​On Beauty And The Impossibility Of Defining It

For the 300th anniversary of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s birth, the m.a.x. museo of Chiasso dedicates to this German master of classical culture an important exhibition focusing on his fundamental work, Monumenti antichi inediti, presenting, among numerous documents, all of the 208 engraved plates from the 1767 editio princeps published in two volumes and part of the museum’s collections.

- Johann Joachim Winckelmann

Beauty can be traced to certain principles, but cannot be defined. It is generally said that it consists in the mutual agreement between the created being and its ends, and in the parts with themselves and with everything; but this means mistaking beauty for perfection, which is not defined by it, nor can be so defined, because humanity is not capable of it. Now can a definition be appropriate to beauty which confuses it with perfection?

The impossibility of defining beauty lies in its superiority to our intellect: and from this superiority, since we cannot conceive anything more sublime or perfect than beauty, what results is that beauty and perfection seem to be two identical concepts. If this were not the case, we would have the true definition, as has been the case with every other thing whose complete essence we understand. Moreover, whatever the definition, everyone who is persuaded that every created being bears the imprint of perfection, to the extent that it is capable of doing so, and that every idea is based on a reason, which has to be derived from another reason, will also acknowledge that the essence of beauty (and also of perfection) cannot lie outside beauty itself, since it is found in all created things.

On the principles of reasoning and knowledge of beauty, which are unity and simplicity.