[366] If we ask this question, we come certainly to the distinction between the naturalistic^a and the expressionistic^b styles. You remember that I took them to be overall styles, through the whole history of art, and that both of them express a special relationship to reality. Here we have something which both characterizes a special period and man's situation universally. Actually the situation is such that we can say: artistic style is expressionistic style because expression is the meaning of art. But in some small moments of history, the naturalistic trend became dominant. This was so since the classical period in Greece, the 5th century, up to the first century before Christ when a new archaism started, a return to the pre-naturalistic style, into which, then, Christianity could easily enter. And the second period in Western civilization started with the early Renaissance^c and went through with a strong interruption in the period of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, up to the end of the 19th century. Now these are two periods in Western history as far as we know it, in which naturalistic

tendencies prevail over against expressionistic tendencies. Let me repeat what I tried to show in connection with the pictures, that even in naturalistic style it is not the negation of the ultimate^d AS SUCH, which is meant, but as the philosophy of the early Renaissance clearly shows, it is the desire to find the ultimate, the infinite, in nature, society and man. And the philosophers^e and artists^f in early Florence of the Renaissance worked intimately together. The philosophers tried to express rationally, or better, conceptually, what the artists did visually,and vice versa.