the sacramental character of the image as bearing witness to the Catholic
union of husband and wife.^18
The emotional power of the work does not derive from its symbolic
content, however, but from its natural subject matter and its depictive
and expressive features, from the intensely sober facial expressions of
the young couple and the delicacy with which Jeanne lays her hand,
palm out, upon her husband’s outstretched hand (the joining of hands
was also symbolic of the marriage vows) to the aura of tranquil solem-
nity in the elegant bedchamber. These are the qualities that make it a
great work of art—an emotionally meaningful image that transcends the
particular historical moment represented and conveys something about
the gravity and importance of marriage in general. Unlike the symbolic
elements, these qualities require no special decoding or explanation:
they are readily accessible to an attentive viewer.
To provide an adequate account of artistic mimesis, I must again
stress that the mimetic arts were never properly regarded as merely
“holding a mirror up to nature,” Plato’s oft-quoted analogy notwith-
standing. As classics scholar Stephen Halliwell persuasively argues in
his exhaustive study The Aesthetics of Mimesis, the ancient concept of
mimesis encompassed a wide variety of artistic styles, ranging from
realism to idealization and stylization. Meaningful selectivity and imag-
inative transformation were always recognized as playing an important
part in the mimetic re-creation of reality—even in the most ostensibly
“realistic” styles. Moreover, Plato himself acknowledged that the highly
stylized figurative representations of Egyptian painting and sculpture,
for example, also qualify as mimetic art.^19
It is of course reasonable to ask why mimesis has always been the
primary means by which the arts perform their cognitive and emotional
function. I have already indicated the answer to this in arguing that
mimetic art is readily graspable. A further evolutionary perspective is
offered by the Canadian neuropsychologist Merlin Donald in his Origins
of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and
Cognition, and in his more recent work, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution
of Human Consciousness.Donald theorizes that mimesis played a cru-
cial role in human cognitive evolution, serving as the primary means of
representing reality among the immediate ancestors of Homo sapiens,
just prior to the emergence of language and symbolic thought. Mimesis,
in his view, refers to intentional means of representing reality that utilize
vocal tone, facial expression, bodily movement, manual gestures, and
other nonlinguistic means. As he insists, it is “fundamentally different”
from both mimicry and imitation. Whereas mimicry attempts to render
Mimesis versus the Avant-Garde: Art and Cognition 47