ORDER OUT OF CHAOSClassical Concepts in Art and Beauty

PLATO

Ideals and Inspiration: Order out of Illusions.

Horizon Illusion

A

B C

Ictinus & Callicrates, Parthenon

trompe l’oeil, Pompeii

Intelligible

World

visible world

The

GoodThe Mind

The True

The Beautiful

Recognition of:

The Good

The True

The Beautiful

understanding

reasoning

proofs

forms

geometric forms

functions

formulae

The Sunordinary thingsbeliefs

sensations

imaginings

You k

now

best

that

whic

h c

hanges least T

hat w

hic

h c

hanges le

ast is

most re

al

How do you know? What is real?

<3 sided figure>

illusions, shadows

<Pythagorean Theorem>

instantiation

The Eye

Plato’s Simile of the Line

ideals

things

Ideals

art

instantiation

mimesis

Plato’s Simile of the Line

Mimesis is, according to Plato, a copy of a copy of an ideal, thrice

removed from the truth. It mimics some of the properties of the

original without including the ideal function.

“I do not mean by beauty of form such

beauty as that of animals or pictures,

which the many would suppose to be my

meaning; but understand me to mean

straight lines and circles, and the plane

and solid figures which are formed out of

them by turning lathes and rulers and

measures of angles; for these I affirm to

be not only relatively beautiful, like other

works of art, but they are eternally and

abstractly beautiful.”

–Plato Philebus 51c

Uccello’s Chalice

Masaccio

Trinity

“Perspective is to painting

what the bridle is to the

horse, the rudder to a ship.”

—Leonardo

Raphael, School of Athens

Leonardo Figure Studies

“There are three aspects

to perspective. The first

has to do with how the

size of objects seems to

diminish according to

distance: the second, the

manner in which colors

change the farther away

they are from the eye; the

third defines how objects

ought to be finished less

carefully the farther away

they are.”

—Leonardo

Leonardo, Last Supper

“…sculpture and painting are in

truth sisters, born from one

father, that is, design, at one

and the same birth, and have

no precedence one over the

other…”

“…design, which is their

foundation, nay rather, the very

soul that conceives and

nourishes within itself all the

parts of man's intellect, was

already most perfect before the

creation of all other things,

when the Almighty God, having

made the great body of the

world and having adorned the

heavens with their exceeding

bright lights, descended lower

with His intellect into the

clearness of the air and the

solidity of the earth…”

—Vasari

Michelangelo Battle of Cascina

PLATO’S IDEAL BEAUTY

Ideals, with a capital ‘I’, sometimes called Forms are,

according to Plato, are what is real, and are eternal and

unchanging. There are three Ideals: Goodness, Truth, and

Beauty. Examples of lesser ideals, with a small ‘i’, might be

ratios, formulae and geometric forms. Beauty, as an Ideal, is

the abstract, intelligible value by which the cosmos (including

appearances, things, and ideals) are constituted, ordered, and

made intelligible.

PLATO’S IDEAL BEAUTY

Examples of Beauty as an Ideal are found in architecture and

architectonics, perspective, geometric shapes, and compositional

forms and ratios such as the Golden Mean. The Golden Mean,

considered one of the perfect ratios, represented by a point on a line

segment (C) that divides it such that the smaller segment (A) stands in

relation to the larger segment (B) in the same relation that the larger

segment stands to the whole (A:B = B:C). Other forms put forth as

candidates for Ideal Beauty are Platonic Solids and the Fibonacci

Sequence. Platonic Solids are the pyramid, cube, octahedron,

dodecahedron, and icosahedron. Each of these have faces that are

identical, regular polygons meeting at the same three-dimensional

angles. The Fibonacci Sequence is a sequence of numbers each of

which is the sum of the two previous numbers. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, .

. . ,. Examples in painting might include architectonics.

Reason

Emotions

Appetites

Rulers

Soldiers

Crafts workers

Wisdom

Courage

Self-control

Justice

Plato’s Ideal Polis

TRIPARTITE SOUL

Plato’s Psychology

The Human Soul

Reason

Emotions

Appetites

Self-control–a

birth of the

cool

Plato’s Psychology

Parthenon Metope, Centaurs and

Lapiths

“God devised and bestowed upon us

vision to the end that we might behold

the revolutions of Reason in the Heaven

and use them for the revolvings of the

reasoning that is within us, these being

akin to those, the perturbable to the

imperturbable; and that, through learning

and sharing in calculations which are

correct by their nature, by imitation of the

absolutely unvarying revolutions of the

God we might stabilize the variable

revolutions within ourselves.”

–Plato Timaeus 47c

Polykleitos’ Doryphorus

PLATO—TEMPERANCE

Temperance (self-control) is the psychological disposition

achieved when Ideal Beauty orders the soul, it is a harmony

between the parts of the soul.

INSPIRATION: EMOTIONS WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE

Reaso

n

Emotions

Appetites

Reason

Emotions

Appetites

Reason

Emotions

Appetites

Reason

Emotions

Appetites

MuseAudience

For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art,

but because they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian revellers

when they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right

mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the

power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed

PLATO—INSPIRATION

Inspiration, a form of mimesis involving a psychological state

in which, according to Plato, emotions are transmitted from

one person to another without transmission of knowledge.

REFLECTIONS

What aesthetic terms would you use to describe the Viet

Nam War Memorial? The film?

Where would Plato place the Viet Nam War Memorial on his

Simile of the Line? Where would you?

Is the Viet Nam War Memorial mimetic or inspirational, in

Plato’s senses of the terms?