by Umberto Eco
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.
