When John Keats wrote his famous lines “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” in his Ode on a Grecian Urn, he was stating a long held belief that the two concepts were inextricably linked, suggesting that a moral or ethical imperative was involved. Over the centuries, philosophers, critics, poets and artists have battled to define what is meant by beauty, the elusive term we may use every day to cover a variety of experiences. For philosophers such as Kant, it was associated with nature – the beautiful sunset, the beauty of landscape or the beauty of flowers.
Today, although we might use the term to describe the pleasing lines of a pot or the satisfying qualities of food presentation, it is a catch-all portmanteau word that means we do not have to think but can react almost instinctively to what we see. Within the field of art things are more complicated as this anthology On Beauty, edited by the novelist, philosopher and semiotician Umberto Eco, makes clear. Focusing on painting but also including classical sculpture and photography, he takes us on a journey through the ages without ever attempting to define exactly what beauty is.
Each of the excellent – and copious – illustrations, spanning a period of 2,000 years, is accompanied by relevant texts not so much discussing the actual image but its context and setting. It makes for a stimulating and occasionally provocative read, for not all the images are conventionally beautiful. Jacques Louis David’s painting The Death of Marat showing the revolutionary murdered in his bath by Charlotte Corday, who claimed “I killed one man to save 100,000”, is a blend of contradictory statements. We might admire the neo-classical ideolisation of the muscular body, but what of the death itself? Here the response is more complex, ranging from tragedy to possibly delight at the death of someone inciting revolution.
What is evident is that beauty is not only relative to particular points in history but contrasting, even conflicting, ideas may co-exist, particularly around the home, described perceptively by Eric Hobsbawm as a bourgeois invention. While embodying a range of values, the home can embrace the illusion of a harmonious and hierarchical happiness. The family symbolises both the warmth of a close-knit circle contrasted against the chill of the outside world. The objects that filled the home can denote wealth and status as much as comfort, yet – despite all its faults – the family unit remains as enduring as ever.
Eco also touches on organic beauty, the beauty of machines and, bringing the book up to date, the beauty of the media. Rightly, he makes no attempt to produce answers to the concept of what is meant by beauty, but demonstrates how to avoid the general in favour of the particular and the relevant. It is a book that can be dipped into and enjoyed on many levels.
