The title of this article originates from Umberto Eco’s book, an Italian philosopher, essayist, literature professor, and writer, best known for the medieval detective novel “The Name of the Rose,” which was adapted into a film starring Sean Connery.
In this book, Eco introduces us to a culture that is very different from our own. However, the principles contained in his study can illuminate our overall understanding of beauty, which is crucial for the world of art – but also for human life as a whole. The first thing we must keep in mind is that a large part of medieval philosophy comes from the classical world, especially Neoplatonism. The foundation of Platonic and Neoplatonic aesthetics lies in the idea that the beauty of the world is a reflection and image of ideal beauty, which exists in the spiritual dimension beyond the material world.
Mosaic on the ceiling of the baptistery in the Florence Cathedral (Duomo), 13th – 14th century.
However, the medieval world was not the classical world of Greece and Rome, but it was heavily influenced by Christianity. More religious in his approach, while simultaneously having a spontaneous love for colors and light, and possessing a strong sense of the sensual. Colors in medieval art and literature are simple and basic, perhaps reflecting a simpler and less sophisticated historical period. However, aside from individual colors, philosophers and mystics were equally fascinated by light, especially sunlight. The best example of this is the effect of light in Gothic cathedrals.
Detail of a stained glass window from Kreuzenstein Castle, Austria, 14th century.
However, a distinction was not made between this spontaneous love for sensual beauty and the mystical sense of beauty as a reflection of the divine, as people in the Middle Ages recognized in a concrete object an ontological reflection and participation in the existence and power of God… Life seemed to them as something completely whole. John Scotus Eriugena, an Irish philosopher and Neoplatonist from the 9th century, understood the universe as the revelation of God in all His ineffable beauty.
Therefore, what ju What was beauty for those medieval philosophers, mystics, poets, and artists? We have many definitions, from the relatively simple one of St. Augustine which was extremely important in the Middle Ages – What is the beauty of the body? Harmony of the body parts with a certain pleasing color – to the much more complex definition put forward by Robert Grosseteste, an English Neoplatonist from the 13th century: Beauty is the harmony and suitability of one thing to itself, all of its individual parts to themselves and to each other, as well as to the whole entity, and such entities to all things.
Sight, one of the six tapestries from the Lady and the Unicorn series, 15th century, Cluny Museum, Paris.
Understanding their mystical view of the world can help us understand the importance they attributed to heraldry and symbolism in the Middle Ages because all things and beings in nature are reminders and manifestations of the Divine, that is, God’s manifestation in things. Eriugena said: In my judgment, there is nothing in visible and bodily things that does not It denotes something non-physical and intelligible. And as Umberto Eco says: We only need to cast a glance at the visible beauty of the earth to remind ourselves of the immense beauty of divine harmony… The face of eternity shines through earthly things, and therefore we can consider them as types of metaphors. Or, in the words of another medieval philosopher, Hugh of St. Victor, the earth is like a book written by the finger of God.
In the XIII and XIV centuries, with figures such as Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon, the worldview began to change, the mentality became more scientific, and the world ceased to be a “forest of symbols”. Something is lost, something gained, but now we can look back and realize that, according to the words of the German literary scholar E.R. Curtius: Modern man overly exalts art because he has lost the sense of intelligible beauty that neoplatonists and medieval people had… It is about a beauty for which aesthetics has no representation.
1 Referring to intellectually comprehensible. the beauty that is a reflection of truth, according to Plotinus.