William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty. With a review by Armando Massarenti

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION

William Hogarth
L'analisi della Bellezza [The Analysis of Beauty]

Scritta con l’intenzione di fissare le fluttuanti idee del Gusto 

[Written with a view of fixing the fluctuating Ideas of Taste]

Edited by C. Maria Laudando

Palermo, Aesthetica, 1999

Fig. 1) William Hogarth, Painter and his pug (London, The Tate Britain)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

[1] This is the second Italian translation of this work by Hogarth. The first one, made by an anonymous in the eighteenth century, was printed in Livorno in 1761; it was published again by the SE Publisher in Milan, in 1989

[2] Schlosser writes (in Art Literature, p. 655): "... really a remarkable book… whose author, with an absolute independence, does not care at all of the opinions taught by the academy and offers, despite some capriciousness, highly unique and interesting elements".

Fig. 2) William Hogarth, Painter and his pug (detail)
(London, The Tate Britain)

[3] The theory of the undulating line of beauty, supported by Hogarth, was judged in various ways: e.g. as a return to typical positions of Mannerism, or as an invitation to focus critical reading of artworks on their formal characteristics, or even as an anticipation of the principles that will be dear to the school of "pure visibility". 

[4] We are displaying hereafter a review of the work. The reviewer is Armando Massarenti for the Sunday version of the Italian daily “Il Sole 24 ORE” on March 4, 1999 (the article has been extracted from Multimedia Library Sole 24 ORE - Cd Rom of Sunday 1983-2003 Twenty years of ideas)

Hogarth, the Beauty captured in a line

by Armando Massarenti

Fig. 3) William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty. Plate 1)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Analysis of Beauty by William Hogarth originated from a challenge and a provocation. In 1745, the English painter published a self-portrait on the title page of a collection of etchings. He also placed, at the bottom, a palette with an elegant and unusual line drawn on it, defined without any further explanation as "The Line of Beauty and Grace" (fig. 1). The bait worked – as the same Hogarth tells us – and, "more than any Egyptian hieroglyph", it amused painters and sculptors who came to him to ask what on the hell it really meant. Only after some explanation, a few "realized that it was an old acquaintance" and that authors of treatises on painting and lives of painters had already spoken on, or alluded to, this "serpentine line", the source of all beauty. Paolo Lomazzo, for example, reported that Michelangelo once suggested to an apprentice: always to start from a pyramid shape, within which to multiply the form of a snake "by one, two, or three". "In that precept - Lomazzo commented - is the whole mystery of art." The "supreme grace and life", the "spirit of a picture", depends on its ability to express movement, and nothing is more suitable for this purpose of that line already present in nature in the "flame of fire." On the "grace" expressed by wavy lines had also insisted Dufresnoy, in another treaty on painting, and De Piles, in his lives of painters. However - Hogarth complains - to give account for such grace, they found no better reason than to refer to that "something" that had become so fashionable, and instead of helping us to understand the reasons for the beauty, they transformed into something mysterious and vague. Not to mention the "connoisseurs", or copyists and imitators of paintings and antique statues, who flatly denied the existence - in art or in nature - of rules for beauty. They were the most popular in England exactly at the time of Hogarth, and against them he launched his most poisonous arrows.

Fig. 4) William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty Plate 2
Source: Wikimedia Commons

To their scepticism, Hogarth replied in the Analysis of Beauty, published in 1753, in which his "line" appeared, along with the pyramid, as the main element of a system based on a idea which is dialectic and full of tensions: on "variety", "intrigue" and "movement" (as opposed to current "bias" of simplicity, symmetry and static). The result is a unique book in his genre, unjustly neglected by historians of aesthetics, perhaps because of the difficulty to place it in literarily terms. On the one hand, it is a treatise of painting and sculpture, to the use of apprentices and artists, full of tricks that every true artist (unlike the "copyists" and "connoisseurs", whom Hogarth despairs he will be ever be able to convince) should know. But also – Enlightenment-like and democratically – a manual for anyone, expert or not, who wants to learn to grasp (or create), learning to "see with own eyes", the surrounding beauty. Everything is intertwined with a continued reference to how our visual system functions, by which Hogarth anticipates, at least in spirit, the perceptive analyses and the psychology of vision of this century, by Arnheim or Gregory. Today, his research might delight phenomenologists (due to the refusal to superimpose any philosophical or metaphysical superstructures to the phenomenon of perception of beauty) and analytic philosophers, not only because the word "analysis" is present even in the title, but also for the ability to cope directly, without much historical mediations, with a problem that is both practical and philosophical. That problem is raised in the subtitle: how to set a few rules to understand, without any "mysterious" allusions “the fluctuating Ideas of Taste"? The text of Hogarth is like a beautifully thought-out tangle, a kind of game - full of irony, of malice and surprises - that unfolds through the constant references to two beautiful plates that accompany it. 

About the new edition, which will be in a few days in the bookstores as a publication by Aesthetica (the previous Italian translation, proposed a decade ago by the Editions SE, dated back to 1700), is also to make the tables easier to see when reading, placing them out of the text in an outside pocket of the book. In the first table (fi. 3), Hogarth reproduces most of the sculptures (copies of famous statues of antiquity), of which were full English gardens and aristocratic houses (even with regard to the pictures, copies of the classics were rather favoured to original works of contemporary English painters). In the second one (fig. 4), as an application of the principles derived from the first plate, Hogarth proposes an engraving from him, a dance in the country house of a nobleman, in which live the graceful and - in contrast to the same rules he exhibited on the beauty - the grotesque, the parody and the irony, of which - as known - he was a master. On the walls there is a picture gallery, reflecting the tastes of the aristocratic patrons of the time. Hogarth puts to shame the bad taste and the static and paralysed idea of beauty, to which aristocrats, even without even realizing it, were referring. The frame of the two prints displays, in an arrangement that recalls the rules of mnemonics, a myriad of examples: faces, candelabras, roasters, geometric figures, anatomical sections etc. Through them Hogarth explains its seemingly simple rules, but rich in amazing implications. They are all linked to a taste that comes out of the locked rooms of the aristocracy, in order to open themselves to the life of the city, to a wider client, to the new bourgeois spirit and new requirement to tie artistic-aesthetic art to industrial production and the objects of daily use. One more reason to rediscover today this formidable essay.