The Balance of Beauty and Truth

The Real and the Ideal through the Lens of Art

Champ de coquelicots- Claude Monet 1881

My good friend Tyler came to visit me in Saint Louis recently. A primary goal of ours for the weekend was to find respite through enjoying the life of the mind together. One way we did this was by seeking beauty: we explored cathedrals, art museums, forests, and firesides. Another side of our friendship is our shared love for reason and the pursuit of truth. To that end, we read and discussed Plato’s Meno, debated our differing views on baptism, and listened to a history podcast during a drive.¹

These two aspects of our weekend—beauty and truth—exist in complete harmony in my mind. However, toward the end of our time together, as we explored the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City, I began to see that these two transcendentals are not self-evidently united for all people. Rather, they are realities that must be intentionally balanced.

A Tale of Two Quotes

Quote #1 - Victor Hugo

As Tyler and I pulled up to the well-regarded art museum in Kansas City, we were in awe of the sheer size of the classically styled building. We walked the grounds leading up to the great stone edifice and took in the beauty of the Greek architectural style. As I stood at the base of the building, at the bottom of the steps, I peered upward—my eyes tracing the giant Ionic columns to the top, where I was greeted by words inscribed into the stone. My viewing angle wasn’t ideal for reading the entire sentence, so I backed up until the full phrase came into view. The words read: “The human soul has greater need of the ideal than of the real.”

I had two immediate thoughts. First, the truth of this sentence wasn’t tracking with me. Second, this quote had to be from someone in the past 200 years, because its content could only arise in the modern world. Sure enough, a quick search on my phone confirmed my suspicion—it was by the French author Victor Hugo (1802–1885).

This quote sent me on a mental journey: how should we actually balance the ideal with the real, or beauty with truth? Was Hugo correct? Do we need beauty more than we need truth? Or is it the other way around?

As Tyler and I navigated through the museum, I found that the various movements of art we encountered were helping guide me toward an answer. We moved through Greek, Roman, Medieval, and European collections. All the pieces in these galleries shared something in common: a focus on the real. Most art created before the late Renaissance was concerned with portraying reality as it stood. It lacked any sense of the artist’s subjective experience of truth. This was accomplished through precise portraiture, architectural realism, biblical accuracy, and other grounded techniques.²

I also experienced the opposite end of the spectrum. Before entering another room, I stopped to read the plaque indicating that I was about to step into the modern and abstract art collection. The small description of the movement explained that the artists’ desire was to “move beyond reason and the real.” This sign felt like a warning, that I was entering a version of Dante’s Inferno where chaos and disorder reigned. It may as well have read, “Abandon all reason and order, ye who enter here.” Truly scary stuff.

The pure ideal, when completely disconnected from the real, leads to chaos and reflects an imbalanced view of the transcendent nature of our world.³ In this great imbalance there are no rules and everything means nothing.

Quote #2 - Camille Pisarro

I felt closer to the answer when I came across the second quote in this tale. It appeared to me on a large wall as I entered the Impressionist wing of the museum. The author of this quote is the painter Camille Pissarro. He writes:

Everything is beautiful, the whole secret lies in knowing how to interpret.

Unlike the Hugo quote, this one seemed to strike closer to the truth. Camille begins from a position that acknowledges the real—"everyTHING is beautiful"—and in doing so, affirms the presence and necessity of the real world. But he also brings in the other transcendental in question: beauty. For Pissarro, beauty rests upon the real. We access this beauty through interpretation, through the ideal.

This is the balance I was seeking—not pitting beauty against the real, but accessing one through the other. And this movement can go both ways. We need to experience beauty through truth, and we also need to experience truth through beauty.

Fittingly, this balance is reflected in both the Impressionist and Romanticist movements. In these styles, the artist is no longer solely attempting to represent reality as it strictly appears, but is instead combining elements of the real with the subjective human experience. This is why Romanticists often painted sprawling, mountainous landscapes in which the scale of the cliffs were exaggerated and the size of the human figure understated. This was to evoke the overwhelming sense of awe they felt when encountering the mountains themselves. You can see this effect in the work of Johan Christian Dahl, pictured below.

View from Stalheim - Johan Christian Dahl 1842

The artistic view of the impressionists and romanticists is the same view of life I desire to have. One which acknowledges that beauty exists everywhere and is attached to the real. So, as Tyler and I walked out of the museum, back into the world, I realized that the answer I was seeking wasn’t just an artistic insight, but a metaphysical one. The real and the ideal are not in competition; they are two lenses through which we perceive the same Divine reality. We aren’t in need of one more than the other. We need God, and both beauty and truth are co-conspirators in His revelation.

For me, Pissarro was right, more than he even knew: everything is beautiful, if only we learn to interpret. And the one who learns to interpret well is the one who sees both the real and the ideal as gifts—given to draw us upward, through the visible, toward the invisible God.

1. A wild episode on The Rest is History podcast - Death in the Amazon

2. There are some exceptions to this of course. For example, Caravaggio’s use of heavy shadow and light is a form of leaning into the ideal to convey a truth

3. I want to be clear, I am not saying all abstract and modern art should be thrown into a dumpster. While I don’t prefer it, I have seen some pieces that have struck me as a beautiful combination of colors. I think because no matter how hard they try, these artists cannot completely severe themselves from the real.