political philosophy – O Tempora, O Mores

Vesuivus — Pierre-Jacques Volaire, The Eruption of Vesuvius, 1771. At the Art Institute Chicago.

Some time ago, I asked in two successive posts whether we really were afraid of beauty nowadays and whether that had significantly altered our approach to thinking about virtue. I wrote a response that was brief and not as comprehensive as I had imagined; it was merely putting pen to paper for a thought that was begging to be let out. Since then, I have had the opportunity to read more widely on the subject, and a book that has caught my attention is Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, which was delivered as the Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Yale University in 1998.¹ Scarry’s lectures are marvellous works, and excised of their drooling over the work of Matisse, asks an important question: how are beauty and justice connected? Can the beautiful be connected to the just? Scarry identifies two roles that beauty takes — first, as the progenitor of wonder; second, as creating what she terms the “pressure toward the distributional,”;² — that are integral to our understanding and comprehension of the world. Through this essay, I will take some of Scarry’s ideas and apply them to areas of inquiry that I intend to probe further.

Continue reading “Are We Afraid of Beauty? (II)” →

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) ↩
Ibid, 67. ↩

[All translations are from the Loeb Classical Library unless otherwise specified.]

The Three Davids — From L–R: Donatello’s marble David and bronze David; Verocchio’s bronze David.

Tucked away from the courtyard of the Bargello are three statues of David: a marble statue (c. 1409) and a bronze statue (c. 1445) by Donatello, and another bronze statue by Andrea del Verocchio (c. 1475). To the uninitiated, these three are merely different takes on a Biblical figure, aesthetically pleasing, and differing only slightly in form and date. To the art historian, these three statues show how the polis of Florence sought to think of itself as it moved from constitutional rule to a brazen oligarchy to a de facto monarchy (and if we are to believe Piero Soderini, a tyrannical one). Donatello’s marble David is also a potent symbol of how change — the kind that can be appreciated, in any matter — is always a slow, gradual process; it stands on the precipice between the medieval and the modern, the Gothic and the Renaissance, combining with astute skill and genius the slender grace of the figures at Chatres and Reims with the ever-so-slight contrapposto that would prominently feature in yet another marble statue of David, this time by Michelangelo, whose revolutionary republicanism inspired a rather moving image that featured prominently in Florentine imagery. But when did the Gothic end — and when did the Renaissance begin? The tail end of the former and the origins of the latter are almost fungible.

Continue reading “The Art Historian as Political Philosopher” →