On the Shoulders of Giants Read online

  The model has to be generational, therefore. Fathers had to worship Cranach’s anorexic Venuses as young men to be moved to call Rubens’s chubby Venuses an insult to beauty; fathers had to love Alma Tadema before they could demand of their sons what the devil that daub by Mirò or that piece of African art was supposed to mean; fathers had to rave about Greta Garbo before, scandalized, they could ask their sons what they saw in that little ape Brigitte Bardot.

  The mass media of today, and the mediatization of museums, also visited by the uncultivated of old, have brought about the compresence and the syncretistic acceptance of all models, indeed of all values. When the Australian supermodel Megan Gale appears in an ad in which she dons rollerblades to swoop across the curves and ledges of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, both the sexual and the artistic aspects appeal to all generations: the museum is as sensuously desirable as Megan, and Megan is as much a cultural object as the museum, since both exist in the amalgam of a cinematic fiction that unites the sex appeal of the ad and the aesthetic boldness of vision that in the past could only been the stuff of arthouse films.

  Between its new concepts and its exercises in nostalgia, television has made transgenerational models out of Che Guevara and Mother Teresa, Lady Diana and Padre Pio, Rita Hayworth, Brigitte Bardot, and Julia Roberts, not to mention the macho John Wayne of the 1940s and the meek Dustin Hoffman of the 1960s. The slender Fred Astaire of the 1930s dances alongside the stocky Gene Kelly of the 1950s, while the cinema makes us dream simultaneously about the sumptuously feminine outfits seen in Roberta and the epicene fashion of Coco Chanel. For those who do not go in for the refined masculine beauty of Richard Gere, there is the sensitive appeal of Al Pacino or the blue-collar charm of Robert de Niro. When you cannot afford the majesty of a Maserati, there is always the elegant utility of the Mini Morris.

  The major media no longer present any unified model. Even in an advertisement created to air for only a week, they can draw on all the experimental work of the avant-garde and at the same time rediscover nineteenth-century iconography; they can offer the fairy-tale realism of role-playing games and Escher’s mind-boggling perspectives, the opulent curves of Marilyn Monroe and the gamine grace of the latest top models, the dusky beauty of Naomi Campbell and the Nordic beauty of Claudia Schiffer, the charm of traditional tap dancing, as in A Chorus Line, and the chilling futuristic architectures of Blade Runner; the androgynous Jodie Foster and squeaky-clean Cameron Diaz, not to mention Rambo and Ru Paul, George Clooney (whom any father would embrace as his son, perhaps only adding a brand-new degree in medicine), and neo-cyborgs who paint their faces in metallic shades and transform their hair into forests of colored spikes.

  Amid this orgy of tolerance, this absolute and unstoppable polytheism, where is the watershed that separates fathers from sons, driving the latter toward patricide (both as rebellion and as tribute) and the former toward the anthropophagy of Saturn?

  We are barely at the dawn of this new trend, but think for a moment about the arrival, first, of the personal computer and then of the internet. The computer comes into the home thanks to the fathers, for economic reasons if for nothing else. The sons, far from rejecting it, go on to master it, soon surpassing the fathers in ability. But neither sees it as a symbol of rebellion or resistance of the other. The computer has not divided the generations; if anything, it has united them. No one lays a curse on his son because he surfs the net, and likewise, no son opposes his father’s doing so.

  We are not lacking for innovation, but today’s innovation is almost always technological, it is normally imposed by an international production center run by older people, and it creates fashions accepted by the younger people. We talk today of a new youth language of SMS texting and email, but I could show you essays written ten years ago in which the very people who created the new instruments, and the older sociologists and semioticians who studied them, foresaw the language and formulas that would result and that they in fact made popular. Bill Gates was young when all this began (now he is a mature gentleman who tells young people which language they will have to use), but as a young man he did not advocate generational revolt. He came up with a shrewd offer designed to interest both fathers and sons.

