Beauty Seen, Beauty Sought

Beauty
by Stefan Sagmeister & Jessica Walsh
Phaidon, 2018, 280 pages, $59.95
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“A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” Keats effused in Endymion. “Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.” His 1818 poem about the shepherd so handsome he was beloved by immortals was poorly received, and Keats regretted publishing it. But whatever Endymion’s demerits, Keats’s outlook attests to a time when beauty was taken seriously, regarded as a worthy aspiration for artists and a subject of intellectual attention.

For Keats, as for many others before him and since, beauty was associated intimately with the classical world as reflected in Arcadian myth, or represented by ode-worthy Grecian urns and the astounding statuary then being salvaged from Levantine rubbish tips and carted back to English country houses by Grand Tourists. But he was also a Romantic, so combining within himself the twin poles of Western aesthetics, the…