AESTHETICS constitutes the life of the stone and the manifestation of its will, unfold itself in the most complete visibility (WWI 215) Of course, architecture serves a practical as well as an aesthetic purpose, but the greatness of an architect shows itself in the way he achieves pure aesthetic ends in spite of having to subordinate them to the needs of his client The representational arts, in Schopenhauer’s view, are concerned with the universal rather than the particular Paintings or sculptures of animals, he is convinced, are obviously concerned with the species, not the individual: ‘the most typical lion, wolf, horse, sheep, or ox, is always the most beautiful also’ But with representations of human beings, the matter is more complicated It is quite wrong to think that art achieves beauty by imitating nature How could an artist recognize the perfect sample to imitate if he did not have an a priori pattern of beauty in his mind? And has nature ever produced a human being perfectly beautiful in every respect? What the artist understands is something that nature only stammers in half-uttered speech The sculptor ‘expresses in the hard marble that beauty of form which in a thousand attempts nature failed to produce, and presents it to her as if telling her ‘‘This is what you wanted to say’’ ’ (WWI 222) The general idea of humanity has to be represented by the sculptor or painter in the character of an individual, and it can be presented in individuals of various kinds In a genre picture, it does not matter ‘whether ministers discuss the fate of countries and nations over a map, or boors wrangle in a beer-house over cards and dice’ Nor does it matter whether the characters represented in a work of art are historical rather than fictional: the link with a historical personage gives a painting its nominal significance, not its real significance For example, Moses found by the Egyptian princess is the nominal significance of a painting; it represents a moment of the greatest importance in history; the real significance, on the other hand, that which is really given to the onlooker, is a foundling child rescued from its floating cradle by a great lady, an incident which may have happened more than once (WWI 231) Because of this, the paintings of Renaissance painters that Schopenhauer most admired were not those that represented a particular event (such as the nativity or the Crucifixion) but rather simple groups of saints alongside 257