Beauty: The Fortunes of an Ancient Greek Idea by David Konstan (review)
- Beauty: The Fortunes of an Ancient Greek Idea by David Konstan
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 262 pp.
A German professor once tested my understanding of Greek sculpture by inviting me to stand up and adopt the pose of Polyclitus’s Doryphoros statue—a very good exercise in balance, as well as of one’s memory of images. In physical terms and especially in art, symmetry and a balance of proportions have long been admitted as criteria of beauty. “Pose” is not among Polyclitus’s “Kanon” of proportions for the human figure in art, but it has long since been added to our own. In literature as in life, the morally good can sometimes be included also—as in modern Greek, kalo eine means “that’s fine” or “fit for the end intended.” Then there is the problem of the use of the concept and word beauty in nonhuman contexts—for nonfigural monuments, for colors, for ideas. The Roman word pulcher does not often mean more than “well made”; the Hebrew has much the same association of the “good” and the “beautiful” as does the Greek.
Beauty is only skin deep—maybe, but we set great store by it, and so did the ancient Greeks, whose concepts of physical beauty have had as profound an effect on our own thinking as have the beautiful works of art that they have left us to admire, either in their ancient form or as translated by the Renaissance and neoclassicism. Konstan’s review of the Greek uses of their words kalos and to kallos is thorough, as much from the perspective of a philologist as from that of an art historian. He shows that an erotic element—related to the human body, male and female—lies at the heart of early usage. The sexual makes way in time for inclusion of the morally good, virtuous, and spiritual, and the adjective beautiful becomes applicable to things as well as people. This development carries with it the difficulty, indeed impossibility, of describing as beautiful any thing or person that is morally corrupt. [End Page 306]
The connotations of the word and concept seem endless. Should we add “fitness” or some criterion of “usefulness”? “A horse is deemed to be a beautiful animal; but had a horse as few good qualities as a tortoise, I do not imagine that he would then be deemed beautiful” (Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Idea of Beauty).
Sir John Boardman is Lincoln Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology emeritus at Oxford University and a fellow of the British Academy, which awarded him the Kenyon Medal in 1995. Editor of the Oxford History of Classical Art, his other books include The Greeks in Asia; The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity; The Greeks Overseas; The Triumph of Dionysos; The History of Greek Vases; and The Relief Plaques of Eastern Eurasia and China: The “Ordos Bronzes,” Peter the Great’s Treasure, and Their Kin. He received the inaugural Onassis International Prize for Humanities in 2009.
