  Firstly, the literary work can help us understand the phenomenon of meaning and meaning-giving by seeing the writer as creating new meanings, indeed a new language (a Joycean version of English, a Flaubertian French, and so on) by recomposing a language he or she shares with an entire historical community. This is a truly ambiguous aspect that can be taken (on one hand) as the proof of the mystery of expression, evidence of a creative power required to make possible the emergence of the new out of the old, while (on the other hand) this new is possible only on the basis of the already-instituted. But this initial remark points to a much deeper level; here, it is painting that offers the most precious indications. In discussing André Malraux’s seminal essays on the history of painting (Malraux 1953), Merleau-Ponty articulated a detailed existentialist theory of meaning where the artwork plays the central role. The Husserlian metaphor of ‘perspective’ is appropriated and transformed into a general formula for both the power of perception and the metaphysical condition of the human being.