Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)Vitruvian Man, c. 1490, Pen and ink on paper, 14 × 10 in (35.6 cm × 25.4 cm)
THE AESTHETIC RESPONSE
The idea that a work of art should be beautiful or should in some way offer the experience of beauty is widely held. But just exactly what beauty is and what objects and artifacts can or cannot be considered beautiful are questions that have been debated since ancient times. Moreover, we extend the judgment of beauty to a broad array of subjects, including landscapes, physiognomy, and mathematical proofs. We might well ask what it is exactly that all these things share. Is it possible to identify the components of beauty? To what extent is our comprehension of beauty conditioned by the culture in which we are immersed, and to what extent is it an innate response to certain stimuli? And then is beauty, after all, a necessary quality for a successful work of art? Can we have art without beauty?
The ongoing debate is known as aesthetics, a branch of philosophy whose name derives from the Greek aisthetikos, meaning esthetic, sensitive, sentient. Here are some of the principal points of view put forward by a few of the world’s great minds:
Plato (427–347 BCE) felt that we perceive an object as beautiful because it partakes of an ideal form of beauty that exists in some sort of higher plane. He identified some of the components of beauty as proportion, harmony, and unity of its parts.
Aristotle (387–322 BCE) discusses beauty in his Metaphysics and declared that its universal constituents were order, symmetry, and definiteness.
Vitruvius (c. 80–15 BCE) proposed, in his Ten Works on Architecture, a theory of beauty based on the idea that nature provides in its designs certain proportions that are universally beautiful. This Roman architect cited in particular the ideal proportions of a human body as the most desirable basis for structuring beautiful buildings and objects. Vitruvius’ ideas were rediscovered in the fifteenth century and had a large influence on the Renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci and others reconstructed images of the so-called “Vitruvean Man.”
Sigmund Freud (1856–1929) writes in Civilization and Its Discontents: “All that seems certain is its derivation from the field of sexual feeling. The love of beauty seems a perfect example of an impulse inhibited in its aim. ‘Beauty’ and ‘attraction’ are originally attributes of the sexual object.”
A Darwinian theory of beauty has been proposed by evolutionary psychologists, most notably by Dennis Dutton (1944–2010). He rejected the idea that beauty is a learned cultural phenomenon citing the fact that many great works of art find favor in diverse cultures. Rather, the appreciation of beauty is an adaptive trait common to all humans. “Beauty,” says Dutton, “is nature’s way of acting at a distance so to speak. You can’t expect to eat an adaptive landscape. It would hardly do to eat a baby or a lover. So nature’s trick is to make them beautiful, to have them exert a kind of magnetism, to give you the pleasure of simply looking at them.”
See also: Proportion and Ratio on page 140
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
Vitruvian Man, c. 1490, Pen and ink on paper, 14 × 10 in (35.6 cm × 25.4 cm)
Raphael (1483–1520)
Madonna with the Infant Christ and John the Baptist, 1506, Oil on panel, 44 1/2 × 34 7/8 in (113 cm × 88.5 cm)
Art of the Italian Renaissance was influenced by Aristotle’s components of beauty: order, symmetry, and definiteness (clarity). Usually a sense of balance was substituted for symmetry. Here the perfectly rendered forms and highly ordered composition convey a feeling that is both exquisite and serene.
