Abstract
Painting cannot be understood through a single relation between image and meaning. For example, Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait combines extreme pictorial precision with persistent classificatory failure, a combination that mesocosmic fit, coordination with the living world, and intersymbolic fit, coordination with other symbolic systems, only partly explain on their own. Mesocosmic fit divides into intramesocosmic fit, habitability, and mesocosmic fidelity. Intersymbolic fit divides from intersymbolic dependency. Intermesocosmic coordination is the basis of style. A painting constructs a world within itself, relates that world to other painted worlds through recurrent ways of building mesocosms, and depends to varying degrees on external symbolic systems for its intelligibility. Tracing these six dimensions across Van Eyck, Impressionism, Cubism, and the conceptual readymade gives art history a multidimensional structure in place of a single sequence running from religious to secular to abstract.
I. Two Kinds of Coordination
A painting coordinates with the living world of appearance, scale, material, and situation, mesocosmic fit, and it coordinates with texts, iconographies, legal categories, and other symbol systems, intersymbolic fit. Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait holds the two apart with unusual clarity: extreme optical precision paired with six centuries of unresolved dispute about what the painting’s central gesture actually records.
A Van Eyck room fits despite an inconsistent perspective system, a chandelier too large for its recess, a bed too short for its occupants. A Monet is highly faithful to atmospheric perception while remaining weakly faithful to object contour, a redistribution of realism rather than a failure of it. A Van Gogh and a Monet depict comparable subjects, a garden, a haystack, a street, while making worlds in unmistakably different ways, ways a viewer recognizes before identifying either painter’s name. A Duchamp readymade is mesocosmically obvious, an ordinary urinal presented as an ordinary urinal, while remaining artistically unintelligible without access to a symbolic network entirely external to the object itself.
Six relations organize how a painting makes a world available. Intramesocosmic fit is coherence among the five mediations within a represented world. Habitability is the degree to which that world affords imaginable continuation. Mesocosmic fidelity is the degree to which particular differentiations of an encountered mesocosm are preserved. Intermesocosmic coordination, the basis of style, is a recurrent way of organizing mesocosms across more than one painted world. Intersymbolic fit is a painting’s coordination with external symbolic systems. Intersymbolic dependency is how much of a painting’s intelligibility depends on access to those systems.
What kind of world a painting constructs is a question of intramesocosmic organization. How it constructs that world, and how its manner of construction relates to other paintings, is a question of fidelity and style. How much of what a painting does depends on symbolic worlds elsewhere is a question of intersymbolic fit and dependency.
II. Painting as Mesocosmic Construction
Nobody can enter a painted room, stroke a painted dog, smell painted air, walk behind a painted figure, eat a painted orange, or receive a response from painted people. Painting does not reproduce mesocosmic recursivity, the continuous, revisable loop through which a living body inhabits a world.
Paintings nonetheless make these unrealizable continuations available to a viewer’s imagination. A floor appears walkable. A chair appears sittable. Fur appears touchable. A doorway seems traversable. A person appears capable of turning, of responding, of noticing the viewer in turn. Painting gives enough form to the mediations that constitute a mesocosm for a recursive viewer to continue it in imagination, using competences the painting itself never supplies directly.
Intramesocosmic fit is coherence among the five mediations, multisensorial embodiment, being-with, multimaterial forming, multiversal dwelling, and multisymbolism, within the world a painting represents. The question is not whether each mediation is represented with equal strength, since no painting represents all five equally, but whether their relations make sense together. A room feels habitable because bodies fit the furniture depicted around them, materials afford the actions their forms suggest, light belongs convincingly to the surfaces it falls across, beings occupy legible social relations with one another, and symbolic objects, a book, an inscription, a devotional image, belong within the world rather than floating free of it.
Intramesocosmic fit is independent of the conventional vocabulary of realism. A painting can have poor optical or geometric accuracy and excellent intramesocosmic fit simultaneously.
In the Arnolfini Portrait, the chandelier does not sit comfortably within the space assigned to it. The perspective does not resolve into one consistent geometric system across the floorboards, the window recess, and the bed canopy. The mirror does not optically reproduce the foreground scene with anything like the fidelity a real convex mirror would supply. None of this prevents the room from working. A viewer registers a coherent, inhabitable domestic interior long before any of these distortions become visible, and they only become visible at all once a scholar arrives with tracings, measurements, and the patience to disbelieve an initial impression that remains, for every other viewer, entirely undisturbed. Realism is selective mesocosmic fit, prioritization of some dimensions of coordination over others rather than an undifferentiated achievement. The coherence of a represented world, whether its parts hang together as a world at all, is a separate question from fidelity to any one particular dimension of an encountered mesocosm.
