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Illusionism is an accurate account of our experience of only a few pictures. Can an account which fits all pictorial representation fare better as the basis for an aesthetic of painting? Such an account would have to begin by recognizing the fact illusionism overlooks, namely that when we see things in pictures, we are aware of both their representational and configurational aspects. As noted above (see §2), we experience the latter as organized around the thought of the former.
Schematic as this is, it already provides some help. By acknowledging the role of the configuration, we distance our experience of the picture from that of the represented object. We are thus able to explain at least how it is possible for the two to differ aesthetically. More than this, by stressing that we are aware of both aspects of the painting, we make room for the idea that it has a beauty which amounts neither to that of what is represented, nor to that of the marks considered merely as marks, but to the way the one emerges from the other. This does indeed seem to be the case for many paintings - consider Bellini’s Doge Leonardo Loredanagain. This beauty is both important to painting and distinctively pictorial. For, while other art forms too can exhibit a beauty constituted by how what they represent emerges from the means by which it is represented, only painting achieves this in the special experience by which pictorial content is grasped.
However, one lesson we took from discussing Lessing is that there must be more to pictorial art than beauty. When a painting is not beautiful, or when its beauty is only a part, perhaps a small part, of its aesthetic interest, what else is involved? We cannot here appeal, in the style of Aristotle, to the imitation itself, not even if we understand that as essentially involving our two-sided experience, seeing-in. For everypicture sustains that experience, even those of no value. Moreover, we have no account of why that experience should, in itself, be of aesthetic significance. What, then, can we say?