ABSTRACT
The hero’s corpse in Death of Marat is beautiful, Arthur Danto says, not because David always painted beautiful bodies (he did: even the blind, begging Belissarius retains his warrior’s musculature) but because, by posing the body as if it were part of a Deposition, David wanted to connect Marat’s suffering with the passion of Jesus and thus inspire his audience with revolutionary zeal. This is how beauty and aesthetics find their way into the history of art: as the explanation of how aesthetic features of paintings illuminate historical meaning. Diarmuid Costello, though, will have none of it. He finds talk of beauty almost completely useless in the discussion of art. He argues, no doubt correctly, that to say that a painting is beautiful is most often simply to pay it a vague compliment, which is filled out and becomes telling only when “beautiful” is replaced by more specific terms, like “clunky,” “delicate,” or “light.” Beauty, he asserts, casts no light on art.
