Forms and Substances in the Arts     by Etienne Gilson, Translated by Salvator Attanasio Original title: Matières et formes Published by Dalkey Archive Press Pub. Date: February 1, 2001 Format: Paperback, 282 pages ISBN: 1564782549 List Price: $12.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

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An engaging companion piece to The Arts of the Beautiful, this volume advances Etienne Gilsons theories about art as a process of focusing on the substances available to an artist. The basis for his argument is grounded in the distinction between arts concerned with the creation of beauty and arts that are primarily f unctional. He takes up in turn: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, dance, poetry, and the theater, analyzing in each the basic materials aVorded the artist, the possibilities of artistic form, and the means of transformation and creation.

"Gilson's astonishing knowledge of all that artists have written about art is most valuable."—Manchester Guardian

"We have come to know in a long line of books the vastness of Gilson's scholarship, the freshness and depth of his insights and the clarity and vigor of his style."—J. W. Evans, Commonweal

"This book . . . achieves a grand panoramic view of the conditions governing the existence of fine art. . . . This is a grand philosophical essay."—Library Journal

"Gilson's reflections on art are deserving of some serious attention."—Choice

"Gilson is an extremely learned and down-to-earth historian. In the philosophy of art he is a scholastic philosopher with a difference."—Times Literary Supplement

"Professor Gilson writes very lucidly."—Harold Rosenberg, Saturday Review

"Gilson probably has no contemporary peer in the lucidity of his mind and the balance of his historical judgements."—Reinhold Niebuhr, New York Times