Beauty and mimesis

In my last post, I gave a thumbnail sketch that focused on the objective basis of beauty. I ended my post with the conclusion that beauty, as the epiphany of form (Plato), is the self-showing property of being (Balthasar). It is being as it relates to the apprehension (we could say this idea comes from Aquinas, but to be clear, it's still a disputed question whether or not beauty is a transcendental for Thomas--for those interested here is an audio presentation on the issue from St. Thomas Aquinas College).

The point of all this, remember, is to better appreciate the role that beauty plays in the charism of Mother Teresa. A fuller understanding of beauty, I am convinced, can help us more fully  and explicitly grasp what was implicitly intuited by Mother Teresa: that to live beautifully, far from being a sentimental cliche, is in fact the deepest vocation of humanity.

In this post, I want to raise the question of what it means to say that beauty is the revelatory character of being qua being. Now when it comes to representational artwork, we could call this the mimetic character of art, it is rather easy to see how beauty is the epiphany of form, even when form becomes more stylized (in the modern period) or symbolic (in the medieval period). Below, a few examples of representation art in different media:

Turner, Sunrise with Sea Monsters. Oil on canvas. 1845.

Raphael, School of Athens. Fresco. 1511.

Stigmatization of St. Francis. Stained glass. Barfusserkirche. 1235-1245.

Personification of Ktisis (Foundation). Byzantine mosaic. 500-550.

We could say the same about representational sculpture and even music (insofar as some pieces are representative of emotions, for example). But what do we make of art that is non-representational? Think about a painting by Pollock or one of Mozart's symphonies or abstract expressionist sculpture. these seem to be good test cases for trying to understand what we say when we say that beauty is the epiphany of form, the revelation of being. In the next post, I'll give some of my observations.