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.