In this article I use Roman Ingarden’s conceptual apparatus to show how the category of purely intentional objects can be used to analyze the consciousness of subjects who reside in intentional worlds and experience internal states invoked in their minds by sources external to them.

The author reflects on the issues raised in R. Ingarden’s article The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity. He considers them and presents them in a new light. This author believes that the musical works exist as special relations between special objects. At the same time, he refuses to consider musical creativity a product of human consciousness. In his opinion, consciousness only accepts or rejects musical phrases that present themselves as a product of unconscious brain activity.

The question about a painting artwork assumes that its ontological, cognitive as well as aesthetic status is not clear and only a profound analysis can specify what lies hidden behind this concept. Ingarden underlines its ambiguousness and discerns that its elimination constitutes one of the major tasks of aesthetics. The ambiguity just mentioned can be discerned in the gap between a painting artwork and a canvas, Ingarden emphasizes. This distinction is already curious in itself, as the two terms may be considered synonyms, yet this affinity which presupposes a distinction seems to indicate that a canvas is not a painting and is not even a part of it but constitutes a separate physical item. In the first part of the article, I offer reasons, which prompted Ingarden to introduce and emphasize this distinction which underlies the answer to the question, what constitutes the painting artwork and what constitutes the canvas that bears it. The second part of my paper focuses on the essential relationship between the painting with its physical foundation. In the third section I discuss the consequences resulting from the maintenance of the distinction in question. This reconstruction of Ingarden’s views is accompanied by comments which are polemical in character but also constitute an expansion of the underpinnings involved in the distinction that has been analyzed.