Art and the spirit of man / Rene Huyghe ; [translated from the French by Norbert Guterman]. (Text)

Includes index.

Introduction : art as language -- Part I : The means of expression -- How art translates the spirit of man -- Drawing and the hand. The human types ; Relationship to life ; The individual -- Form and intellect -- Light and life -- Color and the spirit of man -- Dreams and the image. Art ; Artists : James Ensor, Marc Chagall -- Part II : The human meaning of art -- Art and ideas ; An artist and the thought of his time : Leonardo da Vinci -- Art and society. The Flemish middle class and the discovery of matter ; A historical milieu : Flemish realism in Portugal ; Nuno Gonçalves ; Political aspects : the court vs. the provinces in seventeenth-century French art -- Art and the nation. A city-state : Venice and the School of Venice ; A nation : France and the art of the portrait -- Art and the individual : liberation of the personality in the seventeenth century. Rubens and humanism ; Poussin, Classicism, and the "modes" ; Rembrandt : the exploration of inner depths ; The flowering of personality in the eighteenth and the nineteenth century ; Watteau : song of the soul ; From the aesthetic of the individual to the multiplication of the self -- Art and the irrational. From the rational to the absurd ; Symbolism of the modern soul ; Lux et Nox.