In 1954, I graduated in aesthetics with a thesis on the problem of beauty, albeit only as I could explore it in a few pages of Thomas Aquinas. In 1962, I began work on a project for an illustrated book on the history of beauty, a project that the publisher dropped for banal financial reasons, even though a quarter or at least a fifth of the work had already been done. I picked up that project again a few years ago and created a CD-ROM, and after that a book, for the simple reason that I do not like leaving things half done. Considering the span of fifty years across which I have found myself thinking about the concept of beauty from time to time, I realize that, then as now, I could repeat the answer Augustine gave when asked about the nature of time: “If no one asks me, I know what it is; if I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I don’t know.”
I consoled myself about my uncertainties concerning the definition of beauty when, in 1973, I read the definition of art that Dino Formaggio provided in a booklet written for the Enciclopedia filosofica ISEDI: “Art is everything people call art.” So likewise I would say: “Beauty is everything people have called beautiful.”
This, of course, is a relativistic approach: what is held to be beautiful depends on the period and the culture. This is not a matter of modern heresy. There is a famous passage in Xenophanes of Colophon: “But had the oxen or the lions hands, / Or could with hands depict a work like men, / Were beasts to draw the semblance of the gods, / The horses would sketch them to look like horses, / The oxen, like oxen, and their bodies make / in accordance with their own shape” (Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, V, 110). In other words, le crapaud est beau pour sa crapaude. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
But while beauty has never been absolute and immutable it has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country: and this does not hold only for physical beauty (of men, of women, of the landscape) but also for the beauty of God, or the saints, or ideas.
It should suffice to quote this passage from Guido Guinizelli’s sweet poetry (as I invite the Milanesiana audience to gaze on a Gothic statue from more or less the same period of the beautiful Uta of Naumburg):
I have seen the shining morning star,
So bright it might appear the day has dawned,
…
Snow white face with rosy blush,
Shining eyes, glad and full of love;
I do not believe in the whole Christian world there is
A woman so full of beauty and virtue.
Let’s look now at a nineteenth-century image from Odilon Redon, The Apparition, and with it, I offer a passage from Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 1832 novel Léa:
“Yes, yes, my Léa, you are beautiful, you are the most beautiful of creatures. I would not give you up for the beauty of the angels in heaven.” And her defeated eyes, her pallor, her diseased body, he pulled these images into his entwining sensual and agitated dreams of her.
Another problem involves not giving in to our contemporary taste. For some youngsters with earrings or maybe pierced noses, a Botticellian beauty may appear attractive because they are delightfully and perversely high on cannabis, but it certainly was not like that for Botticelli’s contemporaries, who admired the face of Venus in the Primavera for other reasons.
Meanwhile, what is it that we are talking about when we speak of beauty? We in the contemporary world, or at least we Italians influenced by the idealist aesthetic, almost always identify beauty with artistic creations. But for centuries people talked of beauty above all with regard to the beauty of nature, objects, the human body, or God. Art was recta ratio factibilium, a way of doing things well, but techne or ars was applied both to the work of painters and shipbuilders, and even barbers (and, in fact, people began referring to the “fine arts” only much later).
Regarding the ideal of beauty of a given historical period, we have only three types of evidence today, and they all come to us from “cultivated” sources. An alien visitor landing on Earth today, or a thousand years from now, who wanted to discover what kind of beauty—of human bodies, clothes, or objects—was favored by the humble and unrefined of our day, could deduce this from films, illustrated magazines, and television programs. But imagine if that traveler coming from outer space to determine our prevailing idea of female beauty had only Picasso’s portraits to go by. With respect to past centuries, we find ourselves in this kind of situation.
We also have written texts at our disposal. But, here too, how much do words tell us? When Proust, in À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, describes Elstir’s painting, a careful reader might think of the Impressionists—but biographers tell us that, in a questionnaire Proust filled in at age thirteen, he named his favorite painter as the classicist Meissonier, and that he continued to admire him even when older. As he wrote about the nonexistent Elstir’s concept of artistic beauty, the kind of beauty he was thinking about was perhaps different from the kind his words suggest to us.
