We read a letter, a poem, a book. But how do we read a work of art? We look at a painting, we may admire it immediately or it may leave us indifferent, even displeased, and then we pass it by. However, when we observe it persistently, always from a distance, like in a museum hall, we feel that we have stood in front of it for hours not only because its sight pleases us, but because it has something to tell us, to narrate to us. We then begin to recognize that, "written" in its own language, the painting requires us to "read" it. This paradoxical reading function of the idiomatic language of painting is analyzed by Louis Marin in his essay; to illuminate the intersecting boundaries of the intelligible and the visible: from the representational symbolic painting of Nicolas Poussin - where myth and History take on the narration - traversing the art of the 17th-18th century through the silent still lifes of Philippe de Champaigne, Lubin Baugin, and Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, to modern art, with examples such as the abstract painting of Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee, the author highlights the universality and autonomy of painting's representational significance, describing the pleasure of the gaze when it manages to read the visible as a letter and to look at the intelligible as matter.