A Model of Attractiveness – Thomas Aquinas’ Wholeness, Equilibrium, and Radiance

In the center ages, Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274), one particular of the greatest of the medieval Christian theologians, commented on what he considered have been the factors of Natural beauty. What was an offhanded comment in his monumental Summa Theologica has grow to be for a lot of lovers of magnificence, a design of analysis and appreciation primarily based on 3 ideas: wholeness, harmony, and radiance.

If a operate of artwork consists of all the a few things, then the observer may possibly be fairly confident that the work is attractive. Ought to a person of these a few parts be identified deficient then the do the job will be deficient and though it may perhaps obtain acceptance as a operate of art, it will under no circumstances be regarded gorgeous.

But prior to I suggest my have opinions about attractiveness, allow me do a little bit of history:

The historic Greeks’ phrase for elegance was kalos, a word that owned other connotations these kinds of as “what is proper,” of “what is excellent” and as a outcome the Greeks didn’t go away us a obvious reduce model of splendor. And incidentally, though Plato’s theory of forms sales opportunities to an absolute splendor, which is transcendental, I am intrigued in attractiveness that is of this world.

John Keats in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” tells us that: ‘Beauty is reality, truth elegance,-that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

Clive Bell:

In each and every, lines and colors put together in a distinct way, specific sorts and relations of types, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combos of lines and colors, these aesthetically transferring varieties, I simply call “Considerable Variety” and “Considerable Kind” is the 1 high quality typical to all will work of visual artwork.

Clive Bell as perfectly as Plotinus each think of elegance as “human type.” But ever since Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, released his Dehumanization of Art ebook, no just one thinks any more time that art and natural beauty must offer completely with the human. In simple fact Hans Hoffman, the American expressionist, tells us that painting isn’t going to even have to explain to a tale at all.

When I was a youthful man and observed Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” for the first time, I was still left in awe of the work for quite a few years. Afterwards, I arrived to enjoy performs by Braque, Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Miro, Matisse, Picasso, and Cezanne and nevertheless, I could not get a tackle on that elusive sensation of aesthetic emotion. Was it the fantastic? Reality? Or important kind?

What sophisticated matters was Marcel Duchamp’s form of artwork: his readymades, his anti-artwork artifacts. How can everyone experience the stirrings of aesthetics bliss by thinking about a urinal? Grapple as I did with this problem, I couldn’t imagine an response.

In a re-read through of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Youthful Man, I was gripped by Stephen Dedalus translation of Aquinas product of natural beauty: wholeness, harmony, and radiance. “This is the model I like! This is a model I can recognize, and that I can utilize to all the arts.”

When I begin to browse a do the job of literature, if anyplace in the e-book I come across wholeness and harmony or well well balanced sentences-I read on. When I end the e-book I request myself: Does this book have radiance or an aura that is discernible and transferable to one’s life enrichment? If your reply is indeed, then I might say with out reservations, “What a wonderful book!” What about Marce Duchamp’s urinal?–you would inquire. My basic and humble solution is: the do the job could have wholeness and harmony, but it lacks the radiance! It lacks the aura that I would get absent with me to enrich my soul for several years to come.

Consider the model: choose a appear at Henry Moore’s statues, or Julian Schnabel mixed media. See if you can discern wholeness, balance, and radiance.