COMPOSITIONAL (NON-)FORMULA: VIEWER (RECIPIENT) AND ARTIST (MASTER) AS PHILOMATICS. PART 2.1

Natal'ya P. Kopceva

doi:10.31804/2782-4926-2025-4-4-8-23

UDC 7.013

COMPOSITIONAL (NON-)FORMULA: VIEWER (RECIPIENT) AND ARTIST (MASTER) AS PHILOMATICS. PART 2.1

Published in Siberian Art History Journal · Volume 4, Issue 4 · Pages 8–23 · Rubric: current cultural research

DOI: https://doi.org/10.31804/2782-4926-2025-4-4-8-23

Received: 30.12.2025 Accepted: 30.12.2025 Published: 30.12.2025

Authors

Natal'ya P. Kopceva

Federal State Educational Institution of Higher Education "Siberian Federal University" Head of the Department of Cultural Studies and Art History of the Siberian Federal University · Russian Federation · Krasnoyarsk

ABSTRACT

This publication continues a series of scholarly articles addressing the issues of artistic visual communication between the viewer (recipient) and the artist (master), as well as the artist (master) and the artistic material from which the master creates a work of visual (including fine) art. Traveling freely through the intellectual layers of the philosophy of art and culture, aesthetics, theory and history of culture, and art, the study focuses on examining the complex problems of visual thinking, which has a dialectical, sensory-rational nature and is embodied in the forms of visual artistic creativity, as well as the artistic reception of visual quality. The second part of the study examines the significance of the dichotomy of soul and body—a kind of unshakable foundation for subsequent philosophical and scientific thinking of the European type—for understanding the "mechanics" of the image (phantasm) as the only possible mediator between them, drawing on ancient modeling in Aristotle's treatises "On the Soul," "On the Generation of Animals," and "On the Movement of Animals." This article clarifies the translation of the word φαντασία from Aristotle's treatise "On the Soul" into Russian: it proposes returning V.A. Subbotin's first translation, completed in the mid-19th century, as "image of the imagination," since the 1976 translation of this word as "representation" requires extensive explanatory commentary. Several of Aristotle's ideas, expounded in lost works, fragments of which are cited in the works of the Church Fathers, are examined. A conclusion is reached regarding the unprecedented significance of Aristotle's theory of "psychic pneuma" as a mediator between the physical body and the soul for the theory of artistic imagery, where the work of art is considered in the aspect of artistic imagery and where the significance of the work of art is thereby defined as a potential tool for the creation of phantasms-images-mediators. Phantasms-images-mediators realize a double mediation: between the 5 sense organs and the “heart” (the organic place of “psychic pneuma”) and between the soul, transmitting images of the Supreme Spirit, and, in fact, the human body animated by it.

KEYWORDS

visual thinking, Plato, Aristotle, image, fantasy, soul, body, psychic pneuma, primary instrument

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JATS XML

Doctor of Cultural Studies, Docent

Julia Zamaraeva

rybka08@bk.ru

Candidate of Philosophical Sciences

Anastasia Kistova

Candidate of Cultural Studies, Docent

Maria Kolesnik

masha_kolesnik@mail.ru

Doctor of Philosophy, Professor

Natal'ya P. Kopceva