  This emphasis on the ‘derealising’ aspect of the consciousness of an image has important implications for the ontological status of the artwork. The real, material elements of the artwork are, properly speaking, not the actual elements on which the aesthetic judgement is fixed. These are fixed instead on a virtual object, i.e., the work’s ideal qualities, wherein the work’s meaning, power and beauty are manifested (Sartre 1940, 213; see also Dufrenne 1973, 3). On this account, the material aspects of the artwork are “occasions” for the manifestation of the ideal aspects. Sartre insists that one should reject any suspicion of dualism here: “There is no realisation of the imaginary, nor can we speak of its objectification,” (ibid.) as though a prior mental representation had been “objectified” and realised in the actual artwork. Rather, the “real” artwork has two sides: a real and an “unreal” (irréel, virtual, or ideal) side. These two are, however, indistinguishable. “The painting should then be conceived as a material thing visited from time to time by an unreal which is precisely the painted object” (ibid; see Dufrenne 1973, 3–18). The real, says Sartre, is the analogue of the ideal. Merleau-Ponty puts it in similar terms, at first in terms of sense and non-sense, and later on in terms of the visible and the invisible: the ideal content of the artwork is “in transparency behind the sensible or in the heart of the sensible.” It “doubles up the lights and sounds from beneath, is their other side or their depth” (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 150–151, but already in 1945a, 182–183).