This publication continues a series of scholarly articles addressing the issues of artistic visual communication between the viewer (recipient) and the artist (master), as well as the artist (master) and the artistic material from which the master creates a work of visual (including fine) art. Traveling freely through the intellectual layers of the philosophy of art and culture, aesthetics, theory and history of culture, and art, the study focuses on examining the complex problems of visual thinking, which has a dialectical, sensory-rational nature and is embodied in the forms of visual artistic creativity, as well as the artistic reception of visual quality. The second part of the study examines the significance of the dichotomy of soul and body—a kind of unshakable foundation for subsequent philosophical and scientific thinking of the European type—for understanding the "mechanics" of the image (phantasm) as the only possible mediator between them, drawing on ancient modeling in Aristotle's treatises "On the Soul," "On the Generation of Animals," and "On the Movement of Animals." This article clarifies the translation of the word φαντασία from Aristotle's treatise "On the Soul" into Russian: it proposes returning V.A. Subbotin's first translation, completed in the mid-19th century, as "image of the imagination," since the 1976 translation of this word as "representation" requires extensive explanatory commentary. Several of Aristotle's ideas, expounded in lost works, fragments of which are cited in the works of the Church Fathers, are examined. A conclusion is reached regarding the unprecedented significance of Aristotle's theory of "psychic pneuma" as a mediator between the physical body and the soul for the theory of artistic imagery, where the work of art is considered in the aspect of artistic imagery and where the significance of the work of art is thereby defined as a potential tool for the creation of phantasms-images-mediators. Phantasms-images-mediators realize a double mediation: between the 5 sense organs and the “heart” (the organic place of “psychic pneuma”) and between the soul, transmitting images of the Supreme Spirit, and, in fact, the human body animated by it.
visual thinking, Plato, Aristotle, image, fantasy, soul, body, psychic pneuma, primary instrument
1. Aristotle. (1940). On the generation of animals. Moscow–Leningrad: Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 254.
2. Aristotle. (1976). On the soul. In Works in four volumes (Vol. 1, pp. 371–448). Moscow: Mysl.
3. Bibikhin V. V. (2001). On the translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In V. V. Bibikhin, Word and event (pp. 40–42). Moscow: Editorial URSS.
4. Golosovker Ya. E. (1987). The logic of myth. Moscow: Nauka, 218.
5. Dvoretsky I. Kh. (1958). Ancient Greek–Russian dictionary (2 vols., approx. 70,000 entries). Moscow: State Publishing House of Foreign and National Dictionaries.Vol. 1: Α–Λ, 1043; Vol. 2: Μ–Ω, 861.
6. Durand J., Sun Ch. (2021). Myth, themes, variations. Moscow: Club Castilla, 252.
7. Ermakov T. K., Degtyarenko K. A., Shpak A. A. (2024). Constructing artistic metanarratives in contemporary culture: Formal and meaning-forming aspects. Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities and Social Sciences, 17(4), 681–693.
8. Sertakova E. A., Leshchinskaya N. M., Kolesnik M. A., Sitnikova A. A. (2023). The journal Mir iskusstva (1899–1904) as a source on the history of Russian art of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. Bylye Gody, 18(4), 2025–2035. https://doi.org/10.13187/bg.2023.4.2025
9. Koptseva M. S. (2025). Transformation of The Snow Queen plot in the visual arts of the 19th–21st centuries. Northern Archives and Expeditions, 9(3), 135–146.
10. Koptseva N. P. (2025). Compositional (non-)formula: Viewer (recipient) and artist (master) as “philomaths”. Part 1. Siberian Journal of Art Studies, 4(3), 7–23. https://doi.org/10.31804/2782-4926-2025-4-3-7-23
11. Kostrigin A. A. (2016). Russian translations of Aristotle’s On the Soul (V. A. Snegirev and P. S. Popov). Yaroslavl Pedagogical Bulletin, (6), 294–298.
12. Culianu I. P. (2017). Eros and magic in the Renaissance. 1484. St. Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh Publishing House, 592.
13. Kierkegaard S. (2005). Concluding unscientific postscript to “Philosophical Fragments” by Johannes Climacus. St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg State University, 680.
14. Orlov E. V. (2011). The philosophical language of Aristotle. Novosibirsk: Nauka, 317.
15. Reznikova K. V. (2014). The Snow Queen as an artistic interpretation of the northern myth The Oera Linda Chronicle. Modern Problems of Science and Education, (5), 824.
16. Snegirev V. (1885). Aristotle’s psychological writings. Kazan: Printing House of the Imperial University, 100.
17. Sophocles. (1854). Antigone (trans. D. Shestakov). Otechestvennye zapiski, XCV, 1–30. [Electronic source] Available at: https://books.google.ru/books?id=mwwYAAAAYAAJ
18. Tertullian. On the soul. [Electronic source] Available at: https://azbyka.ru/otechnik/Tertullian/o-dushe/3_12
19. Thomas Aquinas. (2002). Summa Theologiae (trans. S. Eremeev). Kyiv: Elga; Nika-Center. [Electronic source] Available at: https://azbyka.ru/otechnik/konfessii/summa-teologii-tom-1/12
20. Bos A. P. (2013). “Pneuma” as quintessence of Aristotle’s philosophy. Hermes, 417–434.
21. Chroust A. H. (1966). The psychology in Aristotle’s lost dialogue Eudemus or On the Soul. Acta Classica: Proceedings of the Classical Association of South Africa, 9(1), 49–62.
22. Aristotle. (n.d.). De Anima (On the Soul). Based on the translation by E. M. Edghill, with minor emendations by D. Kolak, 49. [Electronic source] Available at: https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Aristotle/De-anima/de-anima1.htm
23. Durand G. (2012). L’immaginazione simbolica. Ipoc Press, 147.
24. Kolesnik M. A. (2016). Imaginary world as a subject of the “Eranos” intellectual group’s research in the 1930s–1980s. Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities and Social Sciences, 9(1), 79–90. https://doi.org/10.17516/1997-1370-2016-9-1-79-90
25. Reznikova K. V. (2015). The Oera Linda Book and The Snow Queen: Two destinies of one myth. Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities and Social Sciences, 8(1), 156–181.
26. van Buren-Penev F. (2025). A fragment of Aristotle’s lost Eudemus in Tertullian’s De Anima. The Classical Quarterly, 1–13.
