1 | The power of an image

What does art do? What are its powers? Has it anything to do with deeper, not surface, reality? Can ideas come from works of art, as creations that give us ways to think – in looking at works of art do we think thoughts? See with the mind?

Answers to these questions might be quite relevant to shaping a culture that helps people live. Perhaps, once, we possessed what we called a civilization because we had a better knowledge of what art is and is for.

On the question of the power of images a current minor controversy brings an image from the past to mind. Just now a Christian press is re-issuing George Gilder’s Men and Marriage, a book first published fifty years ago – according to one reviewer, “to an almost unanimous chorus of hostile comment.” When a revised edition appeared in 1986 (occasioning this writer’s review) the reception was no more welcoming.

Nothing could be more characteristic of the [then] current climate of opinion than the manifest unwillingness of feminist intellectuals to give Gilder even the semblance of a hearing.

Terry Teachout, “A Woman’s Place: Men and Marriage, by George Gilder,” Commentary (April 1987)

And now, at the mention of a re-issue thirty-seven years later, concerned people who glanced at the old edition were alarmed enough by what they saw already on page one to fire off social-media warnings. At the prospect of the return of such ideas “people went insane online,” says one of the publishers; “People are upset!” 

What was it about page one? When I looked it up myself (I have not read Gilder’s book, which I had never heard of) what struck me is the way ideas noted there were presented almost half a millennium ago in an Italian painting, a beautiful painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that we might think presented no ideas at all.

It may be old ideas, however (as we shall see, very old ideas), that we should recover for the sake of our welfare.

To say that we have drifted from the truth presented in the painting puts it, of course, too simply. Considerable effort went into that ‘drifting’, through which, in the process, art and truth were split apart. That in 2023 hostility faces the effort just to restate what is celebrated in a painting hanging in a great museum has to do with the fact that Gilder (with Renaissance culture) is committing what in a liberal order is an intolerable sin. That sin is, to speak about the nature and, still worse, the meaning of woman – of the ‘feminine’, which is woman in the eyes of the man.

2 | A Prohibition era for ideas

There can be no view of woman in a liberal order, which is a Prohibition culture. Such an idea is forbidden on account of its threat of oppression. “Liberalism”, explains Alasdair MacIntyre, is

the project of founding a form of social order in which individuals could emancipate themselves from … the tyranny of tradition,….

Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1988), 335

The evils of tyranny inherent in certain kinds of idea.

If, for instance, securing each person’s liberty to decide the existence of God happens to require (as the liberal argues) the elimination of God from the understanding and management of culture, then you must now talk about culture in a way that suits the atheist. Categorical talk (about things like culture) must be cleansed of unshared elements. – But this is effectively to prohibit the business of saying what culture is, which is how traditions function. (A tradition is, among other things, a set of such verdicts.)

If the idea of woman does not come from all women (and it never will, as women will never have a common view of who and what they are) then the entire discussion of the meaning of …, the nature of …, is closed. The very kind of talk that made traditions function – setting up (‘institutionalizing’) its verdict on the nature of man and woman, on the relation between the sexes – has become, essentially, an evil.

Naturally, ‘in a free country’ anyone may hold these antisocial ideas (ideas downsized to the beliefs of individuals are ideas made safe), but as these ideas are, by the liberal measure, inherently antisocial they are not viable public ideas. – But what do I mean by a ‘public idea’: I have been so thoroughly shaped by liberalism that I am using the wrong language. What I mean is ideas fit for public consumption, the right word for which is truths. And the liberal order cannot have them. It tries to drive truth into the tiny spheres of individual lives, separately divided.

The problem with liberal society is that it is a society with no blood in its veins. It has no place for the truths by which civilizations are created.

There can be no public definition of the nature of woman, since this would oppress the individual who cannot accept that understanding. Every ‘liberal civilization’ is therefore constrained to function with that definition of woman that says that ‘Woman is undefinable’. And in the third decade of this century are we not seeing this stated more and more literally every day?

