The Symptom of Beauty

Francette Pacteau

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780948462542
• eBook ISBN:
  9781780231662
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

For a woman in the Western world, there is no escaping beauty. Either she possesses it, or she lacks it. If she lacks it, she may hope to gain it. If she already has it, she will certainly lose it. But what is ‘it’? Not an objective thing, Francette Pacteau tells us, but a generic term for an unspecifiable number of psychological experiences in the mind of the observer. What these experiences are, what causes them, and how they manifest themselves as a notion of beauty is the subject of this book.

Less interested in the contingent object of desire than the fantasy that frames it, Pacteau considers the staging of the aesthetic emotion. Her analysis extends from the Classical ideals of beauty, through Renaissance poetry to the recent formulations of Hollywood. Her book is an ambitious attempt to describe the mise-en-scène of beauty within a particular field of representations – that of the beauty of a woman.

1 The portrait of Laura

It was a process not very different, he supposed, from thinking a girl was beautiful because she reminded you of a painting by Botticelli: if you had never seen the painting you would not have noticed her

J. G. FARRELL¹

‘Beauty (unlike ugliness) cannot really be explained’, writes Roland Barthes. ‘Like a God (and as empty), it can only say: I am what I am. The discourse, then, can do no more than assert the perfection of each detail and refer “the remainder” to the code underlying all beauty: Art.’² The girl in J. G. Farrell’s novel is beautiful in so far as she invokes a painted simulacrum. Likewise, Stendhal asserts the beauty of Mlle Létour-neau in a simile which refers her, and us, to a representation: ‘Mlle Létourneau was a beauty of the heavy kind (like the figures in Tiarini’s Mort de Cléopâtre or Antoine, in the Louvre).’³ Beauty, as Barthes remarks, is ‘referred to an infinity of codes’; to recognize beauty is to defer endlessly the question of its origin. Thus Barthes asks: ‘Lovely as Venus? But Venus lovely as what? As herself?’ A question of origin, then, of the model – a question which Diderot, two centuries earlier, had put to the artist, somewhat condescendingly, and to which the artist had replied, somewhat inadequately:

—Well, to answer without torturing my mind too much, when I want to make a statue of a beautiful woman, I have a great number of them undress; all offer both beautiful parts and badly shaped parts; I take from each what is beautiful.
—And how do you recognize what is beautiful?
—Obviously, from its conformity with the antique, which I have thoroughly studied.
—And if the antique did not exist, how would you go about it? You are not answering my question . . .⁴

The artist is lost for words. ‘Deprived of any anterior code, beauty would be mute’, declares Barthes.⁵

When Sarrasine, struck by the beauty of ‘La Zambinella’, declares her to be ‘a masterpiece’, he confirms the conventional equation of beauty with art: ‘With his eyes, Sarrasine devoured Pygmalion’s statue, come down from its pedestal.’⁶ With this step, we pass from simile to metaphor: ‘La Zambi-nella’, who is ‘like’ nothing on earth, simply is the incarnation of the mythical statue. ‘To discover the body of La Zambinella’, Barthes comments, ‘is to put an end to the infinity of the codes, to find at last the origin (the original) of the copies . . .’⁷ The origin of the copies (of which there are many in Balzac’s tale: the painting, of the marble replica, of the statue, of Zambinella) is not a living model, but a work of art – an appropriately mythical masterpiece. In the passage from simile to metaphor, we arrive at the coincidence of the woman with the cultural product, which indeed, to cite the otherwise loquacious Sacha Guitry, puts an end to the discussion: ‘Is there anything more ravishing than the entry of a woman, a beautiful woman, in a salon? There we were, three men, freely conversing, without constraint, surrounded by objets d’art, paintings, and in a cordial atmosphere. She entered. The conversation fell in pieces, the paintings effaced themselves, the objets d’art retreated into shadow . . .’⁸ In the implicit comparison, here, between the living woman and the work of art, the woman triumphs over the art objects and takes their place as the object of the contemplative gaze of the assembled men. This is not a triumph of nature over culture, it is rather the assertion of the masterpiece over mere daubs. It is a triumph, however, which can only be momentary. The event Guitry describes is a snapshot, taken in the blink of an eye, framing the woman in the doorway; after a moment the woman, and the conversation, will move on. Such a finding of the original can only be followed by disappointment. The fiction of the coincidence of the woman and the work of art cannot be sustained.

