Tea at Trianon: Beauty

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Beauty

Art professor and atheist Camille Paglia blames the rise of secularism for the decline of the fine arts.

The Italian immigrant culture in which I was raised (all four of my grandparents and my mother were born in Italy) esteemed beauty as a primary principle of life. Everything from a mischievous little boy to the cut of a home-sewn lapel or the construction of a stone wall was called bello (beautiful) or bellissimo (very beautiful). There was no borderline between the arts and crafts: The works of Michelangelo—reproduced on souvenir plaques or ashtrays from the Vatican—occupied the same continuum of handiwork as the lacquered wooden nut bowls carved by my uncle or the wedding dresses stitched by my mother and grandmother to earn extra income.

Thanks to the traditional reverence for art and beauty among the Italian country people from whom I came, I have been waging war for decades against the toxic trends in academe (such as postmodernism and post-structuralism) that view art in a reductively ironic or overly politicized way.

As a 40-year veteran teacher in art schools, I am alarmed about the future of American art. Young people today, immersed in a digital universe, love the volatile excitement of virtual reality, but they lack the patience to steadily contemplate a single image—a complex static object such as a great painting or sculpture. The paintings of their world are now video games, with images in febrile motion; their sculptures are the latest-model cellphone, deftly shaped to the hand. (Read entire article.)

julygirl said...: I agree.

The sense of beauty, the search for beauty, and the need to be surrounded with beauty, especially natural beauty, certainly seems to be missing in that generation.

The affiliation with, and assimilation of, the natural world which God created is important in humbling our human tendency toward arrogance.; November 14, 2012 at 7:22:00 PM EST