In a liberal order we are subject to a more radical form of Prohibition than under tee-totalling moralists: it is vastly worse to
belong to a society militant against truths, verdicts on the nature of things basic to human life. (Of course it is bad additionally in that opinions are now smuggled into place as if they were truths, while the existence of governing verdicts is kept constantly deniable – a state that creates perfect conditions for an entirely covert tyranny. These are conditions that liberalism would condemn if tyranny were in fact its foe.)

To expunge from public life ‘traditional’ ideas – which is to say, decisive claims about the nature of things that facilitate a way of life – might be an especially pivotal move in the unravelling of civilization.

3 | ‘The primacy of women’

Should you in any way doubt that the liberal culture that governs us condemns as a threat the ideas that in fact created our civilization, the warnings about the return of Gilder’s book might be noteworthy. These are warnings about troublesome ideas being smuggled back in.

Suppose we look at those ideas, … and look at what the painting showed and shows today (so far as I know there is no connection between Gilder and the painting; one page of what Gilder wrote simply reminded me of it). That page has to do with men, women, and civilization.

The crucial process of civilization is the subordination of male sexual impulses and biology to the long-term horizons of female sexuality. The overall sexual behavior of women in the modern world differs relatively little from the sexual life of women in primitive societies. It is male behaviour that must be changed to create a civilized order.

Men lust, but they know not what for; they wander, and lose track of the goal; they fight and compete, but they forget the prize; they spread seed, but spurn the seasons of growth; they chase power and glory, but miss the meaning of life.

In creating civilization, women transform male lust into love; channel male wanderlust into jobs, homes, and families; link men to specific children; rear children into citizens; change hunters into fathers; divert male will to power into a drive to create. Women conceive the future that men tend to flee; they feed the children that men ignore.

The prime fact of life is the sexual superiority of women. Sexual love, intercourse, marriage, conception of a child, childbearing –  even breast-feeding – are all critical experiences psychologically. They are times when our emotions are most intense, our lives are most deeply changed, and society is perpetuated in our own image. And they all entail sexual roles that demonstrate the primacy of women.

George Gilder, Men & Marriage
(Gretna, La.: Pelican, 1986), 5

The main elements of what Gilder has said here can be presented in an image.

This is a painting by Paolo Veronese, a painter who worked in Venice in the later Renaissance. To do what I plan to do in the series that I am beginning here – which is to look at a selection of art created in the West in a way congenial to those works, free of conventions established in the age of Western decline – we should start by ignoring the painting’s title. Images are not books. Renaissance paintings had no titles; it was an image that the artist produced. In the 1570s, when Veronese is thought to have painted this picture, the artist had no thought of a label telling us what we are seeing. To understand, or to see, what you are looking at you had to, and still must, consume the painting, bit by bit – so it makes no sense to start with words assigned by a museum for its own reasons.

Of this picture the art historian Edgar Wind said, “The allegory is very involved” (Edar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958], 84 n. 2), but that does not mean it is difficult to read. Wind is speaking about the whole, the layers, and the starting point is always very simple. We should begin with the obvious, asking, What do we see here?

We see a woman and a man, clothed and unclothed, a horse, a sword and helmet, two little children with wings (which we know to be cupids – but what are they?), trees and sky, a building of some sort.

The man and the woman are central, but it is the woman who is most prominent, standing at full length, and having removed her white shift. She leans an elbow upon the man, and raises a leg over his knee. With her right hand she holds her breast – in fact, looked at more closely, she is pressing drops of milk from it.

That puzzles people, but it shouldn’t. You can easily make sense of it in the ordinary way in which you understand a metaphor, by asking what is the unexpected thing, what is it in nature. If we treat the image as an image we will pay attention to the natural meaning of these drops of milk.

What quality is distinctive of milk from a woman’s breast? – It is its life-sustaining quality, for all of humankind. We are shown man’s first food, what keeps alive helpless and dependent human beings.

It is also a woman’s gift – uniquely a woman’s gift, something she alone can give – and it is nourishment from her body. It is specifically feminine physical nourishment.

