The Greeks
The Greeks were the first in the West to ask what beauty is and why people make images of the world. Their answers – that beauty rests on number and proportion, and that art imitates reality – came to govern thinking about art and architecture for more than two thousand years.
The Greek word for the beautiful, to kalon, meant more than our word does. It could refer to a beautiful body, a well-built temple or a noble deed, and it was close to the word for the good. The ideal of kalokagathia – being both beautiful and good – says a great deal about how the Greeks thought: beauty was not a private matter of taste but a sign of order, and order was something that existed in the world itself, not merely in the eye of the beholder. The philosophers would go on to test this idea, sharpen it and sometimes turn it against art. Nor was there any Greek word corresponding to our “art”. Technē meant any skill that follows rules – shipbuilding, medicine, sculpture and poetry – and the boundary between artist and craftsman was fluid. Sculptors and architects worked for pay and were often known only by name, whereas poets enjoyed higher standing because they were thought to be inspired by the Muses. The idea that the visual arts and poetry belong together under a common concept is a much later one.
The starting point is usually placed with Pythagoras and his followers in the 6th century BC. The Pythagoreans noticed that the sounds that go well together correspond to simple numerical ratios: strings whose lengths stand in the ratio 2:1 give an octave, 3:2 a fifth and 4:3 a fourth. If harmony in music was number, could not the whole world be ordered by number? From this question grew the idea of harmonia, a joining of different parts into a unity, and the bold notion that the heavenly bodies, too, move in musical proportions. Pythagoras himself wrote nothing, and most of what is told about him comes from much later sources, but the idea that beauty can be measured and calculated became the Greeks’ legacy. Much later, in the dialogue Timaeus, Plato has the creator of the world arrange the world soul according to just such ratios. In this way the Pythagoreans’ number mysticism became part of the philosophical tradition read by medieval theologians and Renaissance architects.
The sculptors applied the idea to the body. In the 5th century BC Polykleitos of Argos wrote a treatise, the Canon, and made a statue to demonstrate its rules in practice, the so-called Spear Bearer (Doryphoros). Both the text and the original are lost, but the Roman physician Galen tells us that Polykleitos located beauty in the symmetria of the parts – the relation of the fingers to one another, to the hand, to the arm and so on up to the whole body. Symmetria did not mean mirror symmetry but that all the parts share a common measure. In the statue this is combined with contrapposto: the weight rests on one leg, the hips and shoulders are tilted against each other, and the standing body nevertheless looks alive. Polykleitos’ rule was not the only one. According to Pliny the Elder, the sculptor Lysippos in the 4th century BC made the heads smaller and the bodies slenderer, and is said to have remarked that others represented people as they are, he himself as they appear. Even in antiquity, then, there was a dispute over whether beauty lies in measurement or in visual impression.
Architecture rested on the same notion. A Greek temple is a system of relationships: the thickness of the column determines the spacing of the columns, the height of the entablature and the size of the details, so that the whole building can be described from a single basic module. The Parthenon on the Acropolis, built in 447–432 BC, is the most famous example. But the architects were not content with calculated proportions. The floor curves slightly upwards, the columns swell a little in the middle and lean inwards, and the corner columns are thicker than the others. These refinements are usually explained as corrections for the eye: a perfectly straight line can look as though it sags. Beauty thus lay both in measurement and in how measurement is perceived – a tension that would accompany aesthetics throughout its history. Nor was the temple white. Traces of paint show that sculptures and architectural details were painted, something that later classicism, which admired pure marble, long found hard to accept.
Plato, who was active in Athens in the first half of the 4th century BC, brought the question to the centre of philosophy. His dialogue Hippias Major ends in resignation with the proverb that beautiful things are difficult, but other dialogues give powerful answers. In the Symposium the priestess Diotima describes love as a ladder: from a single beautiful body to all beautiful bodies, on to beautiful souls, laws and kinds of knowledge, and finally to the vision of beauty itself – eternal, unchanging and independent of everything that is beautiful for a while. Visible things are beautiful only because they partake of this idea. In the Philebus he maintains that straight lines, circles and the shapes made with compass and ruler are beautiful in themselves, as are pure colours and tones. Here is a pure aesthetics of form, more than two thousand years before modernism. There he also says that measure and proportion everywhere become beauty and virtue, while the immoderate is both ugly and harmful.
