THE OBSCURE FACE OF BEAUTY

Abstract

The cult of the ruins instituted the beauty of the
authentic fragments, relativizing the ugliness of
mutilated or incomplete bodies. The sacred for the italian
renaissance humanists was a classic body reconstituted
more for integrity and less for authenticity, where for
the classicists of the eighteenth century the mutilated
or incomplete body was artistically acceptable. The
free assembly of the classical sculptures represents,
for the italian renaissance, the authenticity of the nonauthentic.
The preservation of mutilated bodies, in the
light of modern theories, is the historical return of the
value of the “authentic”. Between the beauty, integrity
and authenticity of the bodies, a free comparison is
proposed between the concept of authenticity in the
theories of patrimony and the Aesthetic of the Ugly. It
begins with the idea that the ugly is the incomplete,
imperfect, deformed, or falsified. We will see, however,
that there are dissolutions and historical permissions
that contradict this premise.
Keywords: Aesthetics of the Ugly; Authenticity; Integrity;
Patrimony.