Contemplation on Beauty

Venus de Milo, Louvre - photo by Jastrow

• Beauty is incorruptible. It is truth. The Greeks made it a touchstone for wisdom. It is an everlasting reality. If you find beauty you have a treasure forever. But then you do, first, need to know how to recognise it. Or is it too fleeting? Too subjective? Too trend-dependent?

• How beautiful is Venus de Milo to everyone? In Ancient Times, she was the short-hand for Beauty, but now we struggle to understand what this means. A generic term. An abstract ideal. How we crave it and rush to photoshop our faces symmetrical and our thighs satin smooth or to plump up our pecs. How we try to capture it in powdered wigs and silk knickerbockers one era and in leggings and botox in the next

They say, beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. Are there no definitive parameters then?

By reading essays (like in“Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art” by Julian Barnes) and studying catalogue introductions, one practices the art of perception. It's the point of art-history before it turns into pedantic academics. Right seeing is the incipient step towards recognising beauty. It is indispensible but little practiced at schools and even less for our pleasure. In suggesting that you can move into the direction of beauty, it is implied that Beauty lies out there, somewhere, waiting for you to discover it. Not in an abstract sense, but as in a faculty of soul to recognise itself at work - in a work!

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top row left: Amedeo Modigliani, 1919, Jeanne Hébuterne, Metropolitan Museum of Art
top row right: Édouard Vuillard - Misia Seated in an Armchair, Affecting Nonchalance, 1901
bottom row left: Botticelli, portrait of Simonetta Vespucci., 1474
bottom row centre: 'My Wife, Nude, Contemplating Her Own Flesh Becoming Stairs, Three Vertebrae of a Column Sky & Architecture' - Salvador Dali, 1945
bottom row right: Konstantin Makovsky (1839-1915)

In art there is something for everyone. Is it all beautiful? Is the Guernica by Picasso beautiful? Is della Francesca’s portrait not beautiful, despite the sitter being arguably less than stud material? And let’s not linger too long upon the Ugly Duchess by Quinten Massys! It’s the stuff of nightmares about the limits to ageing gracefully, but isn’t it a beautiful work of art!

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Piero della Francesca Portrait of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino (1472), Uffizi Gallery, Florence. |
Quinten Massys, An Old Woman (The Ugly Duchess), ca. 1513, National Portrait Gallery, London

Maria Popova from Brainpickings remembers the critic and author, James Baldwin and his apt definition of the artist (in any medium) as a wakeful and courageous seer of human truth. Is truth not inherently another way of seeing beauty? Even farmers and biologists and producers of plastic household goods can be artists in their work when they try to express their beliefs and meaning of the whole earth experience in all its manifestations. This is artful and creative business! It produces beautiful results.

But a poet feels. E.E. Cummings is very strict in this, separating poetry from the head-activities and placing it as the voice piece of the heart.

Narcissus by Caravaggio (1594-96)

In our narcissistic times beauty is becoming a rare commodity.

A spiritual perception of beauty would need to include a sense of uselessness: quite literally not meant to be used to inform, explain, justify, educate; serving no direct, mundane, practical purpose. Only then can it be spiritually elevating. Yes, it uses telluric materials, the okers and umbers of the soil, the terracotta clay, the Carrera marble, the ground up lapis lazuli, the gold leaf mined mined from Gaia's running rivers or mined from her deepest entrails; the pulp of plants for paper, the skins of animals for drums. But beauty is not profane or secular as such. It is a heavenly quality, which belongs to all but which attaches itself only to a vivid spiritual impulse. It may be found in the model, but you can't model beauty an sich. That is decadence, pathos, kitsch, decorative design and a fallen beauty.

This returns us to the topic of authenticity and my Musing on Authenticity. For only the true self feels (and knows what it needs).

In my advice to people on special diets, I often had to bring it all back to that one key of life at the heart. There are no specific special ingredients to a beautiful diet! (But some products don't fit.) It meant I would have to veer off the narrow edge of the question and drop the quick-fix altogether. I moved away from what foods were good (useful) for weight-loss to appeal to the Questioner's capacity to feel self-worth- which is a tricky can of worms to pul an opener on.

It begins by observing very closely (the point to beginners-meditation). This is to wipe down the mirror of the heart. Its pictures, thereafter, may still be hard to read, like a stereogram: you need to develop the technique to discover a new focus, a new way of seeing, giving a spiritual 20/20 vision.

Ultimately, it is about enjoying art! Also the "Art und Weise" of nature. But as you grow better at looking - have seen more (and grown older) - you find your tastes will start to convene more and more with a Greater Beauty and less with personal self-reflections. Indeed, there is no accounting for taste, but there is a sacred geometry or cosmic harmony behind Beauty.