The beauty of nature is in its details, the message in generality - Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life (1989)

On several occasions, in my time in Italy, I was moved to confront, with greater sincerity than I have ever before, some pertinent curiosities about the nature of beauty.

Amalfi Shrubs

There is a bench, on the path from Amalfi to Atraani, overlooking the beautiful Tyrrhenian Sea and, what to most residents of these bustling towns, would be arbusti communi i.e. ordinary shrubs. To drown out the occasional tourists dragging their suitcase wheels on asphalt, I look towards the crashing of the waves, the sounds of the wind, the sights of distant men lazing on their rocking boats and the clouds obscuring pastel mountains on the horizons. Thermodynamic cycles powering this sea breeze, tectonic crashes and solar convection cells; thoughts lead to thoughts, until I am brought to the memory of last coastline I visited that struck me as beyond commensurate with my capacity to wonder - Algarve Coast in the South of Portugal, flaunting its beautifully striated sandstone cliffs and an incredible network of accessible sea caves. I thought of the immaculate taste demonstrated in the landscaping of the heavenly Portugese gardens. People like Franscisco do Amaral and Luigi Manini have created sites of exquisite beauty and ethereal ambience in corners of Estufa Fria and Quinta de Regaleira. These spaces seem to purge ugliness, if only momentarily, from the lives of those fortunate enough to enter. A distant car horn snaps me back to the Amalfi coast and I look to my right. The geological substrate of the cliff, Mediterranean climate and thousands of years of human history in the Campania region, have all played their roles in shaping the intricate mosaic of multicolored, multi-specied shrubs that cover this stark white rock. As opposed to the dryer, hotter and more vulnerable to eroding landscape of Algarve, the vegetation covered cliffs of Amalfi exuberate a liveliness, as if the rock underneath breaths itself when the thousands of plants on its skin flutter with the wind.

The Mediterranean shrubs do the magic themselves, I think to myself, Amalfi has no need for virtuosic designers of the kind who transfigured soul into soil back in Lisbon. Perhaps, the garden designers themselves took inspiration from the grand designs of nature that she graciously painted in a great variety of form. But, the Portuguese gardeners, though certainly employing volumes of Mediterranean fauna, also brought together elements from the Caribbean, East Asia, Amazon Basins and other corners of the world justifiably called ‘exotic’ by them. If humans cannot be credited entirely with creating beauty on account of us drawing heavy inspirations from the designs of nature, then, perhaps, at least, we could pat ourselves on ours backs for aggregating it. Or, maybe not?

Sorrento’s Sunset

The Mediterranean sun has in its nature, in parts, a quality of an inexorable bully. The few patches of clouds that fly-by occasionally, obscuring sun’s aggression, manage to serve merely as a blanket over you, trapping the heat further, somehow making you equally uncomfortable but in a novel way. It is, thus, all the more dramatic to witness^[1] the last few minutes of the sun’s gentle descent through the horizon framed on its either edges by the island of Capri and Northern arm of the Bay of Naples. I could spend many words describing the sensory experience that such a sunset is but would be at an embarrassing loss of words if attempting to describe the spiritual effect of it. Once a celestial bully, now, the sun could only be likened by a glimmering child, against a world of exploding hues, radiating not just the literal source of vitality on this planet but, perhaps, to some the purpose for it too. Like a painting, I gasp, on witnessing something cosmic and primordial but impossibly intimate and subtle. Besides being massive understatement, my words were also possibly inauthentic. The sunset does not resemble a painting in its beauty. It is the painting that aspires, only asymptotically, towards the Platonic ideal of beauty embodied by the phenomena of a setting sun. The beauty of a sunset appears to exists in a transcendent form independent of our willingness to consume it. In the philosophical discourse on the objective-subjective dichotomy of beauty, one often finds claims, spoken as if axiomatic, that there is almost a perversity in denying the beauty of a sunset. How could beauty not, then, be an aether in which we are immersed and our minds be the agents that metabolize it, like our lungs gather oxygen from the air or like our cells admitting nutrition from their environments. Beauty is food for soul and one fends for themselves, based on their appetite. But, what of artists who see in distant storms, rising Proteus of the sea? What, also, of the artists who capture in notes of a melody, the expanse of worlds unknown? Although the role of an artist may not be to serve as the source of beauty, I still believe in its critical role as the medium, through which, though distorted, amalgamated and diluted, beauty continues to flow.

