Invisibility revealed by visibility

Artist can be regarded as artificialists. What artists represent cannot replicate the model, but only reproduce it from some perspective. Indeed, they have to select a certain level of observation, assign it an essential performance, and reproduce it by using materials and procedures different from those characterising the exemplar. Reproducing an objet by means of a sensible language is not so much a pure material necessity imposed on artists by culture, as the very matter that makes it possible for art to exist. The language used by the artist being intrinsically heterogeneous with respect to the natural exemplar, contributes, on the one hand, to reduce the complexity of the exemplar, and on the other, to generate new aesthetic values, styles, and ways of perceiving and thinking. A short case study on medioeval art is presented that support these theses, by showing the unavoidableness of representing the invisible via the visible.