The Sistine Chapel is invoked through the painting associated with it, not as a place visited or described in its own right. Its role is to anchor an example about the difference between knowing a feature of an artwork and imaginatively apprehending that feature, and later to illustrate how an artwork’s aesthetic object differs from its physical support.

The Chapel as a Reference Point

A subject asked how many primary colors appear on the Madonna of the Sistine Chapel first recalled an image of the Madonna in her cloak and another of two figures, including Saint Barbara in yellow. The subject identified red, yellow, and green, then considered whether blue was also present. Blue entered awareness not as a new visual image but as the notion that the painting represented it.

The Chapel thus appears within an account of knowledge that can aim at something without supplying an intuitive image of it. The subject’s answer distinguishes recalling some depicted colors from knowing that blue belongs in the painting’s color scheme. The text does not establish that the subject had visited the Chapel or seen the painting there; the example concerns what the subject knows and imagines.

Color as Relation and Image

The blue is identified as the painting’s fourth primary color. In this example, it can be thought of through its relation to the other colors and to the ordering of the painting, even when no image of blue is present. Such knowledge is determinate in one respect—it identifies blue by its place in a system—but remains empty of the sensible appearance of a particular blue.

The account distinguishes that relational knowledge from imaging consciousness. An image is not simply a visual addition to knowledge already complete: knowledge helps constitute what is represented, while an image can give intuitive fulfilment to an otherwise empty signification. The reference to the Sistine Chapel therefore serves a specific philosophical purpose: it makes concrete how a feature of a painting may be known as a relation before it is intuitively presented.

The Madonna and the Aesthetic Object

In the discussion of art, the Sistine Madonna is again named as the painting whose blue may be known as the fourth primary color. The larger argument distinguishes the real canvas and its material marks from the aesthetic object apprehended through them. The depicted or imagined object is not identical with the paint and canvas; it appears when consciousness takes an imaging attitude toward the material support.

This distinction places the Chapel’s Madonna within the book’s account of artworks as irreality: a painting’s physical support is real, while its aesthetic object is apprehended through that support rather than as an ordinary object available to perception. The Chapel itself receives no architectural or historical description. Its significance here lies in the artwork associated with it and in the example that artwork supplies for the relations among knowledge, image, and aesthetic apprehension.