Artistic Image

The artistic image is the fundamental category and mode of being of art — a concrete-sensory and at the same time generalized picture of human life, created by the means of language and transformed by the creative imagination of the artist. The image unites the singular and the general, the objective and the subjective, the rational and the emotional; it does not copy reality but aesthetically transforms and concentrates it. By object, one distinguishes character-images, landscape-images, thing-images, and symbol-images; by structure, the image-trope (metaphor, metonymy). The nature of the artistic image as 'thinking in images' was studied by Oleksandr Potebnia ('Thought and Language,' 'Notes on the Theory of Literature'), who drew an analogy between the image and the inner form of the word. Figurative thinking is the specific feature of art that distinguishes it from the conceptual thinking of science. The system of images of a work creates its artistic world.