This example also suggests a third type of evidence that we might call (if we wanted to bring some semiotics into our work—something which, on this occasion, I wish I could spare the great and the good), in a Peircean sense, the interpretant sign. Charles Sanders Peirce claimed that the meaning of a sign is always made clear by another sign that interprets it in some way. And thus we can compare some texts that talk of beauty with some contemporaneous images that were presumably intended to represent beautiful things. This comparison might clarify our ideas on the aesthetic ideals of a certain period.
Sometimes, however, comparison can be brutally disappointing. Let’s take the description of an overwhelmingly seductive beauty, or at least so the narrator tells us: Cecily, a Creole in a novel serialized from 1842 to 1843, Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris:
The Creole uncovered her magnificent head of thick black hair which, parted in the center of her brow and naturally curly, did not fall below the point where her neck met her shoulders.…
Cecily’s features were the kind that remain engraved in the memory forever. A bold forehead … dominated the perfect oval of her face; her matte white complexion had the velvety freshness of a camellia petal brushed by a ray of sunlight. Her … straight, narrow nose ended in two quivering nostrils that flared at the slightest emotion. Her mouth, insolent and sensual, was of a bright red …
How would we portray this splendid Cecily today, if we had to translate these words into images? Like a Brigitte Bardot, or a femme fatale of the Belle Époque? Well, the novel’s original illustrator (and probably his readers, too) saw Cecily in a certain way. So we must resign ourselves and fantasize about their Cecily, at least if we are to understand—according to Sue and his readers—the particular ideal of beauty that caused the notary Ferrand to be consumed with satyriasis.
The comparison of written texts and images is often productive because it allows us to understand how the same linguistic term, in the passage from one century to another, and sometimes from one decade to another, can correspond to different musical or visual ideals. Let’s take a classical example, that of proportion. Since antiquity, beauty has been identified with proportion. Pythagoras was the first to maintain that the principle of all things is number. With Pythagoras an aesthetical-mathematical vision of the universe came into being: all things exist because they are ordered and they are ordered because they are the realization of mathematical and musical laws, which are together the conditions of existence and beauty. This idea of proportion ran through all of antiquity and was transmitted to the Middle Ages through the works of Boethius between the fourth and fifth century AD. Boethius says that one day Pythagoras observed how, in striking the anvil, a blacksmith’s hammers produced different sounds, and he realized that the ratio between the sounds of the range thus produced was proportional to the weight of the hammers. The ratios governing the dimensions of Greek temples, the intervals between the columns, or the ratios between the various parts of the façade correspond to the same ratios that govern musical intervals. In Timaeus, Plato was to describe the world as consisting of regular geometrical bodies.
Between Humanism and the Renaissance, the Platonic regular bodies were studied and celebrated as ideal models, by Leonardo, by Piero della Francesca in De perspectiva pingendi (before 1482), and by Luca Pacioli in De divina proportione (1509). The divine proportion that Pacioli discusses is the golden ratio, the relationship that exists, for example, between two rectangles, where the smaller is to the larger as the larger is to the sum of the two. This ratio is wonderfully exemplified in Piero della Francesca’s painting The Flagellation of Christ.
But, in the ten centuries that separate Boethius from Pacioli, did those who used the term “proportion” all mean the same thing? Not at all. In commentaries produced by early medieval scholars on Boethius, images were deemed to be perfectly proportioned and put on manuscript pages even though they did not adhere to the golden ratio in the slightest.
In the thirteenth century, Villard d’Honnecourt, who certainly knew how to draw very well, supplied highly intuitive and quantitative rules for proportion—nothing to do with the more mathematically rigorous rules that had previously inspired the sculpture of Polyclitus and would later inspire Dürer.
