Constructions of "the Beautiful"
Throughout human history, people, places, and things have been viewed and characterized as beautiful. Magazine covers, movies, and other present-day media reflect, determine, and criticize what 21st century people consider beautiful. Concurrently, museums display statues, reliefs, and other relics from antiquity that modern eyes view as representative of ancient conceptions of beauty.
Yet beauty is more than merely an issue of aesthetics. It has and continues to be a discursive site on which social relations are negotiated. Indeed, which people, places, and objects are considered beautiful is conceptualized in dialogue with the intersecting of domains of institutional power and ideological preference.
The human body itself has often functioned as a locus upon which specific cultural values are expressed and defined. In order to understand a given culture’s values and ideals, therefore, one must pay close and critical attention to how that culture depicts the body. In the ancient Greek world, for instance, the body played a key role in shaping the ways people thought about life and death. In the archaic period, statues of young men and women begin to proliferate in sanctuaries and cemeteries. These relics idealize the body to such an extent that it is often difficult, if not impossible, to determine whether the individual depicted was a god or a human. It is also during this period that such portrayals of the dead first appear on gravestones. Attention to the origins, regional varieties, and mutual influences and meanings of such “beautiful dead” can contribute to our understanding of visual memorization of the deceased in ancient Greek societies and perhaps beyond. Bodily movement also provided an occasion in antiquity for discussing beauty and habitus and their concomitant social values. Plato’s differentiation between beautiful and ugly dancing bodies in his Laws invites scholars to reflect critically upon the communicative attributes of dance in the ancient Greek world and in other parts of the ancient Mediterranean.
“Beauty” has always been culturally specific and temporally contingent. Most ancient cultures did not understand beauty or art as discrete spheres of social existence. The diverse conceptions of beauty in antiquity, therefore, require scholars simultaneously to engage with a particular culture’s view(s) of beauty and to reflect critically upon the usefulness of “beauty” and related rubrics as heuristic categories. In this vein, critical attention to the materials that scholars typically label “Scythian art” (or the “Scythian style”) ironically challenges the idea of a single Scythian people and, by extension, a single Scythian artistic style. Indeed, the Eurasian Steppe was a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic area that consisted of a diverse mix of partially mobile groups. Consequently, scholars should avoid using broad generalizations about “beauty” or “art” when speaking about the extant materials from this region. Instead, they should investigate this extant corpus of artefacts with highly nuanced models of aesthetic norms and visual codes. The diverse conceptions of “beauty” within and across space and time also invite scholars to examine ancient corpora, such as the “Scythian” and “Greek” artefacts, from a comparative perspective.
Bearing in mind the complexities endemic to “beauty” in antiquity, the focus group “Constructions of the ‘Beautiful’” seeks to articulate – both independently and comparatively – the manifold ways in which beauty, art, the body, and derivative concepts were viewed and managed in ancient societies. At the same time, the paramount aim of this group is to engage critically with “beauty” and related concepts as contemporary analytical categories in Ancient History and adjacent disciplines.