Abstract
Abstract Few cultivated persons in the seventeenth century would have understood an idea of art which did not include a concept of beauty derived from a union of form and matter. God, the supreme Artist, had made the world beautiful by imposing the divine ideas upon matter, and by bringing all the variety - sometimes bizarre variety- of His creation into a perfect unity. Such was the original Artist's activity. Should not human artists, painters of pictures and composers of dramatic and epic poems, make beautiful works by the same means? Could they not, sharing the divine rationality, order even apparent imperfections to be part of the beauty of a whole in a work of art? Could not even violence, the ugliness and disorder of real life be made beautiful? All manner of dreadful deaths and terrible sights of woe? Crucifixions, battles, decaying and deformed bodies, all the grim matter of tragedy?
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