Image: A Classical sculpture in Florence
“It is beautiful; it has no meaning,” the French Nobel laureate André Gide remarked on Aristide Malliol’s sculpture The Mediterranean when it was shown at the Salon d’Automne in 1905. Gide’s remark, like many of his remarks, aims for simplicity while skirting paradox.
Even though that quote unfortunately does not appear in this book, Beauty and the Gods, it encapsulates an essential – and in some sense, existential – problem. As Jed Perl wrote in a 1990 issue of The New Criterion magazine, “any exploration of classicism turns into an excursion in a house of mirrors. The classical achievement is the one in which the fractured images in the house of mirrors, for a moment, cohere. Which is not the certainty one hoped for.” At the heart of the classical idea in Western visual art is the kinetic power of the male figure, which is beauty personified.
This book by Dr. Hugo Shakeshaft (National Gallery of Art, Washington) does not engage with the representation of classical Greek beauty in Western art, but of course it would not have been written without those intervening 2,500 years in which that very classical Greek beauty has become the central nervous system of Western civilisation writ large. Shakeshaft examines both beauty’s significance in Archaic Greek theology, and the role ideas and experiences of beauty played in divine veneration.
The central thesis of this book is that beauty was integral to both in ways that affected many cultural domains and developments in the Archaic Greek world, with far-reaching consequences in antiquity and right up to the present day.
Thus, the focus of the book, as he writes, is “how ideas and experiences of beauty informed human relations with the divine in ancient Greece.” In this, he has done a superb job, avoiding for the most part dense academic prose. Nicely illustrated in colour and B&W, the narrative moves along briskly through five lengthy chapters (following a 31-page Introduction).
The image I am using here is a photo I took in Florence, Italy. It embodies a central element of the perception of imagery raised by Shakeshaft. Is it a statue of a Greek god, or a human so beautiful he resembles a god?
“According to the commonly held view, distinguishing between human and god is essential to elucidating the image’s meaning,” writes the author, who goes on to make an important assertion. “I propose to show that the opposite was true, that the representational ambiguity between gods and humans was desirable and meaningful in the votive context of soliciting divine favour. To be godlike in appearance,” writes Shakeshaft, “which was tantamount to being beautiful in appearance, demonstrated a solidarity with the divine that the social ideal of charis sought to achieve.”
Charis, which means ‘divine favour,’ is one of the Greek words he studies at length in this book. (Kalos, which means beautiful, is used more than 300 times by Homer). “There are critical differences in how charis operates between gods and humans. The exchange between them is necessarily asymmetrical: deities give humans what they desperately need, while humans can only offer gods what is pleasing and prestigious.”
But, as Shakeshaft highlights, “This raises a profound theological problem. Were the wealthy specially placed to win the gods’ favour with their beautiful and expensive offerings? Would the humble votives of the poorer people struggle to delight their divine recipients?” The example of Croesus brought the matter into sharp relief. His wealth was (and is) legendary, so he had no problem donating a beautiful and enormous golden lion and gigantic gold and silver bowls to the Temple at Delphi, thought to be the centre of the world. But the downfall of King Croesus is equally legendary. “Where is the favour [charis] of the gods?” he is portrayed as saying in a song by Bacchylides, while waiting to be burnt alive. In a miraculous response, Zeus himself puts out the fire and whisks Croesus away to safety! While this song offered little solace to those who could only offer humble votives, it highlights the lengths to which Greek theological discourse was willing to go to give a ‘yes and no’ answer to the two questions posed at the beginning of this paragraph.
The gods sometimes literally drenched select humans in charis. Odysseus, for example, was a fine man, but this was not good enough for the path in life that had been plotted for him. Athena herself poured beauty (charis) on Odysseus to “make him appear godlike…The beauty of humans was considered pleasing to gods not just because gods were lovers of beauty. It was also because Greek deities had a peculiar predilection for those most like themselves.”
But as the author explains, the concept goes far beyond this aspect of beauty. “It encompasses the environments in which they are born, live, and intervene in human affairs, as though the natural world cannot help but reflect the gods’ own beauty and vitality in their presence.” This leads Shakeshaft onto a study of temples, and how they were situated in the natural environment. While they began small in the eighth or ninth century BCE, by the seventh century BCE some were 75 metres (246 feet) long, with widths up to 24 m. Bigger is more beautiful! And what was placed inside some of them strove for the ultimate: “The beauty of the statue of Zeus at Olympia was fundamental to its influence on religion in antiquity. That the statue set a new standard of beauty and a new standard of divine representation were indivisible.” The throned Zeus, 13 metres (42 feet) high, made of ivory and gold, became the most famous, and most beautiful, sculpture in the world.
However much humans strived to please the gods, or emulate them, there would always be a chasm. “The youthful vitality and beauty of mortals are a passing glory. In the stories of Ganymede and Tithonus, it is through the prism of beauty that mortals and immortals discover not just their potential for intimacy but also their fundamental difference.”
Who is the most likely audience for this fascinating book? The author himself sets out the parameters in his Introduction. “One contention of this book is that beauty, and aesthetics in general, is important for historians, art historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists – in fact, for anyone interested in the character of human societies past and present.”
As Shakeshaft notes, the phrase ‘to look like a Greek god’ is still proverbial for being beautiful. As a votive offering, this book certainly rises to a level of beauty the gods would be pleased with.
Beauty and the Gods: A History from Homer to Plato is by Princeton Univ. Press. It lists for $49.95.
for more on beauty, read my other recent article: