Ideal Beauty: A Western Phantasy

by Régis Michel, Simon Pleasance (Translator), Fronza Woods (Translator)

The concept of ideal beauty, which originates with Plato, reemerges at the end of the eighteenth century to inspire a so-called new classicism, ruling one of the richest--and most controversial--periods in French art. Here Régis Michel explores the renewed quest for ideal beauty as played out
in drawings by artists ranging from Michelangelo and Raphael to Anne-Louis Girodet, Jacques-Louis David, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. He traces the fortunes of new classicism from its genesis in Johann Joachim Winckelmann's vision of a pure Greek canon to its overthrow by the forces of
naturalism and absolutism.
For the English translation of this remarkable art-historical study, first published in French in 1989, the author has added a critical introduction that deploys the anti-Enlightenment arguments of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish to link ideal beauty to social control.

292 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2009