On the other hand, when in the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas spoke of proportion as one of the three criteria of beauty, he was no longer speaking only in terms of mathematical ratios. He believed that proportion was not just a correct arrangement of matter, but a perfect adaptation of matter to form, in the sense that a human body that was well adapted to the conditions of humanity should be considered proportionate. This made proportion also an element of virtue, in the sense that spiritual beauty consists of a person’s conduct or actions being well-proportioned with respect to what reason dictates, and so we must also allow that there is such a thing as moral beauty (or moral turpitude). Because, to be beautiful, a thing must be suited to its intended purpose, Aquinas would not have hesitated to define a glass saw as ugly. Despite the superficial beauty of the material of which it was made, it would be unable to perform its proper function. Proportion also applied to the collaborative interaction of things, so it is possible to call “beautiful” the reciprocal action of stones that, by propping and pushing against each other, solidly hold up a building. It also results from having the correct relationship between the intelligence and the thing the intelligence understands. In short, proportion becomes a metaphysical principle that explains the very unity of the cosmos.
Much of the art of Aquinas’s day therefore tells us only part of what he meant by proportion, because our interpretative effort is made more difficult by what we might call disparities of development between art and philosophy, or among various aspects of art from the same period. Regarding those Renaissance treatises offering mathematical rules for proportion, for example, theory and reality seem to come together only for architecture and perspective. Looking at a series of men and women held to be beautiful by different artists, are there any criteria of proportion common across them?
The same problems come into play for light, or claritas, another traditional attribute of beauty. Considering the origins of this, claritas was certainly valued due to the fact that numerous civilizations have associated God with light, and often with the sun. Through Neoplatonism these images entered the Christian tradition via the sixth-century works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. In his Celestial Hierarchy and Divine Names, he represents God as “light,” “fire,” and a “fountain of light.” The same images are employed by the greatest exponent of medieval Neoplatonism, John Scotus Eriugena.
But here, too, what did medieval man mean by the beauty of light and of color? One thing we know for certain. Even though we always talk of the Dark Ages, and while the rooms and corridors of castles and monasteries and the peasants’ huts must have been dark, medieval people saw themselves (or at least represented themselves in poems and paintings) as living in an extremely bright environment.
The Middle Ages play on elementary colors, on well-defined chromatic zones that shun nuance, and on the juxtaposition of colors that generate light from their overall agreement, instead of being determined by a light that envelops them in chiaroscuro or causes color to seep beyond the edge of a figure. If we look at a baroque painting, such as Georges de La Tour’s Magdalene with the Smoking Flame, everything in the scene is struck by the light of a candle on the right, and in a stack of books can be seen both light and dark areas. In medieval miniatures, by contrast, light seems to radiate out from objects in the scene. They, being beautiful, are luminous in themselves.
The Middle Ages were in love with light and it was in that period that the figurative technique was developed that best exploited the vivacity of simple color combined with the vivacity of the light that filled it: the stained-glass windows of Gothic cathedrals. The Gothic church is built as a function of a burst of light through a tracery of structures.
Dazzling images of light appear in the mystical writings of Hildegard of Bingen, and are wonderfully interpreted in the miniatures that accompany them:
Then I saw an extremely bright light and in the light the figure of a man the color of sapphire, and it was all burning in a delightful red fire. And the bright light flooded through all the red fire, and the red fire through all the bright light, and the bright light and the red fire shone together through the whole figure of the man so that they were one light in one strength and power.
And then there are the visions of light that blaze in Dante’s Paradiso, which, oddly, were rendered in their greatest splendor by a nineteenth-century artist, Gustav Doré. Yet, looking at Doré’s illustrations, it seems to me that the Dante he interprets must have written one or two centuries before Dante did, or else that Doré was thinking of Neoplatonic texts that had inspired him—because the miniatures of Dante’s era are far more restrained. They do not show us explosions of light, arrays of theatre spotlights; rather, their bright colors seem to belong to the bodies themselves.
