What is beauty?

Beauty is a kind of force or light, shining from Him through everything, first through the Angelic Mind, second through the World-Soul and the rest of the souls, third through Nature, and fourth through corporeal matter. It fits the mind with a system of Ideas; it fills the soul with a series of Concepts; it sows Nature with Seeds; and it provides Matter with Forms.
- Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium, (1475. Sears, Reynolds Jayne translation in Hofstadter and Kuhns, Philosophies of Art and Beauty, 1964)

Is beauty merely in the eye of the beholder? Or is a beautiful thing beautiful in itself?

St. Augustine, like Plato, believed that the beauty of a work of art lay in its power to inspire contemplation of heavenly things. And the art of medieval times is indeed filled with angels and madonnas, and nearly always depicted inspirational Biblical themes.

But with the Renaissance the forms of art, if not the subject matter, shifted from a concern with the heavenly to a glorification of the human. For the first time since classical times sculptors began to fashion strong, beautiful human bodies, and painters, though still painting Biblical themes, peopled their canvases with real human beings rather than angels.

Likewise, Renaissance thinkers began to return to the classical philosophy of Plato--the real thing, not the Neoplatonism of St. Augustine--and began to write of the great ideas. Ficino wrote that the beauty of art consisted in its ability to put the human soul in touch with the great Platonic ideas of truth, beauty and justice. And even Michelangelo wrote of the artist's being used as a brush or a chisel in God's hands to reproduce imitations of Plato's ideas.

Is the purpose of art to move, to inspire, to somehow embody the great ideas? Is it to glorify God, or man? Or is it something else? Modern artists and aesthetic philosophers would say that the purpose of art is to provide an aesthetic experience of some kind, but that art need not be beautiful or inspirational in the traditional sense. A work of art can be satisfying in virtue of being true-true to its medium and true to the individual conception of the artist. The work of Van Gogh is beautiful in this sense: it is true to its medium and true to the artist's impressions and ideals.

Contemporary artists find beauty in surprising things such as comic strips and soup cans. The canvases of Warhohl and Lichtenstein and the sculptures of Henry Moore are calculated to awaken us to aspects of reality, especially social reality, that we miss because they are so pervasive. We cannot deny that there is beauty there. On the other hand, the German philosopher J.G. Fichte (1762-1814) said:" Food does not make us hungry; it is our hunger that makes an object food for us."Likewise , one might argue, it is not the "aesthetic object" that generates the sense of beauty in us; it is our sense of beauty that makes a thing an aesthetic object for us. A piece of driftwood, if presented and viewed in a certain way, may be beautiful to us.

So what is beauty? Is it in the object, or in "the eye of the beholder?" Could just anything be beautiful, depending on how and by whom it was being looked at? Or must a beautiful thing put us in touch with the great philosophical and religious ideas?

Could something be beautiful even though nobody appreciated its beauty?

Bibliography

Hofstadter, Albert and Richard Kuhns (editors), Philosophies of Art and Beauty, Chicago, 1964.

Ross, James Bruce and Mary McLaughlin (editors), The Portable Renaissance Reader, Viking Press, New York, 1953.