Ideal beauty, that curious alliance between God and the subtle outline traced with pen or graver, that cold academical mysticism, came into fashion. In Italy (the home of Winckelmann and Mengs, who published many of their works in Italian) it was much discussed by artists, antiquaries and connoisseurs. The architect Francesco Milizia professed himself a follower of "the principles of Sulzer and Mengs";[34] the Spaniard d'Azara, living in Italy, edited and annotated Mengs, adding his own definition of beauty: "The union of the perfect and the pleasing made visible";[35] another Spaniard, Arteaga, one of the many Jesuit refugees in Italy, wrote a treatise on Ideal Beauty (1789);[36] the Englishman Daniel Webb on coming to Rome and making the acquaintance of Mengs seized upon the ideas he heard him express on beauty, collected them and actually published them in a book anticipating Mengs' own.[37]
G. Spalletti and the characteristic.
The first voice of dissent from this doctrine of ideal beauty was raised in 1764 by a small circle of Italians who asserted the characteristic to be the principle of art. As such appears to be the necessary interpretation of the little Essay on Beauty written by Guiseppe Spalletti in the form of a letter to Mengs, with whom Spalletti had discussed the subject "in the solitudes of Grottaferrata," and who had urged him to put all his thoughts in writing.[38] Its polemical character, though not openly asserted, is discernible in every page. "Truth in general, conscientiously rendered by the artist, is the object of Beauty in general. When the soul finds those characteristics which wholly converge upon the matter which the work of art claims to represent, it judges that work beautiful. The same is true of the works of nature: if the soul perceives a man of fine proportions having the face of a lovely woman, which causes it to doubt whether the object before it be man or woman, it esteems that man ugly rather than the reverse, through deficiency of the characteristic of truth; if this can be said of natural Beauty, how much more can it be said of the Beauty of art." The pleasure given by Beauty is intellectual, that is to say, it is the pleasure of apprehending truth: when confronted by ugly things represented characteristically, man "delights in having increased his cognitions": Beauty, "with its property of supplying to the soul likeness, order, proportion, harmony and variety, provides it with an immense field for the construction of innumerable syllogisms, and by reasoning in this manner it will take pleasure in itself, in the object which arouses such pleasure, and in the feeling of its own perfection." Finally, the beautiful may be defined as "the inherent modification of the object under observation which presents it in the inevitably characteristic manner in which it is bound to appear."[39] In contrast to the fallacious profundity of Winckelmann and Mengs we welcome the sound good sense of this obscure Spalletti, upholder of the Aristotelian position against the revived neo-Platonism of the æstheticians.
Beauty and the characteristic: Hirt, Meyer, Goethe.
Many years went by before a similar rebellion arose in Germany; at length in 1797 the art-historian Ludwig Hirt, basing his case on ancient works of art which depicted all things, even things utterly vulgar and ugly, ventured to deny the view that ideal beauty is the principle of art, and that expression has only a secondary place, above which it must not rise for fear of disturbing ideal beauty. For the ideal he substituted the characteristic, as a principle to be applied equally to gods, heroes or animals. Character is "that individuality by which form, movement, signs, physiognomy and expression, local colour, fight, shade and chiaroscuro are distinguished and represented in the manner demanded by the object."[40] Another historian of art, Heinrich Meyer, who started from the position of Winckelmann and went on by adopting a series of compromises, finally asserting an ideal of trees and landscape side by side with the ideal of man and various other animals, tried to find an intermediate position between this doctrine and Hirt's, in the course of controversy with the latter. And Wolfgang von Goethe, forgetful of his youthful days when he chanted the praises of Gothic architecture, returning home from an Italian tour impregnated with Greece and Rome in 1798, also sought a middle term between Beauty and Expression; dwelling on the thought of certain characteristic contents which should supply the artist with forms of beauty to be by him remodelled and developed into complete beauty. The characteristic was thus the mere point of departure, and beauty was simply the result of the artist's elaboration: "we must start from the characteristic" (says he) "in order to attain the beautiful."[41]
[1] Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe, Paris, 1746; see esp. part i. ch. 3; part ii. chs. 4, 5; part iii. ch. 3.
[3] Analysis of Beauty, London, 1753 (Ital. trans., Leghorn, 1761).
[4] Op. cit. p. 47.