Creating Beauty as an Act of Love
I was recently fortunate to spend some time travelling with my wife, leaving our two young children in the care of their grandparents as we headed off to meet friends in Rome. I had never been before, and despite the crowds and the jet lag, it was indeed the treasure promised.
When walking down Rome’s streets, popping into magnificent churches to peek at incredible masterpieces, one feels utterly surrounded by beauty. It is present in various forms, both complex and simple: from the awe-inspiring architecture of the Pantheon to the humble streets lovingly cared for by residents and shop-keepers. This experience got me thinking about the relationship between love and beauty—how an aesthetically rich environment can transmit feeling directly from its creators, improving the value of everyday lives.
THE TRANSCENDING SPIRIT OF LOVE
The connection between beauty and love is somewhat mysterious, but it helps to understand how the concept of goodness plays a part. Here, we are helped by a valuable insight offered from Socrates in Plato’s The Symposium. In it, Socrates defines love in simple terms as “the desire to have that which is good.” But he immediately judges this explanation to be incomplete, noting that the joy of possessing what we desire is paralleled by the fear of losing it. So Socrates offers a revised definition, summarizing love as “the desire to have that which is good, forever.”
This simple truth is apparent even in the daily pleasures we seek. For example, no one tires of hearing good music. Even when a song becomes overplayed, one merely sets it aside temporarily to listen to another. It’s the love of great music that motivates us to seek more of it, causing us to relish new works of beauty that we discover. At the other extreme, our greatest anxieties come from the fear of losing that which we hold most dear, like our loved ones or our faculties to sense the world around us.
Of course, mortality is the great shadow over our lives, and death will ultimately separate us from all the good we know on this earth. But, as Socrates explains, we seem hard-wired to combat this tragic eventuality, equipped with a drive to reach the immortal by various means, both spiritual and earthly. Most directly this is evidenced by the instinct to reproduce, which is exhibited in all living creatures, as well as the willingness of many animals—humans included—to sacrifice their own safety for the well-being of their offspring.
However, as Socrates observes, humans find ways beyond mere procreation to achieve the everlasting. Outside of faith in an afterlife, they do this through the creation of self-perpetuating good works: things of such great value that future generations carry them forward, like technological innovations, improved forms of justice, and, notably, great works of art and architecture. For the most part this is all done subconsciously—real love cannot spring from selfish motives. Rather, we seem to know intuitively that lasting things have the greatest meaning, and this inspires our acts of love.
As further noted in The Symposium, Socrates explains the spiritual dimension connected to eternal goodness, a sentiment shared in religious traditions. For him, love was the ultimate and necessary means of achieving this goal, and he viewed love as a spirit that mediates between humans and the divine. Even up to the modern age, it was common for artists to explicitly aim towards this higher plane. In contrast, contemporary works typically avoid religious subjects, though artists are increasingly exploring ideas of goodness, usually through the lens of social justice. Sometimes this goes beyond secularism into the mystical realm, for example the art of Rajni Perera.
BEAUTY AS AN ACT OF LOVE
To understand how love manifests itself through beauty, it’s helpful to understand how beauty augments our appreciation of good things, including truth. It does so by utilizing what we find naturally appealing to our senses: activating our attraction to a given subject, igniting our imagination, and ultimately revealing deeper meaning. This is the same mechanism that encourages romantic relationships to form, but the power goes well beyond it to all of life’s facets. When beauty is used to reveal greater truth and goodness, it becomes an act of love by the artist who creates it, presented as a gift for others to experience.
As an example, consider Michelangelo’s Pietá, which I had the privilege to see during my recent visit to Rome. In this 15th century marble sculpture, Michelangelo masterfully uses beauty to transcend the grim reality of death and grief, elevating it to a cathartic experience of peaceful sorrow, as well as a contemplation of immortal redemption. In Michelangelo’s work we do not merely see a lifeless body in a woman’s arms, well-rendered in stone. More deeply, we are moved to feel a mother’s grief for her dead child while simultaneously contemplating our own mortality.
With the added knowledge of the religious subject depicted, we are also led towards the feeling of consolation made possible by the sacrifice shown. It’s the Pietá’s incredible beauty, of course, that facilitate’s this depth of emotion, coming through in the figures’ peaceful expressions, the graceful folds of the Virgin Mary’s dress, and even the inversely scaled relationship between mother and grown son. It’s hard to imagine a cruder version or mere written description having the same effect.
ARCHITECTS: LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR
The need for beauty seems not only to respond to our sense of mortality, but also to our flawed human nature. We strive for what is good and true in our lives because these qualities are forever under threat from the hostile world around us, as well as our own imperfections. Beauty is therefore needed continuously to help guide us toward our higher aims. Like the ritual of prayer, the contemplation of beauty can help console and sustain us through life’s many travails.
Architecture provides a unique opportunity to fulfill this role. As opposed to arts of more limited or temporary engagement, it has the special ability to provide beauty on a continuous and undiscriminating basis. As noted by the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, buildings are among life’s everyday aesthetics. They are fixed in place and long lasting, with their facades shared to all who may happen by. This allows architects and builders the exceptional opportunity to provide beauty in a self-perpetuating way. When this is accomplished, buildings express a respectful, neighbourly love: enriching the built environment while helping to sustain the community.
In Rome, as in most old cities, this everyday beauty is richly manifest. It expresses itself in the traditions brought forward through centuries of development and adaptation. The overall effect is something of a universal feeling wherever it is present. It is well described by Marwa al-Sabouni in her book The Battle for Home: The Vision of a Young Architect in Syria:
When the built environment creates an experience of generosity and tenderness, freely offering fragrances, nourishment, cool breezes and shade in summer, and shelter from the rain and wind in winter, it becomes like a mother that cares for her children. You become a brother and a sister to your neighbours. This is what the old cities offered, with their indigenous plants and materials, in the form of an accumulated knowledge of design – the kind of knowledge that cannot be rediscovered by a single person, and that is therefore always more easily lost than gained.
For North American tourists like me, the architectural beauty found in foreign cities such as Rome provides a particularly stark contrast to the ugliness that typifies most post-World War II construction. That’s why tourists will continue to swamp Europe’s beautiful cities (among others in the world), compartmentalizing their worries about carbon footprints, in part, because the power of beauty is so strong, and the utter dearth of it at home is so oppressive. After all, humans will travel incredible distances and make great sacrifices for the power of love. For us North Americans, it’s a pity that more beauty isn’t made closer to home. A problem, of course, that architects must help solve.