It is quite certain, therefore, that, in the graphic arts, which either
determine or accentuate the values "ugly" and "beautiful," every artist
who sets up his notion of what is subject-beauty, like every lover
about to marry, either assails or confirms and consolidates the values
of his people.[61]
Examples of this, if they were needed, are to be found everywhere. See
how the Gothic school of painting, together with men like Fra Angelico,
Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, El Greco, and subsequently Burne-Jones,
set up the soulful person, the person of tenuous, nervous and
heaven-aspiring slenderness, as the type of beauty, thus advocating and
establishing Christian values in a very seductive and often artistic
manner; while the Pagans, with Michelangelo, Titian, and even Rubens,
represented another code of values--perhaps even several other codes--
and sought to fix their type also.
Note, too, how hopeless are the attempts of artists who stand for the
Pagan ideal, when they paint Christian saints and martyrs, and how
singularly un-Pagan those figures are which appear in the pictures of
the advocates of the Christian ideal when they attempt Pagan types.
Christ by Rubens is not the emaciated, tenuous Person suffering from
a wasting disease that Segna represents him to be; while the Mars and
Venus of Botticelli in the National Gallery would have been repudiated
with indignation by any Greek of antiquity.
When values are beginning to get mixed, then, owing to an influx of
foreigners from all parts of the world, we shall find the strong
biological idea of absolute beauty tending to disappear, and in its
place we shall find the weak and wholly philosophical belief arising
that beauty is relative. Thus, in Attica of the fifth century B.C.,
when 300,000 slaves, chiefly foreigners, were to be counted among the
inhabitants, the idea that beauty was a relative term first occurred to
the "talker" Socrates.