This article analyses the importance of awareness, creation, redemption, art and artistic imagination in John Banville’s Trilogy of Art. All the three novels, "The Book of Evidence" (1989), "Ghosts" (1993) and "Athena" (1995) have the same protagonist-narrator, a common texture of plots, references and allusions and a shared theme of art. The artistic imagination, which is central to Banville’s intellectual and literary enquiry, can be regarded as the dominant theme of the whole trilogy. All three novels basically either dramatize an attempt at transcending the chasm between art and reality or complacently explore the intersection, the no man’s land which arises from their overlapping. In the texts we find numerous direct references to famous painters and the protagonists own experience appears to be repeatedly mirrored in the paintings he describes. Art thus appears to be Banville’s ultimate – and only – object of reverence, and it becomes a sort of amoral and yet superior “real life”. It is within this “familiar otherwhere of Art”, that the protagonist delights but pretends to despair.