III. Habitability: When a Painted World Can Continue
Habitability is the degree to which a represented mesocosm supports recursively imaginable continuation across the five mediations. The word should not collapse into comfort or beauty.
A prison cell can be highly habitable, its walls, its bench, its light, its confined but legible space affording exactly the kinds of bodily continuation, sitting, pacing, waiting, that habitability requires, without the cell being remotely beautiful. A battlefield can be habitable in this technical sense, its mud, its wreckage, and its bodies cohering into a world a viewer can imagine moving through, however harrowing that world would be to actually inhabit. A painting can be optically convincing while remaining deliberately, pointedly uninhabitable, a nightmare landscape whose geometry refuses to resolve into any space a body could occupy, its very refusal being the point of the image rather than a failure of it.
Several questions assess habitability directly. Could bodies move within this world. Could its objects be handled. Could the beings it depicts encounter one another, notice each other, respond. Could an action shown mid-course plausibly continue past the frame’s edge. Does the depicted world imply a before and an after, a moment this is not the only moment of. Does it permit dwelling, in the fuller sense of a place someone could return to rather than merely pass through once.
These questions separate representation that is highly differentiated but thin from representation that constructs a world. A gold-ground Madonna achieves intense embodiment, a real body beneath real drapery, and intense symbolic density, an elaborate iconographic apparatus surrounding the figure, while deliberately declining ordinary habitability altogether. There is no room for the Madonna to occupy in any spatial sense a viewer could complete, no floor extending believably behind the gold field, no implied elsewhere the figure might have walked in from. This is not a shortcoming. It is a different construction, one that intensifies embodiment and symbol while suspending dwelling almost completely.
A Dutch domestic interior maximizes ordinary habitability, building rooms whose floors, light, furniture, and inhabitants cohere into spaces a viewer can imagine occupying for an afternoon. A Surrealist interior can preserve local habitability, an individual chair, an individual doorway rendered with total conviction, while making the whole space impossible, corridors that could not connect, rooms that could not adjoin, so that habitability succeeds locally and fails globally at once. A conceptual work may construct no depicted habitable world at all, offering instead an instruction, a document, or an object whose relevant relations lie almost entirely outside the category habitability measures.
Habitability is a basic variable in any art-historical description of a painting, alongside subject, style, and period. It sorts works along a dimension the more familiar categories do not reach.
IV. Mesocosmic Fidelity: Fidelity to What?
Fit and fidelity are different achievements. Intramesocosmic fit asks whether a represented world coheres. Mesocosmic fidelity asks something narrower: to what degree, and along which dimension, a painting preserves the differentiations of an encountered mesocosm.
Fidelity is always fidelity along some dimension, never a single undifferentiated achievement a painting simply has more or less of. There is fidelity to colour. Fidelity to anatomical proportion. Fidelity to the behaviour of light. Fidelity to surface texture. Fidelity to atmosphere. Fidelity to bodily movement. Fidelity to social relation. Fidelity to spatial geometry. Fidelity to material affordance, what a depicted object would actually allow a body to do with it. No painting maximizes all of these simultaneously. A painting chooses, whether deliberately or through inherited convention, which dimensions to intensify and which to let go.
The Arnolfini interior achieves extremely high fidelity to surface, reflection, texture, and local optical differentiation, the individual hairs of the dog’s coat, the precise way brass catches window light, the particular weight heavy fabric would carry. It achieves, at the very same time, selective and evidently deliberate departures from geometric organization, the chandelier misjudged against its recess, the perspective inconsistent across the room’s different planes. High fidelity along one set of dimensions coexists comfortably with localized low fidelity along another, while overall habitability, the room’s felt coherence as an inhabitable place, remains extremely high throughout. Fidelity and habitability are separable properties of the same painting.
Nineteenth century realism intensifies mesocosmic fidelity toward ordinary bodies, labour, clothing, environments, and social life that earlier painting had largely declined to render with comparable seriousness. It is not the highest form of realism, a phrase that reintroduces an undifferentiated notion of fidelity. It is one historical attempt to maximize fidelity to an increasingly ordinary range of mesocosmic worlds, in which the subject itself, a labourer rather than a saint, a kitchen rather than a throne room, changes alongside the technique.
