Beauty Is A Feeling
What is the real concept of beauty? I have a feeling that Cecilia Giménez sensitively appreciated the damage that the passage of time had caused in Ecce Homo. And that in my opinion, the octogenarian from Borja (Zaragoza) is only guilty of wanting to give the image a dignity, which she surely considered lost and therefore tried to compensate her devotion, restoring it with two concepts: illusion and affection.
I will not enter into polemics, if Ecce Homo was properly protected and safe from being manipulated at will. But I am sure that at the end of her work, Cecilia did not consider it a failure, but a pleasure and pride in feeling responsible for perpetuating beauty.
In the worst case, we must never forget the concept of beauty, much less a reflection that her gesture gave me: failure exists… so that the dream continues.
What is beauty?
It is a quality, a concept, a feeling, characterized by its relativity : there is no universal criterion, only the idea, that perfection does not exist except as an ideal.
Beauty is what is pleasing to the senses and therefore causes pleasure, but not everything that causes us pleasure has to be beautiful. For each individual, social group, race, time, there is a different mode of aesthetic perception.
The exuberant buttocks of the Hottentot women, the small atrophied feet of the Chinese, the nasal, ear and lip mutilations of some African tribes, the square heads that show us certain sculptures of Ethiopia caused from childhood, the women with giraffe necks in Burma… the models of beauty for certain races and times are different.
In Japan, the whiteness of the skin is synonymous with beauty and considered as the only color so as not to express feelings, currently the advertisements for cosmetics and articles related to beauty, showed models of pale bodies, which is why it was taken as a stereotype of beauty western.
In other parts of the world, as in some African tribes, sagging female breasts, drooping almost to the waist, are a symbol of beauty. And in many cultures of Polynesia or Maori, in Asian countries such as Japan or India, the use of tattoos continues to be symbols of beauty.
Evolution of the concept of beauty
It was a Greek philosopher who spoke of beauty as the common name of beautiful things and that they had a harmony in their proportions perceived from an objective point of view. This perception of the beautiful continued in the Middle Ages.
With Christianity on the rise, what was considered beautiful at the time depended on God’s intervention. So if something was considered beautiful, it was because it was a divine creation. Hence, a distinction was made between material beauty, external and that fades with time, and spiritual, interior and permanent such as goodness, love, sympathy, etc.
After the Middle Ages, with the Renaissance, beauty has a more naturalistic conception, closer to classical Greece. The most popular pattern of Greek beauty, which has survived through generations, is that the height of the human being is equal to 7 times the height of the head.
The relationship between the perception of beauty and the cerebral cortex has been scientifically proven. Each cerebral cortex will be able to interpret the result of Cecilia’s performance, as frivolity, daring, etc. But in any case, I hope we never forget: beauty is a feeling.