For the seventeenth-century antiquarian and biographer, Giovanni Pietro Bellori (reflecting on the beauty of Helen of Troy), there was simply no possibility of an adequate living model: the attribution of beauty necessarily required that the woman be replaced by a work of art. Bellori could not believe that the bloody war of Troy could have been fought over a woman of flesh and blood. He reasoned: All products of nature contain ‘defects and shortcomings’; Helen was a product of nature; therefore, Helen was flawed. He deduced from this that, in reality, the Trojan War must have been fought over a statue of Helen.⁹

Bellori’s logic is consistent with a long Western philosophical tradition, which has tended to subsume the idea of beauty to notions of measure and order. For Plato, at the inception of this tradition, measure is the defining principle of the good and the beautiful. Measure is the determination of appropriate relationships through knowledge of proportion and of the mean; it forms the Ideal standard to which all creation that aspires to beauty must conform, and is the rational ground on which all judgement of beauty must rest.¹⁰ For Aristotle, ‘the chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness.’¹¹ For St Augustine, beauty is a product of the unifying principle of number – ‘number’ here meaning, at once, mathematical proportion, rhythmic organization and fittingness of parts (in both elements of the object and faculties of the soul).¹² Ficino finds beauty in the agreement between matter and Idea, as in ‘the appearance and shape of a well-proportioned man’.¹³ To see beauty in nature is to recognize a harmonious design (which, in the religious version of the argument, represents the imprint of a divine mind on otherwise formless matter). Even when Kant eventually frees beauty of abstract concept and moral purpose by asserting the principle of a ‘disinterested delight’, or ‘restful contemplation’, beauty nevertheless remains inextricably bound to the a priori laws that govern understanding (common sense). Beauty presents that clarity of delineation which for Kant is ‘the essential thing’ in all the formative arts.¹⁴ The beauty of nature, like a work of art, proclaims its subjection to this representational principle.

Early in the twentieth century, Benedetto Croce wrote: ‘The phrase “natural beauty” properly refers to persons, things, and places whose effect is comparable to that of poetry, painting, sculpture and the other arts . . . the lover’s imagination creates a woman beautiful to him and personifies her in Laura.’¹⁵ The particular lover’s imagination to which Croce refers is that of the twelfth-century poet Francesco Petrarch. But we must be precise here: Petrarch dedicated his two laudatory sonnets not to an actual or imaginary woman, but to a portrait of Laura, painted by Simone Martini:

Even if Polyclitus were to gaze intently, on trial
with the others who had gained fame in that art,
not in a thousand years would he see the least part
of the beauty which has conquered my heart.

But certainly my Simone was in Paradise
whence comes this noble lady;
there he saw her, and portrayed her on paper
to give witness, here below, to her fair face.

The work was indeed one conceived
in heaven alone, not here amongst us,
where the body veils the soul.

It was a courteous deed, nor could he do it
once he descended to feel heat
and cold and his eyes sensed only mortal things.

When Simone, to the noble idea
given him in my name, added his manual skill,
if he had endowed the fair work
with voice and mind, as well as form,

he would have freed my heart from many sighs
that make what others hold dear seem vile to me:
for in appearance she looks humble
promising me peace in her expression.

But when I come to speak with her,
she seems to listen very graciously:
if only she could reply to my words.

Pygmalion, how happy you must be
with your image, since you obtained
a thousand times what I long to have just once.¹⁶

Having praised the artist who has portrayed such beauty, Petrarch laments the impassivity of the painted woman: ‘if only she could reply to my words.’ Some two hundred years later, in an almost perfect repetition of Petrarch’s gesture, Pietro Bembo wrote two sonnets about Bellini’s portrait of Maria Savorgnan – an image which proves no less impassively indifferent to the plea of the lover-poet. In the case of Bembo, however, as Mary Rogers has noted,¹⁷ the poet addresses the portrait with a directness that was absent from Petrarch’s sonnets. With Bembo, the oscillation between admiration for the image and frustration at its impassivity, the confusion between the discourse on art and the discourse of desire, blurs the distinction between sign and referent. The desire of the amorous poet is for an image. Unlike a living woman, an image would not be able to evade him: ‘At least, when I look for you, you do not hide.’¹⁸ The image, then, promises the peace of undisturbed possession to the tormented lover; as image, the fair tormentor has been captured and disarmed. But although it is an image whose beauty even nature envies, it remains inert, and the poet passionately wishes – to the point of hallucination – that, Pygmalion-like, he might bring it to life: ‘And truly it seems to me that she speaks with me, and I with her.’¹⁹