The fact is that Dante followed a theological tradition that celebrated light as a mystical, cosmological phenomenon, but he was writing after Thomas Aquinas and, between the twelfth and the thirteenth century, there had been profound changes in the way claritas was understood. Consider the twelfth-century cosmology of light proposed by Robert Grosseteste, who conceived of the universe as formed by a single flux of luminous energy that was at once the source of beauty and being—an image that, for us, summons the notion of a Big Bang. Through a progressive process of rarefaction and condensation, the heavenly bodies and the natural zone of the elements, and consequently the infinite nuances of color and the volume of things, all derive from this single light. The proportion of the world, therefore, is none other than the mathematical order in which light, in its creative diffusion, materializes according to the various forms of resistance imposed upon it by matter.
Now let us move on to a different vision of heavenly glory—namely, Giotto’s. In Giotto’s Last Judgment, the light is no longer received, so to speak, from on high. The light is proper to the bodies, which are physically well built—healthy, I would say. It so happened that, in the meantime, Thomas Aquinas had spoken. For him, claritas did not come from a cosmic explosion from above, as Grosseteste would have it, but from below, or from the interior of the object—a sort of self-manifestation of the form that organizes it. Aquinas’s master, Albertus Magnus, had previously said that beauty was “ a resplendence of form, whether in the duly-ordered parts of material objects or in men,” and the form he was referring to was not a Platonic ideal, but whatever it was on the inside which ordered the matter to take its certain concrete shape in the proper proportions. Thus we have moved from giving beauty a Neoplatonic foundation to giving it an Aristotelian one. The claritas of the bodies of the blessed consists in the luminosity of the glorified soul that shines through their corporeal aspect—and this is why in Giotto’s work we see light that emanates from the human core of the characters, represented through a corporeality that is far more solid and less abstract.
So, across centuries, there has always been talk of light and claritas, but the vision of the world and of beauty to which these terms referred was not the same from era to era.
The play of contrasts between texts and images also allows us to respond to some fairly complex questions. Let’s tackle the vexed question of an aesthetic of ugliness, or—to remain in a single historical period—of the beauty of monsters in the Middle Ages.
Apart from proportion and luminosity, the third characteristic of beauty for medieval man was integrity: to be considered beautiful, a being had to possess everything befitting an individual of his species. So a mutilated body was not beautiful and neither was a dwarf. (There was no political correctness in the Middle Ages.) Yet medieval man was fascinated by monsters.
In the first instance people admitted the principle whereby, although ugly things and beings exist, art has the power to portray them in a beautiful way. We think this is a modern criterion, but Saint Bonaventure said that “the image of the Devil is beautiful when it portrays the Devil’s turpitude well.”
Contacts with distant lands had increased since Hellenic times and this led to the spread of descriptions, sometimes overtly legendary and sometimes with pretensions to scientific accuracy, of unknown lands and beings, from the Natural History of Pliny the Elder (c 77 CE) to the Romance of Alexander (third century CE) down to the bestiaries (starting with the renowned Physiologus, written between the second and fifth century CE). And the exotic always took the form of the monstrous. Medieval people were fascinated by descriptions of the Blemmyae, headless beings with mouths in their bellies, Sciapods with only one foot that they also used to shield themselves from the sun, dog-headed Cynocephali, unicorns, and all kinds of dragons. Such monsters not only adorned the capitals in churches, but filled the margins of manuscripts, even the devotional sort, which dealt with entirely different topics. In some portrayals of Noah’s Ark, there were even monsters saved from the flood.
The Middle Ages needed monsters. At least we can say the followers of “negative theology” did. They considered it impossible to represent God with suitable names, given his absolute and unknowable transcendence, and therefore used only terms that would obviously not even pretend to describe perfect goodness, such as bear, worm, panther, even monster. So the mystical and theological thought of the time had to justify in some way the presence of these monsters in creation, and it took two paths. From one side, it inserted them into the great tradition of universal symbolism, in which every worldly thing, animal, vegetable, and mineral, had a significance that was moral (teaching something about virtues and vices) or allegorical, meaning that through its form or its behavior it symbolized the reality of the supernatural. In the “moralized” bestiaries, for example, unicorns prized chastity. This is why, it was said, a hunter would have to set a virgin in the forest as bait: the animal would be attracted by the girl’s scent and go to lay its head in her lap, enabling it to be captured. Thus offering itself as prey to men, the unicorn symbolizes the Savior, who dwelt in the womb of an immaculate virgin.