Impressionism is often narrated as a decrease in realism, a step away from the fidelity nineteenth century realism had just achieved. It is better described as a redistribution of fidelity. Contour fidelity decreases, and object permanence weakens, a haystack’s edge dissolving into the light around it rather than holding a stable boundary. Fidelity to atmospheric light, to chromatic relation, to temporality, and to the embodied experience of perceiving a scene rather than merely recording its outlines all increase. A viewer loses precise contour and gains something realism, on the ordinary understanding of the word, had never attempted to supply.
Expressionism and Cubism extend the same logic in different directions. Expressionism lowers fidelity to normal anatomy, to local colour, or to spatial stability, while intensifying fidelity to some other aspect of experienced life, emotional intensity, psychological pressure, the felt distortion of a body under strain, that ordinary anatomical accuracy would have suppressed. Cubism dismantles single-viewpoint fidelity altogether, refusing the assumption that a coherent world can only be shown from one position at one moment, while retaining enough objecthood, enough recognizable material structure, for the things depicted to remain identifiable through their own fractured presentation.
Modernism, across all of these cases, often does not abandon mesocosmic fidelity. It contests what deserves fidelity, redistributing a painter’s attention across the same finite set of dimensions rather than reducing the total.
V. Style Is Intermesocosmic Coordination
Style is astonishingly easy to recognize. A viewer identifies a Van Gogh before identifying the painting’s subject. A viewer recognizes Impressionism as a mode of picture-making without knowing anything about a given canvas’s iconography, its date, or its title. A viewer distinguishes Byzantine from Renaissance painting almost instantly, often from a fragment too small to show any recognizable subject at all. Style resists the kind of propositional paraphrase that iconographic content submits to comparatively easily, because style is not principally semantic. Asking what a style means is asking the wrong kind of question of it.
Style is recurrent intermesocosmic coordination. A style is a recurrent way of organizing pictorial mesocosms across more than one work, a repeated relation among form, edge, colour, surface, depth, bodies, objects, space, light, materiality, scale, gesture, and dwelling that shows up again and again regardless of what any particular painting happens to depict. Style does not relate a painting to a meaning. It relates mesocosms to mesocosms, one painted world’s way of holding itself together to another’s.
A painter develops recurrent solutions to the problem of constructing a coherent pictorial world, solutions that persist across radically different subject matter. How Van Gogh forms a chair and how Van Gogh forms a cypress tree are recognizably related despite the objects themselves having almost nothing in common, no shared shape, no shared function, no shared iconographic history. What recurs across the two is not the represented thing, and it is not a shared meaning either object might carry. What recurs is a way of making things pictorially available, a characteristic relation between mark, edge, and colour that both the chair and the cypress submit to.
Collective style extends the same structure across a group of painters. The Impressionists did not share identical subjects, and they did not share identical meanings across their respective canvases. What they shared, and what makes it accurate to speak of Impressionism as one thing rather than a loose association of painters who happened to exhibit together, is that they entered something like interrecursive relations with one another’s ways of forming worlds, watching, borrowing, disputing, and revising a shared set of mediational strategies for handling light, edge, and atmosphere until those strategies stabilized into a recognizable collective style.
A pictorial civilization sediments recurrent forms of mesocosmic organization so deeply, and reproduces them across so many generations of painters, that the forms become visually obvious, instantly recognizable to any viewer, while remaining conceptually almost invisible, rarely named or theorized as the specific achievement they are. Byzantine sacred painting, Early Netherlandish painting, Renaissance perspectival construction, Chinese literati painting, Baroque pictorial space, and Impressionism itself are none of them merely symbolic systems distinguished by the different doctrinal or narrative content they happen to carry. Each is a historically stabilized way of organizing a pictorial mesocosm, a characteristic relation among space, body, light, and material that persists across an enormous range of different subjects and different intersymbolic programmes.
Style is not intersymbolic fit. Paintings influence one another symbolically. Artists look at other paintings. Paintings become reproducible objects, engraved, copied, described in treatises, and circulated well beyond their original context. Styles are named, taught, and consciously imitated. What is transmitted stylistically, from one painting to the next, or from one painter’s earlier work to a later one, is not exhausted by propositional meaning in the way an iconographic convention is. A style migrates from religious subjects to secular ones without losing its identity as a style, because what makes it recognizable was never tied to the subject matter it happened to be applied to. The same iconography, the same intersymbolic content, is realized in wildly different styles across different periods and regions.
