In Italy it was much discussed in the environment of Mengs and
of Winckelmann, who were working there.
The first counterblast to their aesthetic Neo-platonism came from an
Italian named Spalletti, and took the form of a letter addressed to
Mengs. He represents the _characteristic_ as the true principle of art.
The pleasure obtained from beauty is intellectual, and truth is its
object. When the soul meets with what is characteristic, and what really
suits the object to be represented, the work is held to be beautiful. A
well-made man with a woman's face is ugly. Harmony, order, variety,
proportion, etc.--these are elements of beauty, and man enjoys the
widening of his knowledge before disagreeable things characteristically
represented. Spalletti defines beauty as "that modification inherent to
the object observed, which presents it, as it should appear, with an
infallible characteristic."
Thus the Aristotelian thesis found a supporter in Italy, some years
before any protestation was heard in Germany. Louis Hirt, the historian
of art (1797) observed that ancient monuments represented all sorts of
forms, from the most beautiful and sublime to the most ugly and most
common. He therefore denied that ideal beauty was the principle of art,
and for it substituted the _characteristic_, applicable equally to gods,
heroes, and animals.
Wolfgang Goethe, in 1798, forgetting the juvenile period, during which
he had dared to raise a hymn to Gothic architecture, now began seriously
to seek a middle term between beauty and expression.
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