In contrast to the woman the man is clothed. He wears a rich leather-and-bronze armour. On the ground beside him is his helmet. He is holding a cloak before the woman, in fact raising it to cover her. It is his sword that is being carried off by the cupid at right.

The other cupid is tying a band around the woman’s calf – but looking more closely you see that the man’s calf is encircled by it too. The cupid is tying the legs of the two together; they are being bound together, so they cannot part.

One further thing noticeable is the emphatic contrast between woman and man.

The most notable difference is her nakedness, which in this secluded and sheltered place and in this private company she is very relaxed about. It is unfortunate, in a way, that I am beginning this series with an image of the nude. In a culture in which nakedness has only one association, the nude, as I learned from my students at a Christian college, is quite problematic. This is too large a subject to enter into here (we have plenty to discuss already) so I will largely bypass it and return to the nude in the discussion of some other work of art. But consider only one point; think for just a moment about two kinds of culture:

• one in which the association of the naked body with pornography has become so primary that the student shown a work of art like this shuts his eyes – art has become a threat to him;

• and another in which the naked body does more than one thing, has more than one association because it says different things.

The woman alone is unclothed, but she is also ornamented with a gold band, bracelets, gleaming pearls, carefully decorated hair, all of this emphasizing presentation to the eye – in fact, that there is something lovely to be seen. And beyond the what (the physical forms and objects) there is also the way, the manner in which the body is held, in which this woman stands. There is the special grace of her pose, marking a pointed contrast with the man, who is slumped in a rather unattractive way.

Attractiveness is more or less a key to what we are seeing, in the body and the jewellery that ‘attract’ attention, because of their perfections. And it is not just the nakedness and physical beauty of the woman that has this appeal: her grace is especially marvellous (look at the fingers of her hand on the man’s back). This, the extraordinary lustre of her skin, and especially the delicacy of her expression make an impression of fineness – a term whose meaning we have almost entirely lost, but can recover the substance of here.

In all these ways the woman is emphatically contrasted with the man, the warrior, who is turned away from us, closed in on himself, darker. Something about his eyes suggests preoccupation with some inner disturbance – the mad touch of death, perhaps. The presentation he is given hints at a brutish, unrefined force.

Who has the superior place in the relation depicted here. Are we seeing equality?

In fact the man is offering himself to the woman as a kind of throne. Gilder mentioned “the primacy of women.” The woman here is superior: literally in the image, genuinely in their union. The man is making himself a support for her, in response to what he sees in her.

4 | Ferocity & difference – or harmony, male power tempered

From all that we have said the identities of these figures practically cry out for recognition: this is Mars and Venus. We are at the height of the Renaissance, by which time the pagan gods had returned, not as gods (with temples receiving sacrifices) but as motifs: as symbolic figures in art and thought.

The goddess associated with beauty in ancient Greece was Aphrodite, Venus in the Roman world. And in the mythology of ancient Latin poets, whose works were again being read in the Renaissance, Venus was linked with Mars, god of war (Ares to the Greeks).

Mars and Venus, however, are virtual antitheses. In Plato’s Symposium it is noted how

the God of War is no match for [the god of love]; he is the captive and Love is the lord, for love, the love of Aphrodite, masters him, as the tale runs; and the master is stronger than the servant.

Plato, Symposium, 196d; trans. B. Jowett,
The Dialogues of Plato (New York:
Random House, 1937)

Plato notes the power of Aphrodite over Ares. But who are these gods, especially in the Christian Renaissance?

The Greek essayist Plutarch (c. 46–c. 120 AD; a source in the Renaissance for Shakespeare) had written,

It is well-known that, in the fables of the Greeks, Harmony was born from the union of Venus and Mars: of whom the latter is fierce and contentious, the former generous and pleasing.

Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride; cited by Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 82

It could well be said that Veronese’s painting depicts exactly this conception: the birth of harmony from this union of difference. Writes Plutarch,

This is what the fable of Mars and Venus suggests,…. Harmony was born from the union of Mars and Venus: for when the contraries

(we have noted the emphatic difference Veronese has marked between the charm and openness of the radiant Venus and the inward and taciturn figure of a darker Mars)

when the contraries are tempered by a certain proportion, a marvellous consonance arises between them.

Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride; cited by Wind,
Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 82

Mars is “tempered” … by Venus. In Veronese’s painting we see Mars waylaid by her; he is far from the battlefield, divested (it would seem willingly) of his weapons by cupids, who are Renaissance representations of Eros, the child of Venus. What are cupids? They are divine energies that do the bidding of the goddess of love.

The Italian philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) “had these passages [of Plutarch] in mind,” writes Wind, when he wrote about the nature of beauty.

By due temperation the contrariety must become united and the discord made concordant; and this may be offered as the true definition of Beauty, namely, that it is nothing else than an amicable enmity and a concordant discord

Pico della Mirandola, A Platonic Discourse
Upon Love (1486/1490);
cited by Wind, Pagan Mysteries
in the Renaissance, 83

– by which we should understand the emphatic difference we see between woman and man, so distinct from each other, here brought into harmony.

Human beings, of course, are a race of beings with many differences: with greatly individualized forms but, in terms of the soul each person commands, different and contentious also in thought and judgement. Between woman and man, in particular, is there something that can make the discord harmonious without crushing the difference, as if it were an an evil?

5 | Ageless ideas

Harmonia est discordia concors.
harmony is discord made concordant

But of course, the burning question is how?

Discordia concors was a Renaissance formulation of ideas predating even Plato. The pre-Socratic thinker Empedocles (d. c. 433 BC) had concentrated his attention on the two cosmic natural forces that he called Love and Strife. Describing his ideas, Cambridge professor of ancient philosophy W.K.C. Guthrie wrote,

When Love is supreme the elements are fused together in a mass. When Strife has the victory, they exist in separate concentric layers – for the whole is conceived as spherical – with earth at the centre,

W.K.C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers,
from Thales to Aristotle (London: Methuen, 1950), 52

and in this, plainly, we have strayed quite far from the painting. But Empedocles, writes Guthrie, is “a combination of philosopher [and] religious mystic” and he did not confine these forces to simple physicality.

Love is that which brings the sexes together, and which causes men to think kindly thoughts and do good…. She and strife ‘run through all things’,

Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers, 51–53

like an electraical current, said Empedocles. He called this uniting power Αφροδίτη | Aphrodite.

Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture,
trans. Gilbert Highet (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1965), vol. 1, 433 n. 31

In the thinking of Empedocles, explains Classics scholar Werner Jaeger, we do not have a distinctly scientific or rational-explanatory outlook; “the old force of mythological thinking is still active” and his doctrines are further bound up with Orphic thought (linked with the myth of Orpheus) and its conception of “man’s divine nature”, the human soul as a “guest from heaven”.

Jaeger, Paideia, vol. 1, 151, 166, 169

Yet from this ancient thinking about love and discord, writes Jaeger, a direct line may be drawn leading through Plato to the Neoplatonists and also to Christian thinkers (Church fathers, Dante, scholastic philosophers) who undertook to reconcile the ancient accounts of love (such as those in Plato’s Symposium) with the Christian notion of agape, “interpreting them both as a divine and cosmic power.”

Jaeger, Paideia, vol. 1, 433 n. 31

In the Renaissance, then, Pico writes this.

And since in the constitution of [divinely] created things
[– e.g., human beings] it is necessary that the union overcomes the strife … – for this reason is it said by the poets that Venus loves Mars, because Beauty, which we call Venus, cannot subsist without contrariety.

Pico della Mirandola,  A Platonic Discourse
Upon Love; cited by Wind, 83

Venus alone, without Mars, “cannot subsist” – they are interdependent. Or, as one of the Christians defending George Gilder has just written, “the sexes live and die together.”

Pico wrote,

Venus tames and mitigates Mars, because the tempering power restrains and overcomes the strife and hate which persist between the contrary elements. … [In the order of planets] Venus was placed … next to Mars, because she must tame his temperament which is by nature destructive and corrupting,….

