ABSTRACT
Beauty in human beings is therefore a partial reflection of an absolute beauty that is good, virtuous, and metaphysically inseparable from truth. For Aristotle, the kernel of beauty lay in perfect orderliness, writing that ‘the chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness’ (quoted in Synott, 1993:80). A parallel idea can be found in the Old Testament’s book of Isaiah: ‘The carpenter stretcheth out his rule; he marketh it out with a line; he fitteth it with planes, and he marketh it out with the compass, and maketh it after the figure of a man, according to the beauty of a man’ (44:13). Classical architecture used perfect bodily proportion as a divinely gifted template for the organization of buildings, especially temples, a principle developed by the Roman architect and military engineer Vitruvius (fl. first century AD). In Book III of his De Architectura, he writes, ‘No temple can have any compositional system without symmetry and proportion, unless, as it were, it has an exact system of correspondence to the likeness of a well-formed human being’ (Vitruvius, 1999:47). A beautiful human form is therefore the perfect compositional template, its symmetry and proportion constituting an embodiment of the divine plan.
