The Ecliptic of the Beautiful

Abstract

The Ecliptic of the Beautiful TIMOTHY ERWIN I must be careful not to suffer the misfortune which happens to people who look at the sun. . . during an eclipse. — Plato, The Phaedo To hear you have to see clearly. An absolute knowledge [savoir] will never accept this unique separation, that in the veiled place of the Wholly Other, nothing should present itself. — Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils Early modem astronomy has a word for the way the beautiful is eclipsed by novelty and sublimity during the Enlightenment in Britain. When the new moon passes between the earth and sun its shadow occasionally blots out the solar disk entirely. A total eclipse is visible only from the umbra, that narrow band of shadow which arcs across the globe at more than twice the speed of sound before passing into space. If we imagine the path of the lunar shadow as a curtain hung from the solar orbit the points from which the curtain is suspended are its ecliptic. The celestial metaphor is meant to suggest different ways in which the dark veil of the sublime— shifting in its several phases from the rhetorical elevation of Longinus and 339 340 / ERWIN Boileau towards the novelty and perspicuity of Addison, through a Burkean psychology of fear, and then into the Kantian imaginary—obscures a traditional view of the beautiful during the long eighteenth century. Just as the dark glow of the corona reflects the light of day the unstable attributes of the sublime obliquely acknowledge the continuing presence of classical beauty. The instrumental causes of the sublime open onto the deep mystery of human creation. Its fearsome asymmetry invokes the secret harmony of the whole. And the primacy of the word suggests that a persistent if unrecognized composite beauty be traced across literary history in the intersection of word and image. None of these interdisciplinary crossroads need place us in the path of a totalizing darkness. Ancient notions of beauty comprised of symmetry, proportion, and completeness have always been central to the academic discourse of painting, and they remain at least as much with us today as the weak and diminished beauty of empiricism. If we are unaware of their presence in eighteenth-century writing it is largely because we are still standing in our own shadow, still caught in the dim penumbra of disciplinary complacence.1 What I want to propose is a skeptical look at what might be called, after Butterfield's famous Whig view of history, a Whig view of aesthetics. I want to look beyond the discourse of novelty and sublimity for a glimpse of the theory it was meant to challenge, the classicizing linear design promoted by the French académie royale and the scuola Carracci. Academic design aimed at the creation of the beautiful in history painting primarily through linear arrangement. And because the canvas often depicted biblical or mythological narrative, design also addressed thepictura-poesis doctrine of Aristotle and Horace. When we speak about the image-text relation in early modern Britain we can easily conflate two opposed historical metaphors. The discourse of design promoted during the Restoration likens perspective and arrangement to narrative emplotment. Not only does it imagine that common formal artifice may take place across the boundaries of space and time, it celebrates the labor of overcoming obstacles to the process as a difficulté vaincue. The discourse of the image or of novelty developed by empiricism redefines beauty in natural or practical rather than artificial terms. It qualifies the pictorial analogy by replacing the correctness of outline and plot with the novelty of coloring and verbal imagery. Both paradigms are ultimately grounded in the rhetorical triad of inventio, dispositio, and elocutio, in the three-part process of inventing, designing, and coloring or adding the figurai elements of a work. They once formed part of a unified field theory of the imagination on that basis, before falling into the quarrel between the rubénistes and the poussinistes The Ecliptic of the Beautiful / 341 in the French academy, a skirmish important to the quarrel of the ancients and modems in France and England alike, and then into the further separation enforced by empiricism...