Forms and Substances in the Arts

An engaging companion piece to The Arts of the Beautiful, this volume advances Etienne Gilson's theories about art as a process of "making" by focusing on the substances available to an artist. The basis for his argument is grounded in the distinction between arts concerned with the creation of beauty and arts that are primarily functional. He takes up in turn: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, dance, poetry, and the theater, analyzing in each the basic materials afforded that artist, the possibilities of artistic form, and the means of transformation and creation.