ABSTRACT
Before there was art history and the methodologies considered in this book, there was philosophy. Philosophers have had a great deal to say about the nature of art and the aesthetic response. For Plato, visual art was mimesis-Greek for “imitation”—and techne, or “skill.” And beauty was an essential ideal that expressed the truth of things. But beauty and truth, in Plato’s view, were of a higher order than art. In fact, he had little interest in works of art because they were neither useful imitations of essential ideas nor the ideas themselves.
