Mediaeval Aesthetic

Abstract

HE present article is the first of a series in which it is intended to make more readily accessible to modern students of mediaeval art the most important sources for the corresponding aesthetic theory. The mediaeval artist is, much more than an individual, the channel through which the unanimous consciousness of an organic and international community found expression; in the material to be studied will be found the basic assumptions upon which his operation depended. Without a knowledge of these assumptions, which embrace the formal and final causes of the work itself, the student must necessarily be restricted to an investigation of the efficient and material causes, that is, of technique and material; and while a knowledge of these is indispensible for a full understanding of the work in all its accidental aspects, something more is required for judgment and criticism, judgment within the mediaeval definition depending upon comparison of the actual or accidental form of the work with its substantial or essential form as it