As the second path, from Augustine onwards, mystics, theologians, and philosophers also said that monsters were somehow part of the natural order ordained by heaven and, in the great symphonic concert of cosmic harmony, they contributed—albeit purely by contrast (like shading and chiaroscuro in paintings)—to the beauty of the whole. Because the orderly whole was beautiful, according to this point of view, whatever monstrosity contributed to the equilibrium of that order was redeemed.
But did the faithful who entered the abbey or cathedral and gazed upon these representations from the ridiculous to the teratological to the disturbing really think about the cosmic order? For ordinary people, were these monsters (independent of any theological reflections) pleasing to look at, or disgusting and fearful? Or did they give rise to ambiguous feelings of disorientation?
The answer comes to us indirectly from Saint Bernard. A mystic and also a rigorist if ever there was one (being an enemy of his Cluniac rivals’ love of sumptuous ornamentation in churches), Bernard inveighed against the excessive numbers of monsters appearing on abbey capitals and in cloisters. But while his words are of condemnation, his description of this evil also betrays his fascination—as if not even he could resist the seductiveness of those portenta. He describes what he denounces with an almost sensual appeal, with the hypocrisy of a moralist who, in complaining about a striptease, gives a detailed description of the dancer’s moves:
What place is there in the cloisters … for that ridiculous monstrosity, that strange kind of deformed shapeliness or shapely deformity? What are foul apes doing there? Or ferocious lions? Or monstrous centaurs? Or half-men? Or striped tigers? Or soldiers in battle? Or hunters with their horns? You can see many bodies beneath a single head and many heads atop a single body. On the one side you can see a four-footed beast with a serpent’s tail, and on the other a fish with a quadruped’s head. Here, a beast that looks like a horse with the hindquarters of a goat, and there, a horned animal with the hindquarters of a horse. In short, there is everywhere such a great and strange variety of heterogeneous forms that there is more pleasure to be had in reading the marbles than the codices, and more in spending the whole day gazing at these images than in meditating on God’s law.
And so Bernard, talking in annoyance about a wondrous but perverse delight (mira sed perversa delectatio), confesses to us that these monstrous portrayals were pleasing to look at, at least as much as portrayals of likeable aliens in science-fiction films are to us, and perhaps even as much as we are satisfied by representations of horror in all its hair-raising magnificence. The late Middle Ages and Renaissance centuries showed a real taste for what has been defined in art as the demoniacal.
The fact is that, deep down, even in classical or classically inspired periods, people were not totally convinced that the criteria of beauty came down to just proportion and light. But the only ones brave enough to admit this were theorists and pre- and proto-Romantic artists, the celebrators of beauty’s sibling: the sublime. The idea of the sublime is associated above all with an experience bound up not with art but with nature, and this experience tended toward the formless, the painful, and the terrible. Consider Lord Shaftesbury’s vivid words in his Moral Essays of the early eighteenth century: “Even the rude rocks, the mossy caverns, the irregular unwrought grottos and broken falls of waters, with all the horrid graces of the wilderness itself, as representing nature more, will be the more engaging and appear with a magnificence beyond the mockery of princely gardens.”
A taste arose for Gothic architecture that, in comparison with Neoclassical measures, can only seem disproportionate and irregular, and it was precisely this taste for the irregular and the formless that led to a new appreciation of ruins.
With an authentic coup de théâtre, Edmund Burke (in his 1757 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful) challenged the idea that beauty resides in proportion:
The neck, say they, in beautiful bodies, should measure with the calf of the leg; it should likewise be twice the circumference of the wrist. And an infinity of observations of this kind are to be found in the writings and conversations of many. But what relation has the calf of the leg to the neck; or either of these parts to the wrist? These proportions are certainly to be found in handsome bodies. They are as certainly in ugly ones; as any who will take the pains to try may find.… You may assign any proportions you please to every part of the human body; and I undertake that a painter shall religiously observe them all, and notwithstanding produce, if he pleases, a very ugly figure. The same painter shall considerably deviate from these proportions, and produce a very beautiful one.
