223-24. 26

 

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1990s. We enter the precincts of a Trappist monastery and witness the lives of these consecrated men as they pray together in chapel and minister by art and friendship to the local people. Tensions mount as it appears more and more likely that the monks are unsafe and that they may lose their lives if they remain. The question of whether to leave their adopted home and people or stay with them in danger becomes the primary dramatic problem in the film. Another reason that film is an interesting study as an art-form is the resemblance and participation it has with the art of drama. Both Aquinas and his commentators would have been familiar with plays, even if they did not specifically cite them in their comments on beauty. Watching a film is an aesthetic experience comparable to the live play, although different in certain respects, and while it is beyond our scope to analyze these differences, we will highlight some similarities. Of drama, Lonergan writes that it “is the image of destiny”28 of a people. There is an original situation out of which the character’s decisions will lead from one situation to the next, shaping a narrative. The drama shows the outcomes of the decisions and helps man relate to the mystery of God’s will acting through human freedom: There is something in the succession of human choices that is outside range of human choice…Though everything in the drama is a product of decisions…still there cannot be any individual decision that constitutes situation and the way one situation heads in the next. That logic between situations is one way of conceiving destiny, one way of conceiving manner in which God moves man’s will even though man is free.29

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Ibid, 231. Ibid., 231-32.

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the the the the the

The monks in the film represent this process in a preeminent way as the dramatic tension is precisely about the question of their choice and its consequences. It is also about the interplay of God’s will and their will, for the future is uncertain, yet their decisions will be integral to its outcome. Film critic Roger Ebert did not like the monks’ decision to remain, feeling that this martyrdom was a form of selfishness, when they still had years and talents to dispense to the world. This utilitarian approach to the human vocation to love and to service, ignores the very foundation of the aesthetic resolution to the dramatic tension: the Trappists choose to stay with the people they live among in the hic et nunc, their immediate friends, the people they are surrounded with in the present. Love is the hermeneutic key to this drama, but a messy, difficult love that is not and cannot be exercised in abstraction, for like all actual love, it concerns those who are concrete in one’s life. This key idea, I argue, is played out with a certain integritas: we learn from a variety of scenes that these monks were committed to love the local people. That was the point they served, and Ebert misses the point, both theologically, of course, but also aesthetically. In the Lonerganian optic, it’s the initial problem, followed by a succession of situations based upon their choices, and ends in a final climax of martyrdom (off-screen), which taken together present an arc of dramatic development that is ultimately satisfying to most viewers. Thomas called beauty “Id quod visum placet” – that which pleases when seen, and this film pleases most viewers, because it represents resplendently the mystery of God’s interaction with man’s freedom. It pleases because it is a story that offers a whole illustration of the dynamic of the mystery of love. If “through the drama man can apprehend concretely his freedom, his capacity to

 

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decide, and the limitations upon his freedom,”30 participating emotionally in the struggle of Father Christian and the other monks in Des hommes et des dieux, succeeds as drama. There is also proportion in the balance of the film’s constitutive parts, and one perceives it most notably in the pacing. Although the tension in the dramatic problem is strong, the visual composition and editing is serene, almost contemplative, in a way befitting a drama whose theme is the mystery of self-donation. There is little music beyond the psalm chants of the monks themselves, although there is a dramatic crescendo with the inclusion of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in the celebrated “Last Supper” scene – the spiritual climax, perhaps, of the film. The chants of Joseph Gelineau, Didier Rimaud and Marcel Godard in the chapel scenes are fitting auditory expressions of the paschal mystery unfolding in the story; their chants’ elegance and simplicity – sung by the monk-actors themselves – evoke the inter-dwelling of the mundane and the sublime, the human and divine that meet in recesses of the heart. But above all it’s the long periods of silence that are the most eloquent, given the sobriety and sacredness of the theme. The reverent realism of the auditory and kinetic dimensions of the work thus lends a profound – and even liturgical – sense to the film, creating a powerfully spiritual impression. There is also a pleasing and proportionate ratio between scenes of the film and elements from the life of Christ. Scenes include: healing of the sick, a walk in the wilderness while wrestling with existential questions, a brother’s “agony in the garden” in his cell at night, a “Last Supper” together, and a final via crucis in the snow towards their Calvary. There is also a pleasing ratio between views of bright visual landscapes and                                                                                                             30

 

Ibid., 232.

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natural scenery with the dim interior scenes inside the monastery, an interplay of richness and austerity. This brings to mind the ratio between human interiority and exteriority in liturgical experience, and contributes to the film’s abiding sense of reverence. Thus the respect portrayed by the camera’s eye and the editorial pacing draws the viewer into the virtual space of the film, and allows him to encounter a pattern of solemnity in the presence of a Divine mystery. In this way the medium of film manifests the transcendental of divine beauty, along with truth and goodness. As with the Avignon Pietà, the claritas of the film could be said to shine from its understatement or restraint, which serve to manifest the film’s integrity and proportion. It allows characters to make statements that illumine the drama without seeming didactic. The intense dramatic situation, as well as the preexisting radicality of their own vocation as monks, gives the characters the credibility that permits them to make explicit spiritual insights, such as Br. Luc’s telling his superior: “I’m not scared of death. I am a free man” and Fr. Christian’s voice-over letter about his possible death: “I will be freed of a burning curiosity and, God willing, will immerse my gaze in the Father's and contemplate with him his children of Islam as he sees them.” The proportion between their lived and actual lives and their spiritual statements, their walk and their talk, permits the film to shine forth in spiritual luminosity while avoiding to seem didactic or moralizing, an easy pitfall in religious drama. If art, as Lonergan holds, is “relevant to concrete living” and “is a fundamental element in the freedom of consciousness itself”, Des hommes et des dieux impels us by its intrinsic beauty to ask how one might change or live one’s life according to

 

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Christian love, after clarifying and deepening one’s understanding of its kenotic or selfsacrificing dimension.

7. Conclusion Both the Avignon Pietà and the Des hommes et des dieux share in common the theme of pathos; not merely in the sense that they evoke pity or sadness, but more along the lines of a “sublime pathos”31 which, in the context of art, is the demonstration of human freedom and triumph in the struggle against suffering. In both works, the pathos is expressive of a profound love. It is my hope that through a Thomistic aesthetic lens, looking at how they both possess wholeness, proportion and clarity, we have seen how and why this idea of sublime pathos, artistically rendered, is beautiful. This is a beauty present in their ontological structures as well as in the perception of the beholder. Both pieces, the static visual window of the painting, and the visual, auditory, and kinetic window of the film, move us by this beauty, thereby commending themselves as candidates for being considered great works of art.

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Friedrich Schiller often wrote about this theme of “sublime pathos” in art. We refer to it here only for the sake of illustrating the essential theme of the two particular works under study.

 

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Bibliography Eco, Umberto, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988.

Denny, Don. “Notes on the Avignon Pieta,” Speculum, Vol. 44, No. 2. (Apr., 1969) : 213233.

Gilson, Etienne. The Arts of the Beautiful. Champaign, Il: Dalkey Archive Press, 2010.

Lonergan, Bernard. “Art” from Topics in Education. Edited by Robert Doran and Frederick Crowe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.

Maritain, Jacques. Art and Scholasticism. Translated by J.F. Scanlan. New York: Scribner’s, 1930.

 

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Addenda:

Pietà de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, 15th Century, Louvre Museum, Paris.

 

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Scenes from Of God and Men (2010)

 

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