 Merleau-Ponty returns to the analysis of painting in his final essay, “Eye and Mind” (1964a OEE), where he accords it an ontological priority—between the linguistic arts and music—for revealing the “there is” of the world that the operationalism of contemporary science has occluded. It is by “lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings” (OEE: 16/353), and this presupposes that the artist’s body is immersed in and made of the same stuff as the world: to touch, one must be tangible, and to see, visible. Merleau-Ponty describes this as an “intertwining” or “overlapping”, in which the artist’s situated embodiment is the other side of its opening to the world. There is as yet no sharp division between the sensing and the sensed, between body and things as one common “flesh”, and painting arises as the expression of this relation: it is a “visible to the second power, a carnal essence or icon” of embodied vision (OEE: 22/355). Descartes’s efforts, in the Optics, to reconstruct vision from thought leads him to focus on the “envelope” or form of the object, as presented in engraved lines, and to treat depth as a third dimension modeled after height and width. This idealization of space has its necessity, yet, once elevated to a metaphysical status by contemporary science, it culminates in an understanding of being as purely positive and absolutely determinate. The ontological significance of modern painting and the plastic arts—e.g., Klee, de Staël, Cézanne, Matisse, Rodin—lies in the alternative philosophy that they embody, as revealed through their treatment of depth, color, line, and movement. Ultimately, such works teach us anew what it means to see: 