Art and beauty

The argument begins with a quarrel. Plato, who wrote the most beautiful prose in Greek, banished the poets from his ideal city on the grounds that they imitate appearances and stir up feelings the citizens should keep down. The Symposium, though, has beauty as the first rung on the ladder to the good, and the Phaedrus has poetic madness as a gift from the gods. Aristotle’s Poetics is the reply: imitation is natural and pleasant, it is how we first learn, and tragedy, far from inflaming pity and fear, purges them.

Plotinus made beauty a glimpse of the One, and through Augustine that became the medieval view: the world is beautiful because it is made, and art is a second making. Dante built a cathedral out of it. The Renaissance, in Cellini and Leonardo, gave the artist himself a life worth writing.

Kant separated beauty from use and from truth and gave it its own faculty, and after him the theme becomes a modern one: Ruskin on why Gothic is honest, Tolstoy on what art should be for, Woolf’s Lily Briscoe finishing a painting on the last page of To the Lighthouse and having her vision. Shakespeare’s Tempest, with a magician who breaks his staff, is the play about what an artist gives up.