Yet the same Plato was art’s sharpest critic. In the tenth book of the Republic he compares a bed made by a carpenter with the idea of the bed and with the painter’s picture of a bed. The carpenter imitates the idea, the painter imitates the carpenter’s bed – and only as it looks from one side. The painter thus stands three removes from the truth. Poetry is dangerous, moreover, because it arouses emotions that ought to be kept in check. In his ideal state Plato therefore wants to allow only hymns to the gods and praise of good men. Elsewhere he speaks of poetry as arising from a divine madness, an inspiration that is not the poet’s own. Both the exalted and the suspicious view of the artist have lived on.
Aristotle, Plato’s pupil, gave mimesis, imitation, a different meaning. In the Poetics, written around 335 BC, he explains that it is natural for human beings to imitate and to take pleasure in imitations. We can enjoy looking at accurate images of things that are unpleasant in reality, such as dead bodies or the lowest animals, because we learn when we recognise. For Aristotle, mimesis is not a copy of the surface but a way of showing how things can and should hang together. That is why he calls poetry more philosophical than history: the historian tells what has happened, the poet what might happen. He also takes examples from painting: Polygnotos painted people better than they are, Pauson worse and Dionysios as we are. Tragedy represents people as better, comedy as worse. The plot, not the characters or the language, he calls the soul of tragedy – an early attempt to understand a work through its structure.
Aristotle also gave beauty a more down-to-earth definition. In the Metaphysics he names order, symmetry and definiteness as the chief forms of beauty, and in the Poetics he says that beauty requires both order and the right size: an animal that is too small cannot be perceived, and one thousands of stadia long cannot be taken in at a glance. A tragedy should therefore have a beginning, a middle and an end and be of a length that can be held in the memory. Tragedy arouses pity and fear and leads to catharsis, a word whose meaning – purification, relief or clarification – has been debated since the Renaissance. With Aristotle the emotions became part of art’s value instead of a threat. Of the plot he says that its parts should be so joined that the whole is disturbed if any part is moved or removed – an idea of the organic whole that recurs almost word for word in Alberti nearly two thousand years later.
In the Hellenistic period, after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, art changed. Sculpture became more dynamic, more dramatic and more interested in pain, old age and everyday life. The Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Laocoön group and the great altar friezes at Pergamon show an art that sought to grip the viewer. Theory lagged somewhat behind: the Stoic philosophers defined beauty as the symmetry of the parts together with pleasing colour, a formula that built on Polykleitos. It would later be attacked by Plotinus. In the Hellenistic period art also became an object of collecting, copying and history writing. The kings of Pergamon and Alexandria built libraries and collections, and authors wrote about famous artists of earlier centuries, with stories of painters competing in lifelikeness and of birds pecking at painted grapes. The anecdotes, later collected by Pliny the Elder, express an ideal of illusion that lived on right up to the Renaissance.
The Greek legacy can be summed up in two lines that run through the whole history of aesthetics. One says that beauty is objective, a matter of number, proportion and unity, and it is carried forward by Vitruvius, the medieval theologians and the Renaissance architects. The other says that art is imitation, and it survives until modernism seriously challenges it. Between Plato, who distrusted images, and Aristotle, who wanted to understand them, stands a debate that was never concluded. Nor did the Greeks often distinguish between beauty in art, in nature and in human beings; beauty was a property of the world. The idea that art has a domain of its own, with values separate from truth and morality, emerges only in the 18th century. Raphael made Plato and Aristotle the central figures of The School of Athens – Plato pointing upwards, Aristotle holding his hand out over the earth.