There is a deep problem with beauty. Beauty is commonly equated with sexual attractiveness. Yet there is also the beauty of art which arouses an aesthetic response of disinterested contemplation. By looking back at the classical Greek conception of beauty, we may see how it gave rise to the modern dilemma and some possible ways of resolving it.
Beauty in Art and Aesthetics
If someone were to ask you what feature was most important in judging the quality of a work of art – any work of art – I suspect that a majority would answer “beauty.” This is not surprising since the discipline of aesthetics, which arose in the eighteenth century, took beauty as its central category. This again is natural enough if we think of the visual arts of that epoch and earlier still in the Renaissance and all the way back to the classical era of Greece and Rome: we would not hesitate to describe many such works and certainly the most famous among them as beautiful.
The idea of artistic beauty came under fire, however, toward the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Modernism distanced itself from naturalistic representation, calling into question the relevance of beauty to art that was highly abstract. As Arthur Danto puts it in his book The Abuse of Beauty: “From the eighteenth century to early in the twentieth century it was the presumption that art should possess beauty.” And yet, he notes, “beauty had almost entirely disappeared from artistic reality in the twentieth century as if attractiveness was somehow a stigma with its crass commercial implications.”
Danto illustrates his claim with reference to a painting by Matisse:
“Matisse’s Blue Nude is a good even a great painting – but someone who claims it is beautiful is talking through his or her hat.”
The Debate on Beauty and Attractiveness
Danto quotes a remark by Roger Scruton: “If one finds a photograph beautiful it is because one finds something beautiful in the subject.” Yet many critics do not agree. Alexander Nehamas in his book The Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art writes:
“As long as we continue to identify beauty with attractiveness and attractiveness with a power of pleasing quickly and without much thought or effort, we can’t even begin to think of many of the twentieth century’s great works as beautiful.”
But is that so? And in particular, is it so of works of art? Are we prepared to say that a painting of an ugly subject can in fact be beautiful as a painting? As a student of ancient cultures, this question takes on a historical cast: when did people first begin to speak of the beauty of a work of art as distinct from the subject that it represents? Did the Greeks and Romans think of beauty this way?
Beauty and Desire in Ancient Greek Art
Michael Squire in his book The Art of the Body: Antiquity and its Legacy affirms: “like it or not – and there have been many reasons for not liking it – antiquity has supplied the mould for all subsequent attempts to figure and figure out the human body.” Thanks to the classical heritage, we think that a statue of a man or woman looks like a real man or woman; we can even imagine a person falling in love with the statue as though it were a real person.
There is even the word agalmatophilia from the Greek roots agalma or “statue” and philia “love”; it is defined in the Wikipedia article as a perversion “involving sexual attraction to a statue, doll, mannequin, or other similar figurative object.” The article informs us that “Agalmatophilia became a subject of clinical study with the publication of Richard von Krafft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. Ebbing recorded an 1877 case of a gardener falling in love with a statue of the Venus de Milo and being discovered attempting coitus with it.”
Art and Divine Representation
Praxiteles created a nude statue of Aphrodite which was enough of a scandal we are told by ancient sources in its own right. But a man fell so in love with the statue that he attempted to make love with it and left a stain on it that remained visible afterwards. Did the man fall in love with a statue and hence exhibit the perversion of agalmatophilia or did he fall in love with the goddess represented by the statue?
Let us remember that the Greeks carried statues of their gods and goddesses in their religious processions and worshipped them in various rites. When the Athenians wove the great robe or peplos for Athena and carried her dressed to the nines in the Panathenaic festival parade, they thought of the statue not as some inanimate stone but as a living symbol energized in some fashion by the spirit of the deity.
Beauty and Eroticism in Religious Art
I recall marching in the Holy Week processions in Seville where enormous floats are lifted on the shoulders of penitents displaying larger than life figures of Jesus, Mary, and others. Mary is always adorned with a long woven cape that is truly resplendent and it is impossible not to see that she is beautiful.
But is it the same kind of beauty as Aphrodite’s – the kind that might inspire erotic desire in a perhaps oversexed young man? Some critics would deny this absolutely. Roger Scruton, for example, writes in his book Beauty:
“There are no greater tributes to human beauty than the medieval and Renaissance images of the Holy Virgin: a woman whose sexual maturity is expressed in motherhood and who yet remains untouchable, barely distinguishable as an object of veneration from the child in her arms… The Virgin’s beauty is a symbol of purity and for this very reason is held apart from the realm of sexual appetite in a world of its own.”
The Classical Perspective on Beauty
If the ancient Greeks and Romans did not think of works of art as beautiful independently of the figures represented in them, they might not have worried about whether paintings like the Blue Nude were beautiful; they would have enjoyed representations of beautiful things of course and responded in other ways to representations of things that were not in themselves beautiful. As for the effect that beauty, whether as represented in art or in life itself, had on them, it would likely have been what beauty normally inspires, namely desire.
