“ Beautiful with a finished and restrained beauty, which our taste is hardly refined enough to appreciate, it is incapable of development. ”
George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (1896). copy citation
| Author | George Santayana |
|---|---|
| Source | The Sense of Beauty |
| Topic | beauty development |
| Date | 1896 |
| Language | English |
| Reference | |
| Note | |
| Weblink | http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26842/26842-h/26842-h.htm |
Context
“Its compactness and inevitableness make it excellent for an epigram and adequate it for a satire, but its perpetual snap and unvarying rhythm are thin for an epic, and impossible for a song. The Greek colonnade, a form in many ways analogous, has similar limitations. Beautiful with a finished and restrained beauty, which our taste is hardly refined enough to appreciate, it is incapable of development. The experiments of Roman architecture sufficiently show it; the glory of which is their Roman frame rather than their Hellenic ornament.
When the Greeks themselves had to face the problem of larger and more complex buildings, in the service of a supernatural and hierarchical system, they transformed their architecture into what we call Byzantine, and St.”
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