  Some people think that young social misfits are opposing their fathers by turning to drugs, but drug abuse is a model that generations have made use of ever since the days of the artificial paradises of the nineteenth century. The new users receive their supplies from international drug traffickers, who are adults.

  It might be said that there is no clash of models but merely an accelerated turnover of them. But this changes nothing. For a brief space of time, a certain youth model (whether spotted in a Pasolini film or in Nike footwear) strikes fathers as outrageous, but the speed of its diffusion in the media ensures that it will soon be absorbed by the fathers, too—perhaps even at the risk that, after an equally brief time, it will come to strike the sons as ridiculous. But no one will have time to notice this relay race, and the overall result will always be that absolute polytheism and syncretistic compresence of all values. Was the set of beliefs and practices labeled New Age a generational invention? As far as its content goes, it is a collage of age-old esoteric elements. It may be that young people were the first to turn to these elements, as young cohorts in the past turned to new hosts of rediscovered giants, but the diffusion of typical New Age images, sounds, and beliefs, and New Age recording, publishing, cinematic, and religious paraphernalia, was immediately taken over and run by the wily old foxes of the mass media. If some youngsters now run off to India, it is only to throw themselves into the arms of an elderly guru with many lovers and a fleet of Cadillacs.

  Things that looked like the last frontier of nonconformity, such as nose rings, tongue studs, and blue hair, in the sense that they are no longer the inventions of a few individuals but universally accepted, were proposed to young people by the gerontocratic centers of the international fashion business. Soon the influence of the mass media will impose them on the parents, too—unless the moment comes when both young and old, perhaps on discovering that ice cream is not as enjoyable with a metal stud in one’s tongue, together abandon them.

  Why, then, should fathers still devour their sons, and why should sons still dispatch with their fathers? The risk, for everyone, though the fault of no one, is that constant innovation constantly accepted by everybody will lead to ranks of dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of other dwarfs. And, at the same time, let’s be realistic: in normal times, there ought to be generational turnover. By now, I ought to be a pensioner.

  That’s great, you will say: we are entering a new era in which, along with the decline of ideologies and the blurring of the traditional divisions between left and right and between progressives and conservatives, generational conflict is clearly diminishing. But is it biologically advisable for sons’ rebellions to add up to no more than superficial adjustments to the models produced by their fathers’ rebellions—or for fathers’ devouring of their sons to go no further than giving them a bit of room for some colorful form of social marginalization? When the very principle of patricide is in crisis, mala tempora currunt. Bad times are upon us.

  But the worst diagnosticians of every epoch are its contemporaries. My giants taught me that there are transitional spaces where the coordinates are lacking, the future cannot be seen clearly, and we still do not understand the chicaneries of reason or the imperceptible plots of the zeitgeist. Perhaps the good old ideal of patricide is rising again, but in different forms. In future generations, cloned sons might rebel against their legal fathers (or sperm donors) in ways we cannot predict.

  And perhaps giants we know nothing about are even now lurking in the shadows, ready to climb onto the shoulders of us dwarfs.

  [La Milanesiana, 2001]

  2. Beauty

  In 1954, I graduated in aesthetics with a thesis on the problem of beauty, albeit only as I could explore it in a few pages of Thomas Aquinas. In 1962, I began work on a
project for an illustrated book on the history of beauty, a project that the publisher dropped for banal financial reasons, even though a quarter or at least a fifth of the work had already been done. I picked up that project again a few years ago and created a CD-ROM, and after that a book, for the simple reason that I do not like leaving things half done. Considering the span of fifty years across which I have found myself thinking about the concept of beauty from time to time, I realize that, then as now, I could repeat the answer Augustine gave when asked about the nature of time: “If no one asks me, I know what it is; if I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I don’t know.”

  I consoled myself about my uncertainties concerning the definition of beauty when, in 1973, I read the definition of art that Dino Formaggio provided in a booklet written for the Enciclopedia filosofica ISEDI: “Art is everything people call art.” So likewise I would say: “Beauty is everything people have called beautiful.”

