Cult of beauty - Minerva

Minerva May/June 2011
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Fig 4. William Morris
and Edward Burne-
Jones, The Rubáiyát
of Omar Khayyám,
1872. Illuminated
manuscript bound
in red leather, gold
tooled. Private
collection.
Fig 5. Frederic
Leighton, Greek Girls
Picking up Pebbles
by the Sea, 1871. Oil
on canvas. Private
collection.
Fig 6. Thomas
Armstrong, The
Hay Field, 1869.
Oil on canvas. V&A.
Fig 7. Edward Burne-
Jones, The Golden
Stairs, 1880. Oil
on canvas. © Tate,
London.
first entered philosophical discourse
in 1735 in the writings of the German
philosopher Alexander Gottlieb
Baumgarten, and gradually became the
accepted term for all discussion concerning
the nature of beauty in both
its theoretical and concrete aspects.
Notions of ideal beauty and consideration
of its importance in life and art
were developed in differing ways in the
writings of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich
Schiller and other late 18 th and early
19 th -century German thinkers such as
Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who
elaborated quasi-scientific systems of
analysis to arrive at general principles
of beauty discoverable through the
examination of paintings or the sculpture
of the ancient world. In England
in the 1830s the word was adopted
by intellectuals such as Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and, whilst remaining something
of a specialist term for the study
of beauty in the visual arts, by the
1850s ‘aestheticism’ had come to signify
a more general appreciation of
beauty in works of art, and soon came
to embrace the connotation of a devotion
to that pursuit for its own sake. The
Museum exhibitions
‘decadence’ of the 1890s can be seen as
the final flowering of aestheticism.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti debuted
in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,
a short-lived alliance that venerated
the simplicity of early Italian painting
above later embellishments typified by
Raphael, whom they considered the
high priest of idealised beauty. It is in
paintings that the British cult of beauty
came to its earliest and most sumptuous
fruition. Never stylistically cohesive as
a group, individual aesthetic artists
drew thematic and stylistic inspiration
from a variety of cultures and periods,
often composing uniquely anachronistic
combinations. They found beauty in
Renaissance painting, Classical Greek
sculpture and art forms of the Orient,
most especially those from Japan.
Some of the most fruitful of their
friendships were made in 1857, when
Algernon Charles Swinburne first
entered the circle of Rossetti, Edward
Burne-Jones and William Morris. At
this time the three older friends were
engaged in a collaborative project to
decorate the walls and ceiling of the
Oxford Union debating chamber with
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