Happily disproportionate, the sublime prospers in the shadows, in night, in storm, in darkness, in emptiness, in solitude, and in silence.
If we really wish to continue reflecting on the relativity of the concept of beauty, we must not forget that the same century that witnessed the birth of the modern notion of the sublime also witnessed the celebration of the Neoclassical style. But in the Middle Ages, too, the taste for monsters on capitals coexisted with the taste for the architectonic proportions realized in the naves of churches, and Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516) was a contemporary of Antonello da Messina (1430–1479). Nonetheless, if we look back at the preceding centuries, at bottom there is always the feeling, on looking “from afar,” that every century had unitary characteristics, or at most one single fundamental contradiction.
It may be that, if future interpreters (or the usual Martian who comes to visit us after two hundred years) also look back “from afar,” they might identify something as truly characteristic of the twentieth century, and hence prove Marinetti right by finding that the century’s equivalent of the Victory of Samothrace really was a beautiful racing car, and never even considering Picasso and Mondrian. We cannot look at things from that far away, but we can content ourselves with noting that the first half of the twentieth century was the stage for a dramatic struggle between the beauty of provocation or the arts of the avant-garde and the beauty of consumption.
The avant-garde did not pose itself the problem of beauty, and it violated all the aesthetic canons respected until then. With its arrival, art no longer set out to provide an image of natural beauty, nor did it intend to procure the pleasure to be had from contemplating harmonious forms. On the contrary, its goal was to teach us to interpret the world through different eyes, to enjoy the return to archaic or exotic models and the worlds of dream and hallucination, to rediscover matter and accept the slightly mad notion of taking everyday objects and presenting them in improbable contexts. Abstract art, which seemed to represent a “Neo-Pythagorean” return to the aesthetics of proportions and number, ran counter to the common man’s idea of beauty. Finally, there are many trends in contemporary performance art (events, for example, where artists cut or mutilate their own bodies, or audiences participate in light or sound phenomena) in which it seems that, in the name of art, people hold ceremonies with a ritual flavor not unlike the ancient mystery rites. There is an element of mystery in the musical events enjoyed by huge crowds in discos or at rock concerts where, amid strobe lights and deafeningly loud music, people experiment with ways of “being together” that are “beautiful” (in the traditional sense of circus games) to those looking on from the outside, in ways that are not perceived or experienced by those involved in the event.
Our visitor from the future, moreover, will be unable to avoid making another curious discovery. Those who visit an exhibition of avant-garde art, buy an “incomprehensible” sculpture, or take part in a happening are dressed according to the canons of fashion. They wear jeans or designer clothes and make themselves up in accordance with a model of beauty proposed by mass media. They follow ideals of beauty proposed by the world of commercial consumerism—the very world that avant-garde art has been battling against for fifty years and more.
At this point, the visitor from the future would naturally seek next to understand what the model of beauty proposed by the mass media was. And he would discover that, within the same era, the media proposed the model of the femme fatale as personified by Greta Garbo or Rita Hayworth, and that of the “girl next door” as played by Doris Day. The same media gave us the virile appeal of big John Wayne as well as the meek and vaguely effeminate Fred Astaire and Dustin Hoffman. The visitor would discover that the mass media were totally democratic; women who could not be Anita Eckberg could flaunt the anorexic grace of Twiggy.
Which of all these, and other possible candidates, would our visitor from the future recognize as the ideal of beauty typical of our day?
He would have to yield before the orgy of tolerance, of total syncretism, and the absolute, unstoppable polytheism of beauty.
But now I would like to halt this relativistic drift that has permitted us to reflect upon the variability and occasional incomparability of the vastly different notions of beauty. Is there really nothing that in some way, even a very subtle one, is common to the various experiences of beauty, or whatever was thought to be beautiful at any given historical moment?