Hold the intersymbolic source of the Annunciation constant across an enormous range of styles. Gabriel arrives. Mary receives the news. The same textual and doctrinal content organizes the scene across Byzantine icon painting, Gothic manuscript illumination, Early Netherlandish panel painting, Renaissance fresco, Baroque altarpiece, and twentieth century modernist treatments of the same subject. What changes across this entire sequence, with the intersymbolic content essentially fixed, is the mesocosmic organization, how space is constructed, how bodies are scaled and posed, how light behaves, how material surfaces are rendered, how the room or garden around the two figures coheres or refuses to cohere as an inhabitable place. The content barely moves across six centuries of treatments while the mesocosmic construction changes almost beyond recognition.
VI. Intersymbolic Fit versus Intersymbolic Dependency
Intersymbolic fit concerns how a painting relates to scripture, iconographic convention, legal category, mythology, literature, inscription, prior symbolic articulation, and later theoretical framework. Fit asks whether a relation holds, whether a painting’s gesture, object, or configuration coordinates well or badly with an external symbolic system.
Intersymbolic dependency is the extent to which understanding what an artwork is doing requires access to symbolic articulations not immediately available within its own presented mesocosm. Dependency asks how much of the artwork’s own intelligibility collapses if an external system is removed. A painting can achieve very poor intersymbolic fit, generating six centuries of unresolved dispute about which category its central gesture belongs to, while remaining only moderately dependent on any single resolution of that dispute for its basic intelligibility as a painting. A painting can achieve reasonably stable intersymbolic fit, a well-established convention correctly and legibly deployed, while being so completely dependent on that convention that removing it leaves almost nothing behind.
High mesocosmic fit and high intersymbolic fit coexist without tension: a painting constructs a coherent world and correctly deploys a stable symbolic convention at the same time. High mesocosmic sufficiency, a world complete and intelligible on its own terms, and high intersymbolic dependency, a work whose intelligibility collapses without external symbolic access, compete in the same respect, because they make opposite demands on where a viewer’s attention has to go for the work to succeed.
The Arnolfini dog, considered as a dog, exhibits low intersymbolic dependency. It has an entirely adequate mesocosmic reason for being present in a domestic interior, and a viewer who knows nothing about fidelity iconography loses very little of the room’s basic coherence and conviction. The dove in an Annunciation exhibits high dependency upon an external symbolic system, Christianity’s specific theological identification of dove with Holy Spirit, without which a viewer registers only an oddly positioned bird rather than the event the painting is built to convey. A conceptual readymade, a manufactured object presented as an artwork with minimal alteration, carries potentially extreme intersymbolic dependency, its status as art almost entirely unavailable to a viewer without access to a title, an exhibition history, an institutional context, and an accumulated theoretical discourse about what counts as art.
Mesocosmic sufficiency says, in effect, stay here. The work rewards sustained attention to this particular body, this light, this surface, this room, this material relation, without requiring the viewer to consult anything beyond the painting itself. Intersymbolic dependency says the opposite: go elsewhere. The work requires scripture, mythology, a manifesto, a theoretical text, a title, an institutional history, or a body of prior art before its own operation becomes available at all.
A single painting can make both demands, though not from the same feature at once. The Arnolfini room’s habitability and the room’s central gesture’s unresolved legal classification are different features of the same panel, one rewarding sustained attention on its own mesocosmic terms, the other requiring exactly the external symbolic access six centuries of scholarship have failed to supply.
VII. From the Dove to the Dog: A Historical Transformation in Pictorial Sufficiency
The dove in an Annunciation cannot just be a dove. Dove toward Holy Spirit is strongly stabilized within an established Christian repertoire, and the represented bird remains mesocosmic enough to be recognizable, feathered, winged, in flight, while carrying extremely high intersymbolic dependency. Its mere avian presence is insufficient to the painting’s own purpose. A viewer who saw only a bird, without the theological apparatus that identifies it, would miss what the painting communicates at that point in the composition.
The Arnolfini dog has an entirely adequate mesocosmic reason for being present in a domestic world, a household of this kind would very plausibly own a small dog, and its presence requires no external symbolic system to become intelligible. It may carry symbolic surplus, an association with fidelity a contemporary viewer might well have drawn, but it does not require that association, or any other, in order to succeed as a depicted dog within a coherent, habitable room.
