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not as “art” objects, but as media of the gods. Art was indistinguishable from religion, and even religion was not identified or conceived as such. In this stage, meanings appear directly sensed as powerful and awesome. on given objects, which were felt and
marily meant an image endowed with beauty, the sensuous presentation of truth. The rough dating of this period is from approximately 1400 to the mid-nineteenth century. During this era, painters strove to present the The second period is the era of art properly speaking, where “art” pri-
world in their artworks the way that the world presents itself to the eye – whether the chosen world was biblical, mythological, historical, or natural. This was the era of realism, or even of an enhanced realism, as artworks became over-saturated with the qualities of the real, as the Dutch
masters remind us. Reflective goods appear in the viewer’s act of seeing truth and beauty in humanly made works of art, which weave their magic in creating the illusion of three-dimensional space, perspective, etc. The form of consciousness for realistic art is reflective; beauty or sacredness
appears in an embodied meaning that is constructed the viewer.conception of art and a new reflexive level of artistic self-consciousness. Modernism, the third period, brought about a genuine revolution in the by the artist and for
Modernism can be dated from approximately the mid-nineteenth century until the early 1960s. The focus was on the artwork’s ability to evoke reflec-tion on the mystery of creative imagination as the ground that makes art possible. Giving up the pretenses of visual illusion, modernist painters high-
lighted the real conditions of visual art: the two-dimensional flatness of the canvas surface, its rectangular shape, awareness of paint and the brushstroke, and the like. For modern artists, the painting is to be looked through. (^30) The agenda of modernism was to produce a more honest art – one at rather than
that reflects critically on inherited understandings of what it means for an artwork to be judged beautiful or sacred. To understand a modernist work means to grasp what it says about light of all previous answers to the question. It also means to understand what makes something a work of art, in who
one becomesernist work of art is philosophical orientation, as well as a spiritual discipline for transforming embodied subjectivity.Modern artists were committed to a kind of spiritual alchemy. For if one enters the artist’s vision of the world. Embedded in a mod-
example, Van Gogh painted peasants, landscapes, interiors of rooms, and portraits to reveal how embodied human life is touched by the eternal and how his own tortured consciousness could affirm life in the midst of suffering and death. (^31) Kandinsky insisted on the “inner need” of the