The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas

A presentation of Thomass aesthetic theory, with interpretations from Maritain, Eco,

Gilson and Lonergan, and an application to the painting Piet de Villeneuve-ls-Avignon
and Xavier Beauvoiss 2010 film, Des hommes et des dieux.

Saturday, Oct. 15, 2011

John OBrien, SJ
Fellowship of Catholic Scholars
Toronto, Ontario

1. Introduction Beauty and the Aesthetic Experience

Interpretations of Thomas Aquinass 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 its 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: Scribners, 1930).

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

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: Scribners,
1930).

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 placet5 that which pleases by being
seen. Lets 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 objects 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 doesnt 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

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 thingsthe 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 mans 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 arts 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.

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 Thomass 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
Lets 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.

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 objects beauty is different from anothers. 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 someones
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

works 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 subjects
perception of it. Thus will Thomas say that beauty in itself is a state of equilibrium
between a perfect object and the intellect17; beauty is therefore both objective and
subjective.
*

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 Piet de Villeneuve-ls-Avignon

The Piet de Villeneuve-ls-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 works 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 Piet (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

limit ourselves to one individuals 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
ones 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 piets, 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 Mothers 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.

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 piet. 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 clerics
chasuble, and the luminescent grayness of Christs body. The bright elements are offset by
the dark foreground of the lower two-thirds of the image, which includes the indigo of the
Mothers dress, which flows into the darkness of the earth where her sons 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
Rublevs Trinity) over the body of the Christ (who is in the place of Rublevs 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 clerics folded hands and prayerful
attendance also match the Mothers 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

10

Christs 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 piet, 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 piet 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.

11

form, which is made actual in relation to someones 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 Piet 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 us23 since clarity is the forms 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
paintings 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. Johns delicate finger-work in extracting the thorns, the Magdalenes discreet
wiping of tears, the Madonnas 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 resolutions24 has created a single unity of vision. The clear structure of

22

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

12

the painting, with its strong figures bent in their poses, the prominence of Christs 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 wasnt 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 ones 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 ones own idea of being human, to the
appreciation of what it is to be a Christian27 In Xavier Beauvoiss 2010 film Des
hommes et des dieux, one is indeed transported from ones 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

13

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
destiny28 of a people. There is an original situation out of which the characters 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 Gods will acting through human
freedom:
There is something in the succession of human choices that is outside
range of human choiceThough everything in the drama is a product of
decisionsstill 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 mans will even though man is free.29

28
29

Ibid, 231.
Ibid., 231-32.

14

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 Gods 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 ones 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, its
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 Gods interaction with mans 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

15

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 films 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 Tchaikovskys 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 its 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 brothers 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.

16

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 films abiding sense of reverence. Thus the
respect portrayed by the cameras 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 Piet, the claritas of the film could be said to shine from its
understatement or restraint, which serve to manifest the films 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. Lucs telling his superior: Im not scared of death. I am a free man
and Fr. Christians 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 ones life according to

17

Christian love, after clarifying and deepening ones understanding of its kenotic or selfsacrificing dimension.

7. Conclusion
Both the Avignon Piet 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 pathos31 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.

31

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.

18

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:
Scribners, 1930.

19

Addenda:

Piet de Villeneuve-ls-Avignon, 15th Century, Louvre Museum, Paris.

20

Scenes from Of God and Men (2010)

21

22

23