Beauty of the Beast. John Bascom
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beauty, whenever and wherever found. Unity and variety are qualities usually, I think always, in some degree present in beautiful objects. But though this presence may show them to be a condition for the existence of beauty, it does not show them to be its synonym or equivalent. In fact, we find that these qualities exist in many things which have no beauty.
Bison Carved in Low Relief
Anonymous, c. 16,000 BCE
Limestone, length: 30 cm
Musée national de la Préhistoire, Les Eyzies-de-Tayac
Their range may include the field under discussion, but it certainly includes much more, and thereby shows that these qualities do not produce the distinguishing and peculiar effects of aesthetics. Thus is it with every combination of qualities into which we seek to analyse beauty. Either phenomena which should be included are left unexplained, or phenomena which do not belong to the department are taken in by the theory.
The Antelopes
Anonymous, c. 1550–1500 BCE
Fresco, 275 × 200 cm
National Museum of Athens, Athens
These analyses, either by doing too much or too little, indicate that the precise thing to be done has not been done by them, and only prove a more or less general companionship, and not an identity of qualities. It is one thing to show that certain things, even, always accompany beauty, and quite another to show that these always and everywhere manifest themselves as beauty, reaching it in its manifold forms, and leaving nowhere any residuum of phenomena to be explained by a new quality.
The Cat Goddess Bastet
Anonymous, 663–609 BCE
Bronze and blue glass, 27.6 × 20 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris
The idea of beauty has been with patient effort and elaborate argument referred to in association, thus not only making it a derived notion, but one reached through a great variety of pleasurable impressions. It is clear, however, that association has no power to alter original feelings, but only to revive them. Therefore, if beauty is not as an original notion or apprehension entrusted to association, it cannot be given by it since this law of the mind has no creating or transforming, but simply a uniting power. Association can explain the presence of ideas, not their nature.
The Painted Garden of the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta
Anonymous, 1st century BCE. Fresco
Museo Nazionale Romano
Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome
On this theory, beauty must chiefly be confined to the old and the familiar, since upon these associations it has acted and been correspondingly excluded from the new, as not yet enriched by its relations. This is not the fact. The beauty of an object has no dependence upon familiarity, but is governed by considerations distinctly discernible at the first examination.
In individual experience, it is a matter of accident what objects ultimately become associated with pleasant or with unpleasant memories; and in community, association is as capricious as fashion. No such caprice, however, attaches to the decisions of taste.
Ducks and Antelopes
Anonymous, 1st century BCE. Fresco
Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples
A uniformity indicative of many well-established principles belongs to these. So far as beautiful objects have been united by a firm association with wealth and elegance, this association itself must be explained by their prior and independent beauty. Beauty has occasioned this permanent and not groundless preference for wealth and elegance. The simplicity of this quality is seen in the presence of an unexplained and peculiar effect, after we have removed all the effects which can be ascribed to the known qualities present.
Detail of pictorial decoration with trompe l’oeil garden and fountain with birds
Anonymous, 25–5 CE. Fresco
House of the Golden Bracelets, Pompeii
It is underived. The primary nature of beauty presents a question of some difficulty, since there are qualities with which it is often so intimately associated that its own existence in particular cases is dependent on theirs. Compared to qualities with which it is often associated, beauty can have the appearance of a secondary and subsidiary quality.
Cat clawing a Turkey-Cock, Ducks, Birds, and Seashells
c. 5 CE. Roman mosaic from Pompeii
Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples
In many things, their relations give limit and law to their beauty, and, as we here find the impression of beauty dependent on an obvious utility, coming and going therewith, it would seem an easy and correct explanation to refer this peculiar intuition and feeling to the perception and pleasure of an evident adaptation of means to an end in the object before us. The error of such a reference is clearly seen, however, in another class of cases, in which this quality is found to have no such connection with the useful and to exist in a high degree with no reference, or with a very obscure and remote reference, in the object to any use.
Ganesha
Hoysala Empire, 12th-13th century
Chloritic schist
Asian Art Museum of San Francisco
The Avery Brundage Collection
If we undertake to deduce beauty from any quality or relation of things, however successful we may think ourselves in a few chosen instances, we will find a large number of objects which our theory should explain beyond its power.
A more careful examination of the very cases on which we rely will show us, that, while beauty may exist with, it exists in addition to the quality from which we would derive it; that the utility with which it is associated is not a cause, but a temporary condition of its existence, or rather that the same relations of the object include and determine both its beauty and its utility.
A Bear Walking
Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1490
Metalpoint, 10.3 × 13.3 cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
As it follows, therefore, in regular sequence, there is no one quality or set of qualities. Instead, we say that it itself is a primary and simple quality. There is involved in this assertion an inability to give any explanation of the attribute, or any definition of the word by which it is expressed. It is compound and derived from things which can be explained. Simple things can only be directly known and felt. Any explanation involves a decomposition of the thing explained, a consideration of its parts, and thus an apprehension of it as a whole, or the reference of it to some source or cause whence it proceeded, and in connection with which it is understood.
Lion
Albrecht Dürer, c. 1494
Gouache and