Rome and late antiquity
The Romans gathered Greek thinking about art into handbooks and rules: how a house should be built, how a poem should be written. At the same time two ideas emerged that pointed beyond the rules – the sublime, which overwhelms, and Plotinus’ beauty as a light from a higher world.
When Augustus became sole ruler of Rome in 31 BC, Greek culture had long been part of the education of the Roman upper class. Greek statues were brought to Rome as spoils of war, Greek artists worked for Roman patrons, and philosophy was read in Greek. The Romans’ own contribution to thinking about art was less speculative and more practical: they wrote textbooks that organised knowledge, gave advice on what was fitting and formulated rules that could be taught. That is precisely why their texts had such a long life. It was through Roman books that the Renaissance and classicism came to know ancient aesthetics. There were also Romans who were suspicious of the imports. In his Natural History Pliny the Elder lamented that costly materials had become more important than the artist’s skill – yet it is he who has preserved most of what we know about the Greek painters and sculptors.
The most important figure for architecture is Vitruvius, an architect and military engineer who around 30–15 BC dedicated his Ten Books on Architecture (De architectura) to Augustus. It is the only architectural treatise to have survived from antiquity. Vitruvius demands that every building combine three qualities: strength (firmitas), utility (utilitas) and beauty (venustas). The formula is so simple that it is still quoted in architecture schools, and it says something essential: beauty is one of three equal tasks, not a decoration added afterwards. At the same time the Romans built in a way the Greeks never had. With concrete, vaults and domes they created great interior spaces, such as the baths and the Pantheon, whose dome is still the largest in unreinforced concrete. Theory did not keep pace: Vitruvius writes surprisingly little about vaults.
Vitruvius explains beauty itself in Greek terms. A temple should have symmetria, a common measure for all its parts, just like a well-formed human body, in which the face, the hand and the foot stand in fixed relations to the whole height. In the third book he describes how a man with outstretched arms and legs fits into both a circle and a square, with the navel as the centre of the circle. The body here becomes a link between the human being, geometry and the building. The image was not forgotten: around 1490 Leonardo da Vinci drew his famous interpretation of it. Vitruvius also explains that the architect must know music, since proportion and sound are connected, and he describes how the acoustics of theatres could be improved with bronze vessels tuned to different notes.
Vitruvius also speaks of decor, propriety: a building’s form should accord with its purpose and with the god to whom the temple is dedicated. The powerful Doric order suits warlike gods such as Mars and Hercules, the slender Corinthian suits Venus and the nymphs. He relates that the Doric column took its proportions from a man’s body, the Ionic from a woman’s and the Corinthian from a young girl’s, and that the Corinthian capital was invented when the sculptor Callimachus saw acanthus leaves growing round a basket on a girl’s grave. The stories are myths, but they show how close architecture and the human body were in ancient thought. He also requires a house to suit its owner: a banker, a lawyer and a farmer need different kinds of rooms.
In poetry Horace played the same role as Vitruvius in building. His verse epistle On the Art of Poetry (Ars poetica), written in the last decades BC, is full of advice that became rules: the work should be a whole and not like a picture in which a human head sits on a horse’s neck and ends in a fish’s tail; it should observe propriety, so that each character speaks and acts according to age and nature; and the poet should aim both to instruct and to delight. He who mixes the useful with the sweet wins everyone’s approval. In the 17th and 18th centuries this advice became the foundation of classicist taste. He also stresses that talent and practice must go together: nature is not enough without training, nor training without nature. Whoever wants to make the audience weep, he writes, must first feel grief himself.
One brief phrase in Horace took on a life of its own: ut pictura poesis, “as is painting, so is poetry”. In context it says only that poems, like paintings, may need to be viewed from different distances or several times. But later readers turned it into a principle that the visual arts and poetry are sisters obeying the same laws. Only Lessing broke with this interpretation, in his book Laocoön of 1766, taking as his starting point the very ancient sculpture that illustrates this chapter. In the Renaissance the formula was used to raise painting to the rank of poetry, and Leonardo later turned it into a contest between the arts.
At some point in the 1st century AD an unknown Greek author wrote a treatise On the Sublime (Peri hypsous). It was long attributed to the 3rd-century rhetorician Longinus, but since this is doubtful the author is now called Pseudo-Longinus. The text is about style but says something new: the sublime, the elevated, does not persuade but carries us away. It strikes like a thunderbolt and lifts the soul out of itself. It has five sources – great thoughts, strong passion, rhetorical figures, noble diction and dignified composition – and the first two are innate rather than learned. One of the examples is the creation story’s “God said, Let there be light”, an unusual quotation from the Bible in a pagan author. He distinguishes the sublime from bombast, the inflated that wants to seem great but is empty, and from childish or false outbursts of emotion.
With the sublime came an idea that does not fit the doctrine of proportion: that a text or a work can be great even when it breaks the rules, and that greatness lies in the soul of its creator. Pseudo-Longinus prefers the grand with flaws to the flawless but mediocre. The treatise was printed in 1554, translated into French by Boileau in 1674, and became one of the most important sources when the 18th century made the sublime an aesthetic concept in its own right alongside the beautiful. In his preface Boileau distinguished between the sublime style, the solemn words, and the sublime itself, which can be found in a simple but overwhelming moment.
The most thoroughly considered philosophy of beauty from late antiquity came from Plotinus, who taught in Rome in the 3rd century. He attacked the prevailing definition of beauty as the symmetry of parts. If beauty were symmetry, he objected, simple things such as a colour, a light, gold or a single tone could not be beautiful, and a face would be as beautiful dead as alive, even though it is life that shines in it. Beauty must instead be the presence of form and life, a radiance from the spiritual that takes hold of matter. The ugly is the formless. His examples are often drawn from light: sunshine, the glow of fire, the lustre of gold. Fire is more beautiful than other bodies, he writes, because it stands closest to the incorporeal. Even a virtue or a branch of knowledge can be beautiful, and they are more beautiful than any body.
Plotinus thereby gave the artist a new standing. Plato had seen the painter as an imitator of things; Plotinus held that the artist goes back to the forms from which nature itself derives. Phidias, he writes, made his Zeus not from any visible model but as Zeus would look if he chose to appear to our eyes. Art can thus be a window onto the higher, not merely a mirror of the lower. This idea was taken up by Christian thinkers and became central again in Renaissance Florence. One of his examples is a block of marble beside a finished statue: the statue is beautiful not because of the stone but because of the form the artist has brought into it, and the form existed in the artist before it existed in the stone. Painting and sculpture thus acquired a defence against Plato’s critique, built on Plato’s own philosophy.
In the same period the visual arts changed in a way that accords well with Plotinus’ ideas, even if no direct connection can be shown. The figures of late antique and early Byzantine art become flatter and turn straight towards the viewer, space disappears behind gold backgrounds, and light becomes more important than the body. In Hagia Sophia, consecrated in 537, the dome seemed to contemporaries to float above a ring of windows, and in the mosaics of San Vitale in Ravenna the Emperor Justinian stands in a timeless golden light. The Byzantine historian Procopius described Hagia Sophia shortly after its consecration. The dome, he wrote, seems not to rest on the masonry but to hang from heaven by a golden chain, and the space seems lit not from outside but by a light born within. The architects, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, were incidentally better known as mathematicians than as builders. With Christianity, buildings and images took on new tasks, and the ancient doctrine of proportion and imitation had to be reconciled with faith in an invisible God. The classical imitation of the body had given way to an art that sought to show the invisible – and that is where medieval aesthetics takes over.