Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME
scene need not be, and can be used “as an ingredient in order to produce or
intensify certain mixed states of feeling with which [the poet] must entertain us
in default of feelings purely pleasurable.” 32 In visual art, truth must be sacrificed
in the interest of the harmony that is its essence; the wise Greeks saw that “this
veiling was a sacrifice which the artist offered to Beauty.” 33
The gendered character of the antithesis between truth and beauty is apparent;
we need only remember the differing educational programs prescribed by
Rousseau to Emile and to his Sophie, or Kant’s advice, in the Observations, that
“deep meditation and long-sustained reflection are noble but difficult, and do
not well befit a person in whom unconstrained charms should show nothing else
than a beautiful nature.” 34 Joseph Wright’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump
of 1768 (painted, thus, two years after the publication of Laocoön; Figure 4.1),
while far from expressing a Kantian disdain for women, provides an illustration
of the relation of truth to beauty. A mixed company has gathered around a table
to view a demonstration of the effects of a vacuum on a living thing. While two
girls manifest apprehension and distress, a boy participates eagerly in the experiment.
Understanding that the bird, temporarily deprived of air, will soon be
revived, he lowers the cage to which the beautiful creature will be returned. The
light that shines full on the girls makes them into aesthetic objects for the picture’s
viewer; while one of them hides her face, a man with his protective arm
around them points upward to the sight of the unfortunate cockatoo, a thing of
beauty here transformed into an object of rational investigation. The other men
in the room are absorbed, each in his own way, in the experiment, except for the
male of the couple to the left who, gazing into his betrothed’s eyes, in spirit has
left his fellows to join her in domestic bliss. 35
Truth is difficult and painful, and so opposed to the pleasure served by art.
32 Lessing, Laocoön, p. 124; and see p. 86: “to the poet alone belongs the art of depicting with negative
traits, and by mixing them with positive to bring two images into one.”
33 Lessing, Laocoön, p. 65.
34 Kant, Observations, p. 78.
A woman is embarrassed little that she does not possess certain high insights, that she
is timid, and not fit for serious employments, and so forth; she is beautiful and captivates,
and that is enough. On the other hand, she demands all these qualities in a
man, and the sublimity of her soul shows itself only in that she knows to treasure
these noble qualities so far as they are found in him.
He, meanwhile, “by [her] fine figure, merry naivety, and charming friendliness . . . is sufficiently
repaid for the lack of book learning and for other deficiencies that he must supply by his own
talents” (pp. 91–4).
35 For a different take on gender in Wright’s painting, see David Solkin, “Re-Wrighting Shaftesbury:
The air pump and the limits of commercial humanism,” in John Barrell (ed.), Painting and
the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art, 1701–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992), esp. pp. 91–5. Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (1875) demonstrates the longevity of the
themes of Wright’s painting. Here the bird as object of experimentation is replaced by the
human body as a field for dissection; the scientific passion of the medical men contrasts sharply
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