There is one dog, mesocosmically speaking, its breed and posture open to only narrow disagreement. There are many symbolic dogs, fidelity, domesticity, status, companionship, vigilance, each competing without any decisive pictorial evidence to settle among them. Mesocosmic identification is constraint-rich and proliferation-poor. Intersymbolic interpretation is comparatively constraint-poor and proliferation-rich. Civilization surrounds a stable mesocosmic object with an expanding, largely unconstrained field of competing symbolic doubles, a symbolic halo the mesocosmic dog itself never has to carry.
Earlier Netherlandish painters intensified domestic habitability within sacred subject matter. Robert Campin’s Mérode Altarpiece renders a bourgeois Flemish interior with a specificity that anticipates almost everything Van Eyck would later do with fur and floorboards, while still requiring a Christ child to descend visibly through the window on rays of light for the room to earn its theological justification. Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait pushes the same domestic habitability to a point of unusual autonomy, sufficient on its own mesocosmic terms without any comparable intervention required to justify the labour spent constructing it.
This is not religious giving way to secular. It is symbolically necessary mesocosm giving way to mesocosmically sufficient world, a shift in which intersymbolic dependency loosens even where intersymbolic fit, the Passion scenes still visible around Arnolfini’s mirror, remains entirely intact. An ordinary room, an ordinary chair, an ordinary dog become worth painting on the strength of their own mesocosmic sufficiency alone.
VIII. Metabolic Economy and Mesocosmic Autonomy
A room, a chair, or a dog becomes worth an artist’s extraordinary labour under specific economic conditions.
Painting is metabolically costly. It requires years of training, expensive materials, sustained workshop time, patronage sufficient to support the painter through the whole process, and, beneath all of that, the ordinary metabolic costs of food, shelter, and labour any skilled human activity depends on. A religious commission justifies an immense expenditure of this kind through sacred significance alone, the value of the labour underwritten by the value of what it depicts, salvation, doctrine, ecclesiastical authority, rather than by the depicted mesocosm’s own interest. A wealthy merchant, increasingly present in fifteenth century Bruges and cities like it, justifies the same expenditure through possession itself. The room, the textiles, the imported goods, and the portrait commission instantiate a world whose economic value does not require transcendental legitimation to be worth the labour spent representing it.
A patron who can afford Van Eyck can afford to have a dog painted simply because it is a dog. Nothing about the dog needs to earn its expenditure by signifying anything beyond its own presence. This is the metabolic condition of mesocosmic autonomy, the material precondition for intersymbolic dependency to loosen.
Money operates as a contrastive symbolic system within this economy. Money reduces interpretive surplus sufficiently to produce commensurability among things that share almost nothing else in common, fur, fruit, labour, and a painter’s time, all reducible to a single figure that settles an exchange without requiring any of the exchanged items to be hermeneutically decoded first. Religious symbolic value justifies representation on its own, independent of any market for the depicted object itself. Monetary value justifies mesocosmic specificity directly, without routing that justification through a transcendental register.
Economic surplus, the kind mercantile wealth and long-distance trade generated in growing quantity across the fifteenth century, funds the pictorial autonomy of ordinary worlds.
IX. Modernism and Conceptual Art: The Reversal of Dependency
Realism intensifies mesocosmic fidelity along an increasingly ordinary range of subjects. Impressionism redistributes fidelity rather than reducing it, trading contour and permanence for atmosphere and perceptual immediacy. Expressionism and Cubism alter the terms of fidelity more drastically, each contesting which dimension of experienced life deserves a painter’s most exacting attention. Modernism makes intermesocosmic organization itself available for recursion: painters become progressively more conscious of style as an object in its own right rather than a byproduct of representing a subject faithfully. Style becomes self-conscious, discussed, theorized, and deliberately varied by painters who understand themselves to be working within, or against, a recognizable way of constructing pictorial worlds.
The mesocosmic object at the centre of a conceptual work can become entirely banal. A urinal presented as an artwork remains perfectly intelligible as a urinal, its mesocosmic construction requiring no special pictorial achievement whatsoever, since the object was manufactured rather than represented. The artistic operation instead depends heavily on designation, title, the identity of the artist presenting the object, the exhibition context in which it appears, the surrounding institutional apparatus, and an accumulated history of art and theory that alone makes the gesture legible as art rather than as a plumbing fixture. Conceptual art combines extremely low requirements for represented mesocosmic construction with extremely high intersymbolic dependency, the inverse of the profile Van Eyck’s dog exhibits.
