IDEAL BEAUTY AND CLASSIC ART

A Philosophical Vindication

Introduction

When Giotto was born, a painter was generally regarded as a craftsman. Less than two hundred and fifty years later, Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor, not only visited Titian's studio but picked up the artist's brush for him after he had dropped it. The change of status revealed in this anecdote is in no small way concerned with the role of ideal beauty in giving painting the highest cultural legitimation. The origins of ideal beauty — in both practice and theory — are found in classical antiquity. It is hardly surprising, then, that the notion of "classic art," as such, is usually identified with visual practices that draw in some way on classical antiquity's exemplifications of ideal beauty.

I

In the Republic, Plato holds that the only way one can assess the excellence, the beauty, or the rightness of an implement, living thing, or action is by reference to "the use for which it was made, by man or by nature" (601d). It is this that makes art such a problematic notion for Plato. In his philosophy, art's essence is mimetic. But mimesis, in his terms, involves the copying of sensory things and states of affairs. These, however, are themselves only the earthly appearances of the relevant Forms. Hence, the product of artistic mimesis is a copy of a copy and thus twice removed from the authentically real.

On these terms, even if art achieves beauty, the use that is its basis tends to distract us from the contemplation of truth. While Plato is officially dismissive of art's focus on appearance, he nevertheless has an interesting understanding of what its beauty involves. In the Republic, for example, he resorts to painting as an analogy in explaining how philosophers should create a legal constitution. The first stage is like a "painting-board" that is wiped clean. In the next stage,

by selecting behaviour patterns and blending them, they'll produce a composite human likeness, taking as their reference point that quality which Homer ... called "godly" and "godlike" in its human manifestation. ... And I suppose they'd rub bits out and paint them in again, until they've done all they can to create human characters which stand the best chance of meeting the gods' approval. (501b–c)

Socrates' interlocutor Adeimantus then observes that this "should be a very beautiful painting" (501c). In all these remarks it is clear that, whatever his reservations about the mimetic outcome of painting, its beauty in realizing this goal involves a selective intervention on the appearances it deals with. It involves idealization.

If Plato does not consider the full implications of this, his great follower Plotinus does, by way