Beauty, Nature, and the Virtuous Imitation

Abstract Classical philosophy listed art as a virtue perfecting the intellect’s practical activity ( recta ratio factibilium ). As virtuous, human art or skill must follow a measure or mean of its activity. For classical thought, the natural order provided this measure. This is the origin of the dictum that ‘art imitates nature’. Yet, the claim that the work of creative artists must imitate nature has not gone unchallenged in modernity. This essay claims that a retrieval of the robust notion beauty as integrity, proportion, and clarity not only provides an anchor to tether the work of the creative artist to the natural order but also liberates the artist’s creative intuition from the isolation of mere taste and into the realm of the transcendent. For the creative artist, the integrity, proportion, and clarity of the natural world opens a window into a beauty that unites into one community all those who see it.