The problem of knowing how to define art, and how to divide it into categories, has always been a serious one for theoreticians and aestheticians. In his major work entitled The Concept of Art in the Past and in the Present, Professor Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, a distinguished Polish aesthetician, studies the origins of the concept of art and the successive modifications which it has undergone from antiquity to today.

In Greece, Rome and the whole of the West in the Middle Ages, art was considered either as a profession or as a science. Together with grammar, rhetoric or geometry, the second category, known as “artes liberales,” also included music, which thus became what we call today musicology, or the science of music. The other category-that of “artes vulgares”-had a more practical character and included among other subjects agriculture, medicine and architecture. In the 12th century, the philosopher Hugh of St. Victor counted among the seven “artes vulgares” a discipline to which he gave the name “theatrica” and which, Professor Tatarkiewicz tells us, comprised not only the theatre but in a general way the art of amusing the people in public, in fact all stadium games, races and circus entertainment. Poetry came under the heading of philosophy.