I think that if we were to put together an anthology of the various texts that deal with beauty, we would get at least one common element. “Beautiful”—or for that matter, “graceful,” or “sublime,” or “marvelous”—appears as an adjective always used to indicate something that we like (recall that Aquinas said that pulchra dicuntur quae visa placent, we call those things beautiful that have been seen and which please us) and that we might desire, but that will not cease to be pleasing even if we know it cannot be ours. Naturally, in everyday language, we also use beautiful or marvelous to define what we consider good, and so we might speak of a beautiful erotic experience or run through the woods. But across centuries, a formal distinction has been made between what is beautiful and what is good to have. If what is considered to be good (a food, a fine house, the recognition and admiration of my fellows) is not mine, I feel as though impoverished. Instead, with regard to beauty, it seems that the joy in beautiful things is definitely separate from the possession of them. I find the Sistine Chapel beautiful even though I am not the owner, and in the window of a patisserie I find beauty in a cream-filled wedding cake, even though my dietician forbids me to eat it.
The experience of beauty always has an element of disinterest. I can consider a human being (man or woman) to be beautiful, even though I know I can never have a relationship with him or her. But if I desire a human being (who might even be ugly) and I cannot have a relationship with him or her, I feel bad.
Naturally, all this holds for the western tradition. We see beauty in the bison of Altamira, but we do not know why they were carved and painted (probably as propitiatory magic), whether people went to look at them or instead left them respectfully in the darkness of the cave, or whether those who had made them were pleased afterwards at having drawn them so well. It is the same thing with many objects we see as the works of art of primitive societies. We do not have sufficient documents to compare an object to a text, which usually does not exist or which we cannot understand, or to know whether the ritual mask that fascinated painters and sculptors of the European avant-garde was first fashioned to inspire fear or give pleasure, like the monsters in medieval miniatures. All we know is that Saint Bernard had no fear of monsters, that he found them fascinating, and that he condemned them. As for the rest, even without venturing into societies with no history or no writing, to this day specialists debate whether the Indian term rasa can be translated with our term and concept of taste, or whether it refers (instead or also) to something else that eludes us.
In an ethnographic museum in Bamako, Mali, I saw some very well made female dressmaker’s models, in the western style, which were draped in wonderful traditional costumes. One of the dummies looked agile and sinuous, while another was incredibly fat. Our Malian guide, a professor at the local university who had studied in France, winked at us and said that the thin dummy was put there for western tourists. For the locals (or at least for their fathers immune to the lures of the West) the beautiful woman was the fat one. Our guide could negotiate two concepts of beauty with critical awareness, but I still wonder if, after studying in Paris and having seen our films and television, he might have thought that the fat woman was beautiful and the thin one sexually desirable, or vice versa.
However, surely he would have been able to say what he wished to possess and what he was prepared to admire disinterestedly.
I would like to conclude by pointing out that perhaps the greatest statements of aesthetic detachment were made in a period when, along with the experience of the sublime, we seemed to celebrate proximity to natural phenomena of great enormity and majesty. Even the terrifying can be enjoyable provided it does not get too close to us. Sublime beauty is reserved for those things that placent (please us) but only if visa (they are seen)—and seen without being suffered. The painter who was certainly the greatest exponent of the experience of the sublime was Caspar David Friedrich, and when representing it he almost always placed human beings in the foreground, gazing upon a natural spectacle they were struck by as by the sublime.
The human figures are seen from behind and, by a sort of theatrical mise-en-scène, if the sublime is the stage, then they are on the proscenium, inside the show—for us in the audience—but also representing someone who is outside the show, so that we are obliged to detach ourselves from the spectacle by looking at it through them, putting ourselves in their place, seeing what they see, and—as they do—feeling like a negligible element in the great spectacle of nature, but still one who is able to flee the natural power looming large over us and capable of destroying us.
I believe that, across centuries, the experience of beauty has always been similar to the way we feel, as if seen from the back, when we are in the presence of something we are not a part of and do not wish to become a part of at any cost. In that distance lies the slender thread that separates the experience of beauty from other forms of passion.
[La Milanesiana, 2005]