Is there still room for beauty in this age of technology, finance, and woke precepts? Beauty seems obsolete, useless, discriminatory, overshadowed by an esthetical vision of the world. Twenty-five years ago, with Giorgio Albertazzi, I wrote and launched the manifesto of beauty.
A lover and reader of Dante and d'Annunzio, Albertazzi was then staging Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, a monument to beauty; I remember an outstanding performance of his at Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli. We felt the great emperor was truly present. In the manifesto, which I wrote and signed with him along with a few other friends, I endeavored to define beauty in ten points, which I will summarize here.
Beauty is a friend of moderation and the enemy of border-lessness; a friend of the real world and the enemy of the abstract; a friend of gift and the enemy of utility; a friend of excellence and the enemy of mediocrity; a friend of lightness and the enemy of heaviness; a friend of variety and the enemy of uniformity; a friend of distinction and the enemy of separation; a friend of myth and the enemy of calculating reason; a friend of space and the enemy of time; a friend of being and the enemy of nothingness. Each affirmation had a succinct explanation.
Beauty
is the glory of the world by light cantata. Beauty in its ultimate sense
is the symbol of Good, i.e. the visible upper half of a tile. The other
half resides in the heavens. Beauty here on earth is the reflection of
transcendent beauty.
In that thesis there is the echo of Plato and Plotinus, the philosopher of beauty; there was the Greek love of Beauty and the Christian love of The Beautiful. Order is beauty, and beauty is order; both are determined by measure and harmony. Both give form to the formless and oppose the chaos that deforms and confuses the elements. The founding principles of order correspond to the constitutive principles of beauty, described by Saint Thomas: proportio, integritas, and claritas, proportion, integrity, and clarity.
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(proportio, integritas, and claritas)
In heaven and on earth, from musical scores to sculptures, to the warp and woof of carpets, the connection between order and beauty is close. Order deteriorates when it becomes mechanical and not organic; similarly, beauty deteriorates when it is not designed by light but is merely a shell and appearance and therefore is only extrinsic and not intrinsic.
Order
is masculine and beauty is feminine, order is adult and beauty is youthful,
order instils serenity and beauty joy. Order is the window, and beauty is the
light that penetrates it. Order and beauty are metaphysical principles embedded
in reality. Order is the intelligent design that organizes the world.
Truth is beauty, said Keats. But other authors, from Leopardi to Nietzsche, teach us that beauty is rather the Apollonian and illusory veil spread over the tragedy of the world. Beyond Apollo, said Nietzsche, there is Dionysus who tears the veil of golden lies and leads us beyond beauty. To where?
Towards tragedy, the infinite, delirium.
Or toward the
sublime, as Burke and Kant envisioned it, which is the disconcerting,
immeasurable beauty that disturbs yet fascinates us.
Even a malevolent writer like Baudelaire emphasized
the connection between order and beauty, in those famous verses quoted by
Manlio Sgalambro and Franco Battiato in Invito al viaggio: "Yonder,
everything is order and beauty, calm and delight. The world falls asleep in a
warm light of hyacinth and gold."
Beauty can be natural and supernatural; or inspired by
art and intelligence. Beauty imparts an aura, not limited to a work of
art, as Walter Benjamin has said, since it can arise from the charisma, grace, or
light intrinsic to a subject and a place, and not just the creation of the
artist.
Beauty has much to do with pagan, Catholic and
Byzantine, Mediterranean civilization, which, in the name of light, had the veneration
of icons and figurative religion, in
which even the Divinity was in the image and likeness of man, albeit for the Faith,
man is in the image and likeness of God.
The grace of beauty was conceived in the classical
world as static, inert, hence, "to display miracles." In modernity, beauty, static in its being,
has been ravaged by ugliness, concentrated in becoming functional. Ugliness is
mobile, it advances, beauty is not, and therefore it is a loser. Futurism
attempted to put beauty in motion, to imagine it dynamic and no longer static,
the product of technology and not just nature; the beauty of machines, of
speed. Beauty was not only in creation and in the imitation of creation, but
was the fruit of creative and imaginative labour, artifice. What will become of
it in the age of artificial intelligence?
"The Politics of Beauty" was the title of a
brilliant text by James Hillman, a Jungian psychoanalyst, dedicated to the need
for beauty in reviving cities and communities, in an era dominated by the dictatorship
of ugliness. Of course, the politics of beauty is not the beauty of
politics: but today, in both senses, the connection between beauty and politics
is a relationship of pure fantasy, a delirium.
Beauty will save the world, said Dostoevsky but we shall continue to ask: who shall save beauty - a delicate and easily
lost good?
(Panorama n.42)
Source: https://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/bellezza-mezza-salvezza/