To be sure, ancient Greeks, being rather philosophically disposed, might stand back and wonder what it was that made a body beautiful and in this sense treat a beautiful person or object as matter for contemplation. But the double perspective on beauty that has troubled modern aesthetics did not arise for them. The tension between transcendent beauty invisible to the physical eye and the ordinary beauty of worldly creatures was an issue above all for mystically minded philosophers like Plato and for Christian theologians who were concerned about whether and how one might ascribe beauty to so elevated a figure as God. Ordinary beauty and even divine beauty aroused desire and insofar as a work of art captured such beauty, desire was the natural reaction.
More Affairs:
The Intersection of Beauty and Morality
But who was considered beautiful? Aphrodite for sure; and Helen too. So too Paris, with whom Helen fell in love and eloped to Troy, setting off the great war described in the Iliad. In general, the Greeks applied the term beauty precisely to those individuals who had sexual allure. Some women might be what we would perhaps call handsome or dignified or powerful but they did not seem primarily pretty.
I am thinking here of a goddess like Athena in full military garb with spear and helmet and the gorgon-faced aegis on her chest; and indeed where Athena is so represented, the texts that describe her seem not to attribute beauty to her. Her other attributes such as wisdom, skill at the arts, and military might are usually emphasized. With such an imposing presence, there was perhaps less emotional conflict among viewers as to her potentially erotic attractiveness.
Artistic Responses Beyond Beauty
A work of art may inspire pleasure, but the pleasure deriving from art was typically understood to derive from its technical excellence, above all in fidelity to the object, which was called in Greek mimêsis, that is, “imitation.” Aristotle explains that there are two reasons why poetry came into being. First, imitating is innate in human beings and everyone enjoys simulations; that is why we enjoy watching the exact likenesses of things that are in reality painful to see “for example the figures of the most contemptible animals and of corpses.” Aristotle’s second reason is that it is pleasurable to learn, and when people see likenesses, they realize the connection with the real thing.
Some centuries later, Plutarch in his essay How a Youth Should Listen to Poems observes that poetry, like painting, is imitative and that the pleasure poetry provides is due not to the beauty of the thing represented but rather to the faithfulness of the reproduction. This is why we enjoy imitations of sounds that are by nature unpleasant such as a pig’s squeal, a squeaky wheel, the rustle of the wind, or the beating of the sea.
Apart from pleasure, which the Greeks regarded as a sensation, a work of art may also elicit various emotions. Aristotle affirmed that the emotions proper to tragedy were pity and fear and he presumably supposed that others were suitable to other genres. Aristotle seems to have meant that these emotions are a response to the entire work, that is, the plot or story as a whole, and not to individual events or moments in the action.
The Sublime and the Beautiful
There are still other ways to respond to art. One is awe, the feeling elicited upon an encounter with the sublime or “lofty” to use the Greek term (hupsos) adopted by Longinus in his essay that is conventionally translated as On the Sublime. Longinus writes that “what is extraordinary draws listeners not to persuasion but rather to ecstasy [ek
stasis]” and he affirms that what is marvelous (thaumasion) and accompanied by shock (ekplêxis) overwhelms all else.
In modern romanticism, the sublime came to replace beauty as the primary feature of art due in large measure to the influence of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant; beauty was too insipid a quality for the grand vision of artistic genius that took hold in the nineteenth century. Insofar as Longinus himself speaks of beauty, it is as a feature of style that can have good effects or ill; it is associated with figures of speech and the choice of appropriate words which can contribute when properly deployed to the effectiveness of the whole work.
Beauty, Symmetry, and Harmony
Toward the end of the fifth century B.C., the sculptor Polyclitus published a work called the “Canon” or “Measure” in which he sought to explain the characteristics that rendered a work of art beautiful. Although Polyclitus’ treatise like the original statue is lost, we know from numerous later citations that he emphasized above all symmetry and harmony among the body’s parts as essential to beauty, a view that was dominant among classical thinkers and has remained so right down to today.
Here again we have to ask: do these precise proportions render the artwork beautiful or the human figure that the sculpture represents? Indeed, would Polyclitus even have seen a difference between these two questions or would he have replied: The work is beautiful because its proportions capture those of a beautiful human being?
The Enduring Legacy of Greek Beauty
I have been arguing that the problems and paradoxes associated with beauty, art, and desire in modern aesthetics, including the contemporary rejection of beauty as an artistic ideal, did not arise in classical antiquity or at least did not assume the same form. There was no tension between the beauty of the work of art and that of the object represented because artworks as such were not deemed beautiful. The ancients knew perfectly well the difference between an imitation and the thing imitated, and an awareness of this distinction entered into their interpretations of the pleasure we take in representations as well as their theories concerning our emotional responses to art.
When they looked at a representation of a beautiful figure, they responded to its beauty as they would to that of a live person, much the way we can feel a certain kind of desire at the photographic image of a beautiful man or woman. The stories of exceptional cases, such as the young man who attempted to have intercourse with the statue of Aphrodite, testify not so much to a confusion between art and reality as to the direct appeal of the beautiful body represented and a kind of fantasy encouraged by the cultic role of statues and paintings universally that in some sense the statue was an embodiment of the deity herself.
In conclusion, the classical Greek conception of beauty as intertwined with desire and the representation of the human form offers a rich context to understand the evolution and complexities of beauty in art. This ancient perspective challenges and enriches modern debates, providing a timeless lens through which to explore the enduring allure and profound impact of beauty in our lives.
