What is beauty in art?

‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ seems like a straightforward phrase: beauty is defined by the individual seeing it. The thing is, personal opinions on what is or isn’t beautiful are not purely individual. They are social constructs, influenced by our time and place, what we’ve studied at school, what experiences we’ve had related to beauty and so on.

So, what is beauty if it changes from beholder to beholder? The simple answer is, it’s complicated. Beauty and the beholder are anything but straightforward and their connection has a big impact on the social value of art.

Let’s take these two paintings separated by almost 300 years. The work by Titian depicts the ideal of female beauty in 16th century Venice, Italy. While the other depicts Sarah Bernhardt the ideal of female beauty in 1870s France.

The attitude and physicality of each sitter is different, yet we can likely agree that both women represented are widely accepted as beautiful even if we, individually, might not think them to be our personal conception of beauty. So, acknowledgment of beauty is, in some part, a social agreement, not purely about individual opinion.

However, it’s not just the beauty of these women we’re discussing; it is the beauty of the artworks they are in – can the beauty of the subject be separated from the beauty of an artwork? Are the artworks beautiful because of their subjects or does the artwork create their beauty? Is their beauty natural (given) or is it a creation?

Beauty in nature is different to beauty in art because nature is natural – it is not constructed, nor is it an interpretation. When nature is the subject of art, we are studying the artist’s interpretation of nature, their creation of nature which may or may not be exactly what was seen. Their creation plays to human understanding of nature rather than what nature truly is. If nature is beautiful in an artwork, it is because it is a human explanation of nature; nature is not beautiful unless a human declares it to be.

Understanding cultural conceptions of beauty is the foundation of art historical work. We’re not so interested in what makes something beautiful, but how the beholder comes to believe that something is ‘beautiful’.

Defining beauty, especially in art, is not really possible, but that does not mean some art historians have not tried.  Some have declared that beauty is ‘unity in diversity of forms’ while others proclaim beauty causes one to feel love or passion. None of the definitions are terribly specific, but all of them are interested in what beauty does to the beholder.

Winckelmann praised the work of Raphael as being geometrically unified even though there were multiple figures in action.   

We can credit the 18th century Enlightenment thinker Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), ‘the father of modern art history’ with introducing the complications of beauty into the study of art. Winckelmann’s work transformed art history from just being artist biography to a method of thinking about how an artwork is a product of its broader social, cultural context.

His focus was how the ‘beauty’ or visual harmony of an artwork was a reflection a culture’s beliefs, not just the product of a singular artist. Because Winckelmann’s method of studying art is the foundation of art history, the study of art history is fundamentally linked to cultural conceptions of beauty.

Winckelmann’s beauty bias leant towards the ancient Greeks. He believed the ‘quiet simplicity and noble grandeur’ of Greek sculpture signalled the peak of artistic creation. For Winckelmann, this sculpture, Laocoön and his sons, from the 1st century was an example of the ‘beautiful mode.’

The ancient sculpture depicts Laocoön with his two sons being strangled by sea snakes, their fates dictated by the goddess Athena who was displeased that Laocoön had warned the people of Troy about the Trojan Horse. For Winckelmann, the heroic pain in both the face and tense musculature of Laocoön’s body were the epitome of beautiful mode: the fullness of sensuality and grace that make the artwork immediately attractive to its viewer. It is in this immediate attraction where he judged the success of the artwork’s beauty.   

In this way, Winckelmann is explaining that beauty creates experience, to know beauty is to experience it. For him, the beautiful is immediate and transforms us not just mentally, but physically moves us. If an artwork does not do this it is not, technically, beautiful.

Winckelmann’s concept of beauty may seem old fashioned or esoteric. Agree with it or not, it had a huge influence on the making and study of art as well as the collecting and display of art in museums for over 200 years. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, the world’s largest museums, influenced by Winckelmann’s ideas, founded their collections on Greek classical art.

Pheidias is one of over 100 sculptures currently owned and on display at the British Museum. The marbles were brought into the collection in 1816, about 60 years after Winckelmann wrote his influential work on classical Greek art and beauty.

I have been teaching at City Lit for almost six years. On the first day of a course I always ask the learners why they have come to study to art. A majority of people say: ‘I don’t know anything about art.’ This is a very good reason and feels like the most obvious reason to study art history. However, this is simply not true. Most people already understand a lot about art. A painting with apples relies on human understanding of apples – their shape, texture, colour. Seeing and identifying what is there is actually an important part of understanding an artwork that most people are capable of. Of course, there is more: history, artist biography, etc. But, why should anyone be able to know that on first look at an artwork?

A big part of why people don’t feel like they ‘get’ art is our culture’s perception that art is still linked to Winckelmann’s immediacy of beauty. Many people feel that understanding art is accompanied by an instantaneous change of consciousness; that ‘true’ understanding art is to be immediately moved by its beauty. That is a lot of pressure for the beholder and for the artwork.

A comprehensive understanding of art is never immediate no matter how ‘beautiful’ the artwork is. What happens when an artwork does not move you? Are you wrong? Is the artwork bad? No!

This is not to say that there are no genuinely negative experiences and subpar artworks. Many times our experience of art is primed by the expectation that a ‘very good’ or beautiful work of art will transform us. When it does not, the art must be bad or we must be lacking knowledge.

Let’s take the Mona Lisa, perhaps the most famous artwork in the world. If you would like to see the Mona Lisa, you’ll have to queue at least 40 mins to get museum admission and then, you’ll have to queue again (up to 30 minutes) inside the museum to get a closer look at it. It is not simply crowd-control, it is the theatre of experience.

Anticipation created by the queues and crowds of people photographing the painting make it feel like seeing it, in person, should be transformative. Yet, most people describe the experience as underwhelming, the painting as small, the crowds and selfies as baffling. Why do we play along with the hype? Perhaps it has to do with the belief that the experience of art can immediately impact you (to use Winckelmann’s concept). Who wouldn’t queue for that?

Beauty being in the eye of the beholder is a starting point of a lot of questions; it is certainly not the answer to what beauty is. If we want to begin to understand the importance of art in our lives, we should start with our individual expectation of it. How have we come to believe what art is supposed to do? What does art really do to us? What have we been told to do when looking at art? Do we have to see beauty for an artwork to be of value? 

Art history can help us develop a beholder’s eye for art, but it also allows us to examine how our relationship to art is structured by history, culture and society. In this more advanced study of the humanities (art, film, literature) we develop an understanding of our experience of human creation. This expands not only our view of art, but social systems structure our relationship to the world, for better or worse. If you are looking for this more expansive, critical view of art, join us for one of our advanced study courses in the humanities.

Study Art History at City Lit