Many works of art are representations. Picture galleries containing pictures painted before 1900 are full of them. Plays and works of literature also seem to be representations of a sort; at least we talk about the way in which a novelist or dramatist has depicted a person or situation. Some aestheticians hold that even when a work of art is a representation, it is not as a representation that we view it when we assess it aesthetically. Medieval aestheticians took this line, and even defined beauty accordingly. Medieval aestheticians, though they recognised the importance of catching the beholder's attention with pleasant visual sensations, thought that our delight in beauty is primarily intellectual. An artist who paints a picture of a horse normally wishes to represent it as having certain characteristics, if only those typical of horses. If, in the resultant picture, it has, or is indeed represented as having, these characteristics, the artist has scored a success.