  This, of course, is a relativistic approach: what is held to be beautiful depends on the period and the culture. This is not a matter of modern heresy. There is a famous passage in Xenophanes of Colophon: “But had the oxen or the lions hands, / Or could with hands depict a work like men, / Were beasts to draw the semblance of the gods, / The horses would sketch them to look like horses, / The oxen, like oxen, and their bodies make / in accordance with their own shape” (Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, V, 110). In other words, le crapaud est beau pour sa crapaude. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

  But while beauty has never been absolute and immutable it has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country: and this does not hold only for physical beauty (of men, of women, of the landscape) but also for the beauty of God, or the saints, or ideas.

  It should suffice to quote this passage from Guido Guinizelli’s sweet poetry (as I invite the Milanesiana audience to gaze on a Gothic statue from more or less the same period of the beautiful Uta of Naumburg):

  I have seen the shining morning star,

  So bright it might appear the day has dawned,

  …

  Snow white face with rosy blush,

  Shining eyes, glad and full of love;

  I do not believe in the whole Christian world there is

  A woman so full of beauty and virtue.

  Let’s look now at a nineteenth-century image from Odilon Redon, The Apparition, and with it, I offer a passage from Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 1832 novel Léa:

  “Yes, yes, my Léa, you are beautiful, you are the most beautiful of creatures. I would not give you up for the beauty of the angels in heaven.” And her defeated eyes, her pallor, her diseased body, he pulled these images into his entwining sensual and agitated dreams of her.

  Another problem involves not giving in to our contemporary taste. For some youngsters with earrings or maybe pierced noses, a Botticellian beauty may appear attractive because they are delightfully and perversely high on cannabis, but it certainly was not like that for Botticelli’s contemporaries, who admired the face of Venus in the Primavera for other reasons.

  Meanwhile, what is it that we are talking about when we speak of beauty? We in the contemporary world, or at least we Italians influenced by the idealist aesthetic, almost always identify beauty with artistic creations. But for centuries people talked of beauty above all with regard to the beauty of nature, objects, the human body, or God. Art was recta ratio factibilium, a way of doing things well, but techne or ars was applied both to the work of painters and shipbuilders, and even barbers (and, in fact, people began referring to the “fine arts” only much later).

  Regarding the ideal of beauty of a given historical period, we have only three types of evidence today, and they all come to us from “cultivated” sources. An alien visitor landing on Earth today, or a thousand years from now, who wanted to discover what kind of beauty—of human bodies, clothes, or objects—was favored by the humble and unrefined of our day, could deduce this from films, illustrated magazines, and television programs. But imagine if that traveler coming from outer space to determine our prevailing idea of female beauty had only Picasso’s portraits to go by. With respect to past centuries, we find ourselves in this kind of situation.

  We also have written texts at our disposal. But, here too, how much do words tell us? When Proust, in À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, describes Elstir’s painting, a careful reader might think of the Impressionists—but biographers tell us that, in a questionnaire Proust filled in at age thirteen, he named his favorite painter as the classicist Meissonier, and that he continued to admire him even when older. As he wrote about the nonexistent Elstir’s concept of artistic beauty, the kind of beauty he was thinking about was perhaps different from the kind his words suggest to us.

  This example also suggests a third type of evidence that we might call (if we wanted to bring some semiotics into our work—something which, on this occasion, I wish I could spare the great and the good), in a Peircean sense, the interpretant sign. Charles Sanders Peirce claimed that the meaning of a sign is always made clear by another sign that interprets it in some way. And thus we can compare some texts that talk of beauty with some contemporaneous images that were presumably intended to represent beautiful things. This comparison might clarify our ideas on the aesthetic ideals of a certain period.

