The Truth of Beauty
(Crf.
Thompson, Maglioni, New Literary Links. From the Origins to the Romantic Age, Teacher’s
book, CIDEB, pp. 60-61)
· Although linked to divine, or
idealistic concepts, beauty in the Renaissance somehow becomes separated from
its origins, producing a proliferation of 'simulacra'- simulations of divine
beauty - which proves more compelling than religion, since it
refers to the visible. A cult of the iconic image, in particular of the image
of the Madonna, which dominates Renaissance painting, substitutes what the
image is supposed to represent.
·
In his
'Sonnet 130', Shakespeare sees beauty as an effect of subjective perception.
Thus beauty for Shakespeare is a question of rarity. Among the simulacra of the
ideal, the non-ideal beauty stands out. We see
Shakespeare's critique of Platonic beauty at work also in Romeo and Juliet where the apotheosis of ideal beauty is Romeo's
vision of Juliet as a beatific death mask, a vision which proves more
compelling than his love for the living, breathing Juliet. For in reality he
chooses the dead Juliet over the living, since he does not try to revive her,
as a distraught lover might, but seals a 'dateless bargain to engrossing death'. The word 'engrossing'
conveys Romeo's fascination with death, which is synonymous with his
fascination for Juliet as simulacrum, a virtual image that disengages itself
from her living being, and which is the antidote to the inevitable
decomposition of her body and beauty in both life and death.
· In Keats' 'Ode on a
Grecian Urn' and 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' the connection between the beauty of art and death is
made more explicit. Keats shows the way man's
fascination for art lures him away from his own life towards an eternity he
cannot attain, an eternity which, lacking life, and providing no real
sustenance, is arid, sterile and monotonous like the Urn's 'cold pastoral'. Art
in its eternity is indifferent to the fate of those who create and believe in
it. It is the 'Belle Dame Sans Merci', who lulls the wandering knight to sleep, entrapping him
forever in a dream of her, despite the warnings of her other victims, the death-pale warriors he meets in his dream. Art weaves its own
truth, but it is a truth
which is at the same time
paradoxically a form of deception. Its beautiful facade is simply a 'mask which
covers the void.
·
In Wilde's The Picture
of Dorian Gray the void of beauty, it's blank
fascination, also has an amoral dimension. Beauty is that which permits
everything. It presents itself as something which cannot be questioned.
·
We see this
mask-like
dimension in D. G. Rossetti's
Pre-Raphaelite paintings of Jane Morris, such as Lady Lilith, another 'Belle Dame Sans Merci' who lures men to their doom. In this painting Lilith regards herself in the mirror, but all we see of this
reflection is its reverse, the back of the mirror which forms a perceptual
black hole in the painting. The crucial turn is to realise
that this black hole is the truth of the image itself. Thus, though we think we
are made to think we are being deprived of Lilith's image which she guards like a jealous secret,
it is actually presented to us. There is no other side of the mirror, just as the painting itself is without depth. Here Rossetti
shows us the lure of beauty, the
way it gives us the illusion of depth when it is in fact nothing but pure
surface.