F1317 Beauty and Ugliness in Western Art through the Centuries, Franck Villain

What does Beauty mean to Western civilization? Immediately a whole series of expressions and concepts appears. We can speak of "natural Beauty," which means that only the natural is beautiful and Art has to copy it; or we can speak of the "Beauty of art," which means that Beauty is not connected with nature but depends on the artists' creativity and imagination, and on the aesthetic models of their time (e.g., the aesthetic ideal in ancient Greece, Beauty as proportion and harmony for Pythagoras, and the Beauty of provocation and consumption in our modern world). From Venus to Madonna and Monica Bellucci, sameness is expressed through difference: the same expectation of Beauty, and differences in aesthetic. The idea of Beauty in art is very relative: what is considered beautiful varies through times and cultures.

Furthermore every culture has always accompanied its own concept of Beauty with its own idea of Ugliness, and the main questioning was to ask how it is possible to represent it. For example, from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, various aesthetic theories see Ugliness as a discordance that breaks the rules of the proportion ; with the advent of the Christian sensibility, Ugliness becomes the pain, the suffering, the death, the torture and the physical deformations suffered both by victims and their tormentors ... No Beauty without Ugliness. Then, it is possible to portray this opposition in a global beauty aesthetic ? It is possible, for example, to speak about the Beauty of the horror, of the Aesthetic inferno, or to consider Ugliness as a Requirement for Beauty ? Does a beautiful representation of monstrosity lend it some degree of fascination, if we think, for example of the Romantic or Decadent period where the appeal of the horrendous and the Beauty of Devil were acknowledged without hypocrisy... and what say about our present time when a terrible drama appear anywhere in the world, why we immediately switch on TV or Iphone or Ipad to eat this king of images which is completely fill of gruesome ?

The purpose of this course is to review the evolution of the idea of Beauty and of the questioning of the representation of Ugliness in the West through different cultures and over different periods of time. From antique to modern times, how could different models of Beauty and perception of Ugliness coexist in the same period in Italy, Germany, France, and England? Furthermore, how and why were such models revisited, developed and modified over time? Finally, as the concept of Beauty and Ugliness are in constant dialogue with art, literature, social sciences, and politics, we will study artists along philosophers and writers who have explored these concepts.

Teaching and evaluations methods
Each class will be focus on a particular historical period or concepts connected to Beauty and Ugliness in Western painting. Each week we will work through one chapter of the course textbook that we will discuss and explain in class and there is no required preliminary knowledge.

Each week is focused on an selected paintings that we will see before on a wide screen. The class will always start by a brief conversations between us about the paintings to promote interactive debates and discussions.