Ananda Coomaraswamy

Sri Lankan Tamil metaphysician and art historian who wrote The Dance of Shiva, The Transformation of Nature in Art, and Am I My Brother's Keeper — serving as the first scholar to make Indian and Islamic art accessible to the Western world and developing a metaphysical interpretation of art as the expression of universal principles.

Demonstrated that traditional art (Indian, Islamic, medieval Christian) encodes metaphysical knowledge — art is not self-expression but the making visible of universal principles — and argued that modernity's separation of art from metaphysics represents a catastrophic impoverishment of both.