Pico della Mirandola, A Platonic Discourse
Upon Love; cited by Wind, 83

In sum, the forceful and aggressive temperament of the male (this quality has long been recognized), if tamed by nothing, is ‘malignant’, to cite another translation (Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, A Platonick Discourse Upon Love, ed. Edmund G. Gardner, trans. Thomas Stanley [Boston: Merrymount Press, 1914], 2.5, 26).

Was the difference of Eve, a difference conceived by God, fashioned in such a way as to offer this tempering help?

Temperance is not destruction; it is, exactly as Pico has said, mitigation. The force of the man is not an evil, toxic in every dosage; it is toxic untempered, like excessively strong wine. The brute force of the man must be channelled, not destroyed.

There is also the matter of what the man who is captivated by the attractions of Venus is seeing. Echoing Plato, Renaissance thinkers held that the beauty of woman reveals the beauty of God. One scholar writes,

Both Ficino and Pico (and Benivieni)* think that love is “desire for beauty” …, understood as grace and harmony, and both affirm the superiority of heavenly Venus [– Venus as a divine figure] because she leads to God, supreme beauty…. However, to reach ideal beauty, they maintain that it is first necessary to see earthly Venus, visible and perceivable [– Venus embodied in a living woman]: in this way the terrestrial beauty obtains an important role in the staircase to God, because it is the first step on the ladder.

Sergio Di Benedetto, “From Earthly Venus to
Heavenly Venus: On the Evolution of
the Concept of Beauty in Girolamo Benivieni,”
in The Idea of Beauty in Italian Literature and
Language, ed. Claudio Di Felice, Harald Hendrix,
and Philiep Bossier (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 69

* Marsilio Ficino, Pico’s teacher, who translated Plato’s Symposium to Latin; Girolamo Benivieni was a poet and friend of Pico who rendered Ficino’s translation into verse.

What we are seeing in this picture, then, is the marshalling of a set of ideas into a kind of symphonic image: force and discord; difference, but harmony; temperance and productive service; taming, via willing subordination … to a figure giving of herself, physically; a figure counted superior by the man, and a divine vision.

If ‘harmony’ would make a better title than ‘Mars and Venus’ (because more meaningful), in what we have been given we have seen much more than a mere concept. Not to give titles undue importance, the title assigned to the work in the Metropolitan Museum gets us further – Mars and Venus United by Love – but it is crucial to grasp that if a title can state an idea, it is still far too simple compared to the relation of ideas that the image itself presents. And further, as I have hinted, the great question raised by this complex of ideas is how the pivotal and civilizing feat of temperance is accomplished. The answer to this is a further component of what the painted image gives us.

We do after all want to know, what inspires the love that generates the harmony? What is the power that tempers the force, in fact makes the man turn himself into a throne and become a worshipper? What is it that accomplishes the binding of Mars to Venus? – This is a question that the painting in fact answers, and it answers it in a way that has notable implications for the understanding of civilization.

6 | Beauty & civilization

What a woman is, even if we relativize and add ‘for a man’, is beauty incarnate: beauty in the form of a living person. What makes Venus, with her life-giving gifts, master of Mars is her beauty, to the man – but we must instantly retract these gestures of relativization in that her significance for the man is a part of her identity within the union of marriage.

A particular woman may not accept this identification of her nature. But even an unmarried woman (as we learn from the life of Dante) possesses this power: however she sees herself she is still part of society, living among and visible to men.

What Veronese has painted is what woman is in human society, a society affirming this understanding of the conditions of human life. She is an image of God to men, a window on the divine, a life-altering inspiration. The feminine is a meaningful reality.

To the question of the power that masters man, the painting answers through the Platonic thinking still coursing through the veins, as it were, of Renaissance society – and in this connection it is not surprising that Gilder prefaced his opening chapter with a line from the Symposium.

Love is a desire for generation and birth in beauty.

