Winter 2025 • By ML
From Mind to Matter

What Thomas Aquinas Can Teach Artists about Their Art

Artists do not need philosophy to make their work. Philosophy is (mostly) a reflective practice, relying on an already-existing reality to ponder and understand. Philosophizing about art, then, presupposes that artists make things.

But we are rational, curious beings nonetheless; and when we do want to understand what we make, a philosopher’s account should help by distinguishing, ordering, and clarifying what an artifact is and what the practice of art is.

Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism (1920) remains a foundational work in this area. It provides a succinct introduction to pre-modern thought on art and has guided many (artists and otherwise) to consider what art is and how it is made.

As an interpreter of Thomas Aquinas, however, Maritain also introduces his own ideas about art. Most notably, he argues that “art stands entirely on the side of the mind”. Such a claim should give us pause: unlike philosophy, art seems to be a very physical, tactile activity. The thing to be made must be...made—actually, really made. No one would consider a blueprint for a building and the building itself to be identical, and only one of those is considered an artifact.

Other philosophers have noted this. But defining art solely as the external act of making seems to neglect the rational element.

But the question remains: how do we articulate what art is as both a rational activity and as one that requires an artifact to exist separately from the mind of the artist? Reading Thomas Aquinas can aid us.

Following Aristotle’s observations, Thomas considers how artists work. First, we plan: we determine what we want to make (which is the goal or end of the process); this is the form of the artifact, and although it only exists mentally, it allows us to see the whole and each part and how those parts will be fit together. We also determine the materials we need. Finally, we determine how we will accomplish all of this: the tools we need, the order in which the parts must be constructed and composed, etc.; that is, we determine the means. All of this comprises the plan.

Second, we execute the plan: the mental form becomes real externally to the artist’s mind and into in-formed matter. We shape, mold, construct, compose, cut, add, remove, look, test, touch in a repeated series of minute, trained acts until the final goal—the artifact—is complete. Sometimes the original plan remains precisely unchanged; other times, it is altered significantly. Either way, the making is accomplished.

Recognize that both of these phases are necessary for art: we can (and do) plan as much as we wish, but without execution, no artifact exists. And while executing without a plan may seem to be spontaneous and fun (and in certain art forms may be a useful exercise), rarely would an artifact of any value arise (and certainly nothing useful: no one would enter such a building, for example).

In this way, Thomas holds both elements of art: the rational planning and the external execution. The former is ordered to the latter, but both are essential and ordered to the final product—the artifact, what is made.

The most important question concerning any philosophical explanation is whether it is an accurate description of reality. Thomas argues convincingly regarding artistic practice, because we can recognize it in our own.︎



—Matthew Lomanno, Orein ‘24
Reprinted with permission from Matthew’s Substack

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