Although, in his consideration of Helen of Troy, Bellori’s argumentative substitution of the work of art for the woman is consistent with a philosophical tradition which equates beauty with an abstract perfection of form, his unequivocal separation of imperfect flesh from flawless artefact is nevertheless unusual. The Petrarchan address, in its subsequent transformations from Bembo to Croce, is more typically ambivalent: at once a discourse of desire, and an appreciation of the artist’s skills in giving lasting substance to the ideal, ethereal, object of desire. It is this confusion of mortal beauty with art which (dis)organizes Kenneth Clark’s thinking in his book entitled Feminine Beauty.²⁰ In effect, the book is a chronologically structured commentary on a long history of beautiful women, beginning with a carved head of Queen Nefertiti, and ending with a photograph of Marilyn Monroe ‘doing a high kick on the beach’. There is no doubt in Clark’s mind that, as far back as art history will reach, it was the beauty of the real woman which motivated the artist to paint or carve those portraits; he has no doubt that beauty was out there all along, in the real, waiting to be discovered. Clark even gives us the date and place of ‘the discovery of feminine beauty’: the second millennium BC, in Egypt. In a familiar displacement, however, Clark’s discourse of appreciation of feminine forms slides into a discourse on the merits of the work of representation – a shift already implicit in the publisher’s decision to commission a book on ‘the concept of feminine beauty’ from a well-known connoisseur of art. So, for example, Clark writes about, ‘the exquisite painting of the Countess Howe’s silk and lace dress, its sophistication and effective contrast to the rustic landscape setting’ – and the woman fades beneath the intricate lace of paint and painted plants. Again, he writes of the ‘statuesque ideal of feminine beauty’ of Guido’s figures, ‘classical in origin’, which, ‘form a graceful and flowing composition’ – and the beauty of Venus is displaced by the mastery of the painter which, in turn, evokes that of the sculptor. The painted myth is a statuesque beauty, and thus twice subject to the work of representation. Clark writes of ‘the skill and truthfulness’ with which Velázquez painted the ‘Rokeby Venus’ – an emblematic example, and a candidate for inclusion in the pantheon of mythical beauties – whose beauty thus becomes a tour de force designed to elicit our ‘admiration’.

Kenneth Clark’s discourse on female beauty is in direct line of descent from the sonnets describing the portrait of Laura. Moreover, the fact that his book sits unproblematically in the mainstream of modern publishing attests to the extent to which Petrarch’s sonnets, and the broader context of assumptions which inform them, have contributed to the foundations of a contemporary doxa. The tradition must, therefore, be of more than historical interest to us, and merits some closer consideration. Here, it is instructive to examine the very form in which beauty is praised. In an essay of 1979, examining the status of all the ‘Lauras’ of fifteenth-century poetry, Mario Pozzi has traced what may be called the ‘evacuation’ of the woman to the level of the poetic discourse itself.²¹ Pozzi finds no simple prioritization of a painted or sculpted portrait over the living woman, but rather an undoing of the woman in the very act of writing about her. Renaissance poetry about beautiful women evolved out of the late medieval models of the canone lungo and the canone breve – whose exponents included Boccaccio and Petrarch. These forms, in turn, rested on Classical models. When Boccaccio described the beauties of Emilia,²² he was following specific rules of enunciation, first elaborated in Classical antiquity, but which had since been formalized into a ‘system of feminine beauties’. Primarily, these rules concern the order of enumeration of the physical features, and the choice and use of metaphors. For example, physical attributes should invariably be described beginning from the head and working downward; metaphors should be used only to refer to the no...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: more than a woman
• 1 The portrait of Laura
• 2 The imaginary companion
• 3 Shattered beauty
• 4 The girl of the Golden Mean
• 5 Woman as hieroglyph
• 6 Dark continent
• 7 Skin deep
• 8 Love at last sight
• 9 Mirror, mirror . . .
• Images
• References
• Select bibliography