Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME
draught animal and dinner, urban sites of service and production. That Dutch art
followed this tradition was a conventional view. To take a notable instance, Sir
Joshua Reynolds judged that Dutch artists wasted their skills “on vulgar and mean
subjects.” 38 According to Reynolds, the merit of Dutch pictures “often consists in
the truth of representation alone,” 39 a mode of truth not equal to the heights of
which art is capable.
Lessing’s desire to restrict the practice of painting to the representation of
beauty betrays a striking conception of the power of visual images. Since beauty,
unlike truth, is a matter of pleasure, not necessity, it is legitimate to censor the
visual arts; and the plastic arts require “the close supervision of the law” because
of “the unfailing influence they exert on the character of a nation” and even on
the physical form of its citizens.
When beautiful men fashioned beautiful statues, those in their turn
affected them, and the State had beautiful statues in part to thank for
beautiful citizens. With us [moderns] the tender, imaginative power of
mothers appears to express itself only in monsters. 40
Here Lessing equates visual beauty with moral or civic beauty, and credits the
plastic arts with the power to affect both. The example Lessing gives, suggested
by the “monsters” to which modern mothers’ physiological susceptibility to
imagery gives rise, is of the “ancient legends” of the birth of warrior heroes to
women impregnated by intercourse with a serpent. The true explanation,
according to Lessing, is that “honest women” by day “feasted their eyes” on the
38 J. Reynolds, Discourses on Art [1797], ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1975), p. 109, where Reynolds remarks of “Jean Stein” that
if this extraordinary man had had the good fortune to have been born in Italy,
instead of Holland, . . . the same sagacity and penetration which distinguished so
accurately the different characters and expression in his vulgar figures, would, when
exerted in the selection and imitation of what was great and elevated in nature, have
been equally successful; and he would now be ranged with the great pillars and supporters
of our Art.
As a painter Reynolds is quite naturally a defender of the claims of that art. “The terms beauty,
or nature, which are general ideas, are but different modes of expressing the same thing,
whether we apply these terms to statues, poetry, or picture” (p. 124). But his claim that art
should satisfy “the natural appetite or taste of the human mind” for Truth (p. 122) proves finally
to fit the same conceptual structure as Lessing’s, since nature for Reynolds signifies not the particular
but the general—the ideal form, imperfectly realized in the concrete individual. Thus
“deformity is not nature, but an accidental deviation from her accustomed practice” (p. 124).
For Reynolds too the highest levels of art must shun the vulgar, the grotesque, and the ugly,
though (as we will see) he claimed for painting, beyond the beautiful, the realm of the sublime.
39 Joshua Reynolds, A Journey in Flanders and Holland, vol. 2 in Works (London, 1809), p. 369.
40 Lessing, Laocoön, pp. 61–4.
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