III. Artistic Mimesis and Cognition
The “cognitive turn in aesthetics” of recent decades is often attributed to
the publication of Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art(1968), which
focused on the study of “representation and other symbol systems and
processes.” In my view, however, Goodman’s emphasis on symbol sys-
tems (his book is subtitled An Approach to a Theory of Symbols) was
itself an unfortunate step in the wrong direction, for it diverted attention
from the mimetic nature of the arts.
That mimesis is integral to the arts has not only been recognized by
Western thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Baumgarten, Kant, and
(more recently) Rand, as I have indicated, but is clearly implied in the
thought of other cultures as well. According to this long-established
view, the “language” of art is fundamentally mimetic, not symbolic,
for it depends primarily on the “natural meanings” of representations—
in contrast with the arbitrary, culture-specific meanings assigned to
symbols.^17
As the art historian Erwin Panofsky observed, the primary source of
meaning in a work of painting or sculpture is what he termed its natural
subject matter—that is, forms that are intelligible simply by virtue of
our shared human experience, without any specialized cultural knowl-
edge. Natural subject matter, he further explained, can be both factual
and expressive (the term he used was “expressional”). Factual subject
matter consists of recognizable, although not necessarily realistic, rep-
resentations of such things as human beings, animals, plants, and every-
day objects. Expressive subject matter has more to do with the manner
in which things are represented—that is, with the emotionally evocative
qualities of pose, gesture, facial expression, atmosphere, and so on.
The secondary source of meaning in visual art is what Panofsky
termed the conventional subject matterof a work. Understanding the
meaning of conventional subject matter—including, most notably, sym-
bols of all kinds—requires culture-specific knowledge that is extrapic-
torial rather than intrinsic. An excellent illustration of Panofsky’s
distinction between natural and conventional subject matter is offered by
Jan van Eyck’s justly celebrated wedding portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini
and his young bride, Jeanne Cenami—a work whose rich iconography is
familiar to students of art history. A number of the painting’s details
have both symbolic and natural meaning—the figure of a little dog at the
feet of the couple, as a sign of fidelity, for example, and the solitary can-
dle burning in the chandelier, signifying the all-seeing Christ. While nat-
urally appropriate to the domestic setting, these objects also symbolize46 Michelle Marder Kamhi