Allegory Paintings

There is a four-part series of late Renaissance paintings, made by the collaboration between Jan Brueghel and Hendrick van Balen, named Allegory of Fire, Allegory of Water and so on for the other classical elements (air and Earth) in Western Philosophy^[2]. One complete collection of such paintings is displayed in the halls of Palazzo Pamphili (which gleam with a surprisingly tasteful form of opulence, when compared against, say, the Viennese residence of the Habsburgs.). These paintings neither focus on characters (like the Pope, a mythical icon, a family patron, etc.) nor on any narrative (like a Biblical fable, a Roman legend, a war of conquest, etc.). Instead, these paintings are structured like a cabinet of curiosities, a genre-blending novelty aiming to capture and pay homage to the encyclopedic and scientific zeitgeist, ancient wisdom in mythological poetry, romanticism towards nature, and elements of one’s philosophical inclinations. For example, consider the painting Allegory of Fire that, presumably, speaks to the dual nature of fire. On the right edge of the painting, there is an exploding volcano shrouded in ominous clouds, sending its destructive fury towards nearby town and its fleeing residents. In the foreground, is the Roman God of Fire Vulcan himself, engaged in his other mythological ambit of metalworking. Fire is the element of destruction but wielding it also powers progress, innovation and technology. Vulcan is surrounded by a spread of metallic tools for worship (candlestick, chalice, altar bells, etc.) and war (canons, armors, swords, shields); the two most serious affairs in 16th century Europe. The paintings depicts, also, Goddess Venus visiting her husband Vulcan’s workshop, speaking to the delicate play between passion and edge of creation and destruction. The word Allegory comes from the Greek root of Allegoria, a composite word whose meaning is constituted by ‘to speak of’ and ‘in a different way’. To speak of fire is, in a different way, to speak of a deadly gamble whose rewards are plenty and alluring but it risks something extreme and corrupt. To speak of fire is, in a different way, to speak of the cautionary messages from the history of humanity on the heights that mortal passions can climb and the depths to which a single slip could lead. To speak of fire is to speak of our footprints on the moon and of the ashes in the blast craters of our bombs.

My father in the political context of a major Indian protest effort (called Narmada Bachao Andolan), in an age radically different from Renaissance Rome, for an audience as far from Italian theocracy as possible, writes a poem^[3] called ‘Jab Hum Chidiya ki Baat Kartein Hain’, which translates to ‘When we speak of the Birds’. With a literary tone which the English language would fail to convey, the poem describes (as if in a conversation with Baroque and Romantic poets of the likes of Wordsworth) that when we speak of the birds, we speak not only of the vibrant, cheerful orbs of melody that glide through the forest slopes. When we speak of the birds, we speak, also, of the hungry, yearning beaks that await them in their distant nests and of the chimney smokes pierced through powers of promises. When we speak of the birds, we speak not only of their songs but also of their screams and also of their quiet.

I intend not to draw any explicit parallel between my father’s poem and the allegory paintings in Rome but I hope in my descriptions, I could emphasize the structural similarities that I found. Richard Fortey in his visit to the Cave 2 of Ajanta, makes a similar observation and he describes it in Earth: An Intimate History as

There is a fresco that includes a half-naked girl on a rope swing, set against a rather dark and stylized field of flowers; it is an image of fun, but also curiously solemn. It has an exact counterpart in a painting called The Swing, by the pre-Revolutionary French artist Jean Honoré Fragonard, in which an aristocratic girl, dressed as a notional shepherdess, soars carefree into the sky. Two girls from different millennia and from remote traditions enjoying an identical game, and captured in mid swing by the hand of an artist. I take this as an emblem of the deep similarity of human responses, and, specifically, of the importance of the artist in proving it.

I travel a quarter of the world away from my home, a quarter of the way through my life, in pursuits of perspectives on larger than life mysteries. In a delightful ploy of irony, the answers often lead me back home. What I noticed in common between the allegory paintings and my father’s poetry, and what Richard noticed in common between Ajanta’s fresco and The Swing, suggest something about the co-existence of the unassailable imprint of circumstantial context on, and context-independent structurally similar manifestations of, what the human spirit finds beautiful.

Neoplatonism

Plotinus in his short essay On Beauty, begins by establishing the broad sense in which he intends to use the word -

Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight; but there is a beauty for the hearing too, as in certain combinations of words and in all kinds of music, for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues.

He, then, makes a subtle observation about this multifaceted idea of beauty (embedded within a certain mystical Neoplatonist propaganda)

[Principle of Beauty] is something that is perceived at the first glance, something which the soul names as from an ancient knowledge and, recognizing, welcomes it, enters into unison with it… Our interpretation is that the soul—by the very truth of its nature, by its affiliation to the noblest Existents in the hierarchy of Being—when it sees anything of that kin, or any trace of that kinship, thrills with an immediate delight, takes its own to itself, and thus stirs anew to the sense of its nature and of all its affinity.

Instead of believing the artist to be the medium through which a transcendent beauty flows, I now feel it more apt to believe that beauty arises - or, rather, simply is - when the artist and the transcendent flow with each other ‘in unison’. Nature’s invitation for this dance, hinted in the variety of forms and hues, the Mediterranean shrubs and sunsets, the warmth felt on one’s skin and the salt in an ocean breeze, and the human aspiration to know and care, to service spaceships and serenade symphonies, to squint, pivot, stretch and flip, flowers, mountains, and immeasurable forms of thoughts and matter, and the impossible reality of this divine dream; how I wish to hold, to cherish, and to become all this which needs no naming, but moves me to say: beautiful.