Secular art does not steadily escape intersymbolization as it becomes progressively more autonomous from religious content. It develops an intersymbolic universe of its own, no less demanding than the one it left behind. Scripture is replaced by theory. Theology is replaced by institutional discourse, museum, gallery, catalogue, critical reception. Saints’ attributes are replaced by an accumulated history of artistic precedent a viewer needs in order to recognize what a given gesture is doing in relation to everything that came before it. Mesocosmic sufficiency rises through the early modern period, and intersymbolic dependency rises again afterward, on entirely new and no less demanding terms.
X. A Method for Analysing a Painting
A sequence of analytic questions applies these distinctions to a painting, weighted differently depending on the work.
Reconstruct the painted mesocosm: what bodies, beings, materials, places, and symbolic objects the work makes available to a viewer. Analyse the five mediations, which are amplified, which are muted, and how they constrain or fail to constrain one another. Assess intramesocosmic fit: does the represented world cohere, where precisely does it fail to cohere, and where misfit occurs, is it a lapse or is it doing productive work, as an impossible perspective can sometimes intensify rather than undermine a room’s felt inhabitability.
Assess habitability: what forms of recursive continuation the world affords, what could plausibly happen next within it, what a body could actually do there. Assess mesocosmic fidelity: to which dimensions the painting has committed itself, surface, light, anatomy, social life, atmosphere, spatial geometry, or material affordance, since no painting commits to all of them equally and the pattern of commitment is itself diagnostic.
Locate style intermesocosmically: what ways of organizing a pictorial world recur across the artist’s own oeuvre, across a movement, a workshop, a region, a period, or an entire pictorial civilization. Reconstruct intersymbolic fit: what external texts, iconographies, myths, doctrines, theories, or classifications constrain the work. Assess intersymbolic dependency: how much of the work’s own artistic operation becomes inaccessible if those external relations are removed.
Distinguish symbols from indices and from mesocosmic constraints. Does the fur symbolize wealth, or does a world containing this particular fur simply make poverty implausible given everything else the configuration establishes. Does a dog signify fidelity as a matter of settled convention, or is it merely available, should a viewer wish to draw the connection, for that symbolic surplus without requiring it.
Reconstruct the metabolic economy that made the work possible: why this particular world was worth painting, who could sustain the labour involved, what forms of value, sacred or monetary, made the representation economically achievable.
Analyse subsequent interpretation as its own object of study: which later symbolic relations illuminate the painting, which merely proliferate around it without adding real determinacy, where scholarly intersymbolization has generated distinctions considerably more precise than anything the pictorial source itself ever stabilized.
A gold-ground altarpiece rewards the fidelity and dependency questions far more than the habitability question. A Dutch interior rewards habitability and style. A conceptual readymade may reward almost nothing but dependency.
XI. Conclusion: Painting Before Meaning
Mesocosmic fit contains six distinguishable dimensions. Intramesocosmic coherence asks whether a represented world’s mediations hang together at all. Habitability asks what recursive continuation that world affords. Mesocosmic fidelity asks which particular dimensions of an encountered mesocosm a painting preserves. Style, as intermesocosmic coordination, relates painted mesocosms to one another rather than functioning as a decorative surface applied on top of content. Intersymbolic fit and intersymbolic dependency both concern a painting’s relation to symbolic systems outside its own presented world, and ask different questions of that relation.
These six dimensions generate configurations considerably more varied than a linear art history describes. A work can be highly habitable while remaining geometrically distorted. It can be highly faithful along one dimension while remaining symbolically opaque along every other. It can be stylistically recognizable at a glance while its subject remains semantically ambiguous after six centuries of study. It can be mesocosmically banal, an ordinary manufactured object, while carrying extreme theoretical dependency. It can be symbolically dense while visually spare, or mesocosmically sufficient on its own terms while remaining entirely open to whatever symbolic surplus a later viewer adds.
Art history is a changing configuration of fit, fidelity, habitability, style, sufficiency, and symbolic dependency, six dimensions moving somewhat independently of one another, rather than a single sequence running from religious to secular, from realist to abstract, from abstract to conceptual.
A painting invites several questions before it invites the question of meaning. What world is here. How does it hold together. How faithfully does it preserve particular aspects of an encountered mesocosm, and which ones. How has this particular way of making worlds recurred elsewhere, in a painter’s other work, in a movement, in an entire pictorial civilization. What other symbolic worlds, if any, does understanding it actually depend upon.
A painting is not first a message about a world. The Arnolfini dog does not need to mean fidelity for the room around it to succeed. A painting is a way of making a world available, and only some of what becomes available there needs to point anywhere else.