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 art (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 issues 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 perception of visual quality. The second part of the study continues the exploration of the theory of visual thinking in its origins in ancient medical schools. This article examines Empedocles' theory of color as the first model in European thought to link cosmology, the physiology of vision, and artistic practice. He interprets color as a proportional mixture of white (fire) and black (water), perceived by the eye through a system of "pores" and "effluvia." It analyzes the theory's connection to the ancient technique of skiagraphy, the pictorial palette of the 5th–4th centuries BC, and the concept of harmony as a numerical relationship. It demonstrates that Empedocles' approach anticipates modern concepts of visual thinking, where vision is understood as an active measurement of the relationship between light and darkness, and color as a relationship, a proportion, rather than an isolated quality of either a thing (naive materialism) or the subject perceiving it (the concept of John Locke and his followers).
visual thinking, ancient physiology of vision, psychic pneuma, imagination, artistic image, optics, Empedocles of Acragas, Sicilian medical school, color theory
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