The disciplined exercise of reason in making — recta ratio factibilium (Thomas Aquinas) — as applied to the plastic and sculptural arts.
In its primary sense for sculptors, art denotes the disciplined exercise of reason in making: the capacity to produce an artifact rightly — that is, according to the intrinsic demands of the material, the form, and the purpose of the thing to be made. In Catholic Thomistic philosophy, art is defined as recta ratio factibilium — right reason with respect to things to be made.
Etymology
Latin ars, artis (skill, craft, technique, method); the root is shared with Greek aretē (excellence, virtue) and harmozō (to fit together), all deriving from an Indo-European root *ar- meaning to fit or join. The English word art enters through Old French art, which preserves the Latin nominative. The same root produces artisan, artificial, articulate (to join clearly), article (a joined part), and the architectural term articulation.
Sculptor Notes
The question of what art is — and whether sculpture qualifies — is not merely philosophical background for the practitioner; it has been a matter of institutional, economic, and social urgency for sculptors across more than two millennia. In the medieval university system, the seven artes liberales (liberal arts) — grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy — were distinguished from the artes mechanicae (mechanical or manual arts), which included agriculture, architecture, and the plastic arts. The liberal arts were free in the sense of being proper to a free man; they were arts of the mind, not the hand. Sculpture, however skilled and however conceptually demanding, was classed among the manual arts: it required physical labor, it left the practitioner’s hands dusty with stone or smeared with clay, it was paid for by the piece rather than honored by a patron who engaged the sculptor’s intellect. The great stone carvers of the thirteenth century — the masters of Chartres, Reims, Amiens — worked within this framework without apparent distress; for them the question of liberal versus mechanical arts was less pressing than the question of right making, of producing the image that would serve the liturgical and theological purposes of the cathedral program. Their art was, in the Thomistic sense, exactly recta ratio factibilium.
It is from Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics VI.4, that we receive the most useful definition of art for the practicing sculptor: recta ratio factibilium, the right reason applied to things to be made. This definition is practical and purposive rather than expressive or emotivist: art is not self-expression; it is the capacity to make a thing as it ought to be made, in accordance with the demands of its material, its form, and its end. Thomas adds that the artist who makes a saw from glass rather than iron — however beautiful the glass — has made a bad saw, and therefore a bad work of art in the primary sense, because beauty is subordinate to the right ordering of means to end. This is deeply congenial to the stone carver: the carver who ignores the grain of the stone for the sake of a delicate profile produces a sculpture liable to fracture. The ars demands that the sculptor know stone as stone, not merely as an extension of personal vision.
The Renaissance struggle to elevate sculpture to a liberal art — or at least to a fine art distinct from the merely mechanical — was fought on multiple fronts. Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550, revised 1568) is itself an argument: by writing the biographies of artists in the humanist tradition of the vita, Vasari was claiming for painters and sculptors the status of uomini illustri previously reserved for warriors, statesmen, and scholars. Leonardo da Vinci’s paragone (comparison) arguments directly addressed whether painting should be ranked among the liberal arts; the arguments for sculpture turned on the sculptor’s engagement with three-dimensional reality, geometry, and the mathematical analysis of proportion. By the time the Florentine Accademia del Disegno was founded by Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1563 — the first formal academy of art — the institutional separation of the fine arts from the mechanical crafts was nearly complete.
What was gained in the Renaissance elevation of sculpture to fine art was social recognition and intellectual prestige. What was potentially lost was the direct continuity with the artes mechanicae tradition, which had embedded the sculptor within the guild system, within a community of shared technical standards, within the pedagogical chain from apprentice to journeyman to master. The greatest medieval sculptors were artisans in the guild sense; their art was defined by its service to the Cathedral, its theological and liturgical function, its right ordering toward the making of things that assisted the faithful toward God. Whether that is a lesser or greater conception of ars than the Renaissance fine art model is a question this glossary leaves open — though it is worth noting that the builders of Chartres did not need Vasari to tell them what they were doing.