 A third distinctive feature of Maritain’s philosophy of art is his account of artistic (or what he sometimes calls ‘poetic’) knowledge. Maritain notes the focus on the awareness of the self as a characteristic of art from the time of the German romantics, and he recognises its value so far as it challenges the emphasis by some artists of the 17th century on reason and mechanical technique—perhaps having in mind figures such as Paul Freart de Chantelou. Artistic knowledge is an instance of what Maritain calls, in general, knowledge though connaturality; it is a kind of ‘creative intuition’ that arises out of “the free creativity of the spirit” (Creative Intuition, 1953: 112; Natural Law, 2001: 18; see Bellusci 2013, Klein 2010). Maritain also describes artistic activity as a “grasping, by the poet, of his own subjectivity in order to create” (Creative Intuition, 1953: 113). As noted earlier, in the discussion of Maritain’s epistemology, this knowledge through connaturality is found at the level of the preconscious intellect. While it is non-conceptual and “obscure” (Creative Intuition, 1953: 18; see Natural Law, 2001: 18), it is, nevertheless, a knowledge of a “concrete reality”—albeit one that “tends and extends to the infinite” (Creative Intuition, 1953: 126). 