  Sometimes, however, comparison can be brutally disappointing. Let’s take the description of an overwhelmingly seductive beauty, or at least so the narrator tells us: Cecily, a Creole in a novel serialized from 1842 to 1843, Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris:

  The Creole uncovered her magnificent head of thick black hair which, parted in the center of her brow and naturally curly, did not fall below the point where her neck met her shoulders.…

  Cecily’s features were the kind that remain engraved in the memory forever. A bold forehead … dominated the perfect oval of her face; her matte white complexion had the velvety freshness of a camellia petal brushed by a ray of sunlight. Her … straight, narrow nose ended in two quivering nostrils that flared at the slightest emotion. Her mouth, insolent and sensual, was of a bright red …

  How would we portray this splendid Cecily today, if we had to translate these words into images? Like a Brigitte Bardot, or a femme fatale of the Belle Époque? Well, the novel’s original illustrator (and probably his readers, too) saw Cecily in a certain way. So we must resign ourselves and fantasize about their Cecily, at least if we are to understand—according to Sue and his readers—the particular ideal of beauty that caused the notary Ferrand to be consumed with satyriasis.

  The comparison of written texts and images is often productive because it allows us to understand how the same linguistic term, in the passage from one century to another, and sometimes from one decade to another, can correspond to different musical or visual ideals. Let’s take a classical example, that of proportion. Since antiquity, beauty has been identified with proportion. Pythagoras was the first to maintain that the principle of all things is number. With Pythagoras an aesthetical-mathematical vision of the universe came into being: all things exist because they are ordered and they are ordered because they are the realization of mathematical and musical laws, which are together the conditions of existence and beauty. This idea of proportion ran through all of antiquity and was transmitted to the Middle Ages through the works of Boethius between the fourth and fifth century AD. Boethius says that one day Pythagoras observed how, in striking the anvil, a blacksmith’s hammers produced different sounds, and he realized that the ratio between the sounds of the range thus produced was proportional to the weight of the hammers. The ratios governing the dimensions of Greek temples, the intervals between the columns, or the ratios between the various parts of the façade correspond to the same ratios that govern musical intervals. In Timaeus, Plato was to describe the world as consisting of regular geometrical bodies.

  Between Humanism and the Renaissance, the Platonic regular bodies were studied and celebrated as ideal models, by
Leonardo, by Piero della Francesca in De perspectiva pingendi (before 1482), and by Luca Pacioli in De divina proportione (1509). The divine proportion that Pacioli discusses is the golden ratio, the relationship that exists, for example, between two rectangles, where the smaller is to the larger as the larger is to the sum of the two. This ratio is wonderfully exemplified in Piero della Francesca’s painting The Flagellation of Christ.

  But, in the ten centuries that separate Boethius from Pacioli, did those who used the term “proportion” all mean the same thing? Not at all. In commentaries produced by early medieval scholars on Boethius, images were deemed to be perfectly proportioned and put on manuscript pages even though they did not adhere to the golden ratio in the slightest.

  In the thirteenth century, Villard d’Honnecourt, who certainly knew how to draw very well, supplied highly intuitive and quantitative rules for proportion—nothing to do with the more mathematically rigorous rules that had previously inspired the sculpture of Polyclitus and would later inspire Dürer.

  On the other hand, when in the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas spoke of proportion as one of the three criteria of beauty, he was no longer speaking only in terms of mathematical ratios. He believed that proportion was not just a correct arrangement of matter, but a perfect adaptation of matter to form, in the sense that a human body that was well adapted to the conditions of humanity should be considered proportionate. This made proportion also an element of virtue, in the sense that spiritual beauty consists of a person’s conduct or actions being well-proportioned with respect to what reason dictates, and so we must also allow that there is such a thing as moral beauty (or moral turpitude). Because, to be beautiful, a thing must be suited to its intended purpose, Aquinas would not have hesitated to define a glass saw as ugly. Despite the superficial beauty of the material of which it was made, it would be unable to perform its proper function. Proportion also applied to the collaborative interaction of things, so it is possible to call “beautiful” the reciprocal action of stones that, by propping and pushing against each other, solidly hold up a building. It also results from having the correct relationship between the intelligence and the thing the intelligence understands. In short, proportion becomes a metaphysical principle that explains the very unity of the cosmos.