  At this point, we can note a tension within the aesthetics of many existentialist writers (a tension that is quite acute in Sartre’s work) between the relative trans-historical meaningfulness of artworks and their utter situatedness: artworks offer an image of engaged freedom in particular situations that are truly accessible only to its contemporaries (Sartre 1948a, 50–52). Merleau-Ponty, for his part, insists on the underlying unity of the history of painting, which allows us to find traces and echoes of past painters in modern ones. The history of painting is a microcosmic image of history, and a testament to the capacity of present generations to understand the actions and passions of the past (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 72). Merleau-Ponty’s vision of the possibility of empathy across the ages does not deny the historical relativity of sense formations. It shows how, despite the spatiotemporal distance that separates historical contexts, humans can still understand each other, historians can understand previous times, anthropologists other peoples, and we can somehow access some of the meanings of past artistic practices. The expressive achievements of other peoples are both radically alien, and yet the result of expressive gestures that are commensurable to ours, inasmuch as they are the product of a common human capacity, viz., the capacity to transcend the natural world and recreate it as a meaningful and ordered universe.