ABSTRACT
The emergence of Christianity at the beginning of the first century meant the beginning of a great transformation of the Sensate Graeco-Roman culture into the subsequent Ideational culture of the Middle Ages. Medieval painting and sculpture are virtually iconography. Christianity was an Ideational cultural stream from its very emergence. Only the Ideational man and Ideational culture which begin to pay more and more attention to the empirico-sensory world but which by one half seem to be able to produce the great Idealistic art, as a blend of both styles. Such exactly was the situation in the thirteenth century in Western culture generally, and especially in its art. Impressionism, photography, movies—all three are excellent testimony that at the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century the mentality of the Western society, so far as it was expressed in art became extremely Visual and illusionistic.