Plato, The Symposium, 206d;
cited by Gilder (1986), 5

When, as we see Venus doing in this painting, a woman gives the radiance of her body to the man, in marriage, the power of this ‘act of giving’ (the Renaissance called it caritas, charity) is generative, just as Plato claimed. The act of union, giving and receiving, gives birth in the replication of beauty. From the charity of the woman and the gratitude of the man, blessed with this beauty, new beauties arise: for instance, “the beauty of institutions and laws” that Plato mentions in the Symposium – realities like justice, conceived in the image of an experience of beauty.

This is clearly a birth of civilization. Charity, restraint, harmony, chastity as we see them modelled by the figures in this picture deliver a partial image of the character of civilization (of a society causing restraint, etc.). But what the painting reveals most deeply about civilization is the basis of civilization in the love of the divine ideal that men are given in women.

Civic activity … inspired by the beauty of the eternal … becomes a means of civilization – which is life together in the mode of the eternal. Gilder brought sexual conduct and civilization together because they go together.

7 | Images for a people

In Veronese’s picture we have, offered for contemplation, an image of both the relations between the sexes and the engine of civilization, as it has operated since the day of ancient Greece, if not the age of Adam. In the nature of things this power remains latent.

When we look further at the painting in the light of the Western tradition that had meditated upon Plato (and the tradition of myth Plato himself had reflected on) we see in it, also, an image of the contemplation that is the genesis of that ‘quality of action that is harmonious with awesome beauty’: the action we once called noble, done under its inspiration. ‘The noble’ is a translation of to kalon | το καλόν, also translated as the beautiful, … what is fine.

When we talk about the power of an image, as I opened by doing, the lesson from our past is that we are sometimes talking about the power of a thing that an artist might depict, a thing encountered through the senses: a creature who, by her own qualities, can open a pathway through which life-giving power is received from beyond the visible. Through her the energy of the beautiful (“beauty absolute”, wrote Plato) flows into us from where it is waiting. (I mean, for example, the power of the woman, but also of the child, that may suddenly become a force in a man’s life, a force of unsuspected character and magnitude.)

But this opening of the eyes, creating this pathway, may also not happen. The mind may need to be prepared, to allow it. And images may signal its reality, its location, in a prophetic way, so that what is real can be beheld. Indeed, a painting showing a man and woman related in this way, by the power of beauty, might itself function as a window onto the reality that the image is telling us of.

Note, then, the power of an image both in life (the seeing of a woman) and also in art (the image of a woman and the image of seeing that we encounter in this canvas by Veronese).

If you could form a society in which this flowing of energy were accomplished, by the assistance of images (which are more public than books, though books remain crucial), a society in which people can grasp what the image is showing (the human image, and the image of the painting), not having been trained in habits of mind that keeps us from the reading of images, then the power of the image feeds the society. It is blood in its veins.

When people are given something to see, and are able to see, as Mars sees, then they will see, and with seeing comes affirming. Beauty makes the seer of beauty its own, a servant of beauty.

A society may prohibit the kind of idea (the meaning and nature of woman, the nature and meaning of marriage) that constructs a civilization, but liberal policing surely becomes utterly impotent when people are living in response to manifest beauty, to the divine experienced as divine.

Somehow people have been alienated from deciding experiences, made to assign the term ‘beauty’ to some lesser, ‘aesthetic’ phenomenon. But in the ‘West’s’ own tradition of contemplation beauty is not life-enhancing, it converts the beholder into a person captive to a truth. When people recover this experience again they will again become a people, who see the world to be something and who live accordingly. (Not as good liberals, suppressing all contentious beliefs for the sake of a fable about harmony.)

Was there ever a civilization that did not express some people’s concrete way of understanding things? To be a people is to be one of those who affirm together what is both their experience and the meaning and engine of their lives.

.

Artist                                    Paolo Veronese (Paolo Caliari) 

                                              Verona 1528–1588 Venice

Date                                     1570s

Collection                            Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Titled there                          Mars and Venus United by Love

Medium                                Oil on canvas

Dimensions                         205.7 x 161 cm | 81 x 63 in

Photo source                       Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York