According to Thomas E. Wartenberg in “The Nature of Art," Aristotle saw art forms such as painting, music, dance, literature, and sculpture as a representational. He believed that artwork can not be interpreted literarily because every artwork represents various hidden meaning such as what matters the most in poetry is not the actual meaning of the words, but as they might or could be. There are three main focuses in Aristotle’s representation theory such as the object, manner, and means. These things are related to each other and can not be separated. For instance, an object can represent something, but artist has to explain how and why he refers that object to something else. Additionally, the character and content in an artwork helps audience to feel the emotion of the artwork, and that emotion helps to bring the artwork to life. Thus, audience figure out and understand the meaning behind every artwork through experiencing the emotion and feeling. Aristotle believes that this phenomenon is associated with tragic drama art form, which leads to have actions in dramatic form that cause the artwork to deliver emotion such as fear and pity. In addition, Aristotle uses a form of philosophic argument to support his theory called teleological, which refers to a goal or purpose. Aristotle mentions that artists need to give relevant phenomena into the artwork in order to achieve the goal or purpose. Therefore, there are many artists adopt this theory and apply it to their artworks.
“The Stone Breakers” painting is the second Ornans painting of Gustave Courbet in 1849 (Janson 862). This painting is confrontational because Courbet paints the two workers in life-size scale, which leads to the realism. In the painting, the two workers are pounding stones to make grave for a road. Courbet paints the two workers with the same detailed intensity as the stones, so their faces can not be seen. This virtually transforms them into inanimate obje...