Sistine Madonna

The Sistine Madonna figures in Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis as a test case for the difference between knowing a feature of a painting and picturing or sensibly encountering it. A subject can identify blue as the painting’s fourth primary colour without forming an image of that blue; the example shows how knowledge may reach an object through relations while leaving its particular sensible character beyond pure thought.

The recollection of the painting

Asked how many primary colours appear in the Sistine Madonna, one of Karl Bühler’s subjects reports an ordered recollection. The subject first has an image of the Madonna in her cloak, then an image of two other figures, especially Saint Barbara in yellow. From these images the subject recalls red, yellow, and green. The subject then wonders whether blue is present and arrives, without an image, at the notion that it is.

The sequence separates pictured details from a concluding act of knowledge. The subject’s answer does not depend on producing an image of blue: it identifies the colour by its place in the painting’s set of primary colours. The Sistine Madonna thus provides a concrete instance of knowledge that is directed toward what is represented in a painting without becoming an intuitive presentation of every represented feature.

Colour as a relation, not a particular sensation

Sartre describes the subject’s knowledge as aiming at blue as it appears in the Sistine Madonna and as the fourth primary colour. In this mode, blue is grasped through an order of relations. It is known as occupying a determinate position in a colour system, rather than encountered as the unique shade present before a viewer.

The example supports a distinction between the particular sensible colour and thought about that colour. Pure thought can refer to the blue from outside, by identifying it as the painting’s fourth primary colour or by locating it within a scale. It cannot, merely through that relation, capture the individual blue as the concrete sensation it is. To see that particular blue as blue would require the sensible encounter that abstract knowledge does not supply. The painting’s colour is therefore not exhausted by the accurate relational description that knowledge can give of it.

Place in the account of images and art

The example also clarifies how knowledge differs from imaging. The subject’s initial images of the Madonna and the figures in the painting are not the same act as the later, imageless recognition of blue’s place in the colour sequence. The painting can be the target of both, but each reaches it differently: one through pictured figures and colours, the other through a relation that identifies a colour without showing it.

In the book’s later discussion of art, Sartre argues more generally that the aesthetic object is irreality, constituted when consciousness takes an imaging attitude toward a material work. His specific portrait example is Charles VIII, not the Sistine Madonna. The Madonna’s role in the earlier discussion is narrower and precise: it makes visible the limit of relational knowledge, showing how a person may know which colour is represented without possessing its distinctive sensible quality in an image or in pure thought.