Beautiful Qualities
In the Summa Theologiae (1,29,8), Thomas Aquinas (13th C) states that "Three qualities are required for Beauty. In the first place integrity or perfection: since incomplete things, precisely because they are such, are deformed. Due proportion or harmony among the parts is also required. Finally clarity or splendor: in fact we describe things whose colors are clear and brilliant as beautiful". While there is beauty in perfection, it is an easy beauty. One expects the well-proportioned and harmonious to be beautiful but one doesn't think about it.
There is an equal, if different, beauty to be found in the imperfect. Not all that is beautiful is regular; so many things that are strange, or even grotesque, can display a startling faucet of beauty. Their irregularities are fascinating and their beauty unsettling. A regular object of balanced proportions is beautiful in a way that doesn't intrude on a person's sensibilities; one doesn't have to think about it. People are naturally drawn to symmetry, it's comforting; but, despite that attraction, people are also drawn to the unusual. It's easy to accept a perfect object as beautiful because there are centuries of history behind it's acceptance. The discordant is more difficult to explain.
The incomplete, or deformed, push the visual senses off-balance, they come as a shock because they are unexpected. When the strange becomes beautiful it forces one to abandon prescribed notions of beauty--there is potential, possibilities that lay beyond what is culturally known. Discord of symmetry creates a sense of the dynamic. The mind records the unusual and creates a sense of anticipation and tension. In a way, the incomplete can be more beautiful because it creates a response on many different levels, it's harder to glance at and walk away. If all the world were perfect it could only result in becoming mundane--there would be nothing new to look for or think about and what would be beautiful then?
There is an equal, if different, beauty to be found in the imperfect. Not all that is beautiful is regular; so many things that are strange, or even grotesque, can display a startling faucet of beauty. Their irregularities are fascinating and their beauty unsettling. A regular object of balanced proportions is beautiful in a way that doesn't intrude on a person's sensibilities; one doesn't have to think about it. People are naturally drawn to symmetry, it's comforting; but, despite that attraction, people are also drawn to the unusual. It's easy to accept a perfect object as beautiful because there are centuries of history behind it's acceptance. The discordant is more difficult to explain.
The incomplete, or deformed, push the visual senses off-balance, they come as a shock because they are unexpected. When the strange becomes beautiful it forces one to abandon prescribed notions of beauty--there is potential, possibilities that lay beyond what is culturally known. Discord of symmetry creates a sense of the dynamic. The mind records the unusual and creates a sense of anticipation and tension. In a way, the incomplete can be more beautiful because it creates a response on many different levels, it's harder to glance at and walk away. If all the world were perfect it could only result in becoming mundane--there would be nothing new to look for or think about and what would be beautiful then?