Beauty and Ugliness in Italian Renaissance Art: Antithesis, Paradox, Oxymoron and Coincidence of Opposites

The art of the Italian Renaissance has long been equated with the search for beauty and harmony. However, many works have challenged this ‘golden legend’, and suggested that it is possible to read the production from this period sub specie deformitatis. Thus, the notions of “counter-Renaissance”, which we find in Hiram Haydn [11], 1950 and 1962, and in Eugenio Battisti [5], who speaks of a form of “antirinascimento”, and “anticlassicism” (John Shearman [17], 1967, and Antonio Pinelli [16], 1993) have underlined the polyphonic and partly contradictory character of the art of the Cinquecento,the solar depictions of which Heinrich Wölfflin and Jacob Burckhardt had failed to capture, thus showing it could not be boiled down to its quest for harmony. Following a historical process that took place throughout the Cinquecento and ended in the Baroque period, the Italian artistic theory and production, each in its own way, gradually managed to think of ugliness in art as something other than a simple voluntary (transgression) or involuntary (failure) deviation from the standards of beauty. More precisely, they sought to combine ugliness and beauty which, since the appearance of antique philosophy and aesthetics, were most of the time opposed to each other on the ontological (being vs. non-being), logical (true vs. false), moral (good vs. evil), formal (harmony vs. disharmony), aesthetic (pleasant vs. unpleasant), and anthropological (identity vs. otherness) levels [10]. It seems therefore that this topical antithesis between the beautiful and the ugly made way for ‘beautiful ugliness’ first theorised in the second half of the 16th century as a paradox — the ugly being endowed with qualities traditionally attributed to beauty — and later, with the advent of the Baroque period, as an oxymoron since the ugliness, and even the horror of the content of the mimesis, underlined the transfiguring power of art and the talent of the artist. Such a shift could reveal a contiguity, or even, in the context of the theorisation of the ‘perfect ugliness’ of caricatures in the 17th century, a coincidentia oppositorum between the beautiful and the ugly: after all, do not kalós and kakós differ only by a single letter?