The concept of art is a historical one. When Saint Thomas uses the word “art” he means something completely different than a modern thinker, as Etienne Gilson made a point of observing in 1958. Gilson was expressing his agreement with the then most recent essay on Thomist aesthetics, that of Umberto Eco, according to whom, “As a matter of fact, the scholastic philosophers never occupied themselves ex professo with art or its aesthetic value.” And long ago P. O. Kristeller meticulously followed the misadventures of the Greek and Latin equivalents of this term in the West since antiquity, up to the constitution of what he called “the modern system of the fine arts.” This was clearly achieved in France around the mid–eighteenth century with the celebrated treatise of the abbé Batteux, Les beaux-arts reduits à un même principe, published in 1746 and destined for considerable success both in France and abroad.

Underlying the constellation of arts Batteux called “fine” (poetry, painting, sculpture, music, dance), to the exclusion of other arts called “liberal” or “mechanical,” was a concept naming their common essence, the imitation of beautiful nature, la belle nature. This is not the concept that modern consciousness associates with that of art. The fundamental notions of modern aesthetics crystallize around the idea of creation: in the work of art, understood as an organic totality, are expressed the autonomy of the beautiful and the irreducible originality of the genius whose unique gesture has engendered it. Consequently, this concept of the work, fruit of human activity, has taken the place of the idea of beauty (which designates qualities possibly independent of human activity) as a focus for reflection on the arts.