The dangers associated with the sound of beauty are all too apparent in one of the earliest texts in the Western literary canon. On his way back from the Trojan war Odysseus is able to hear one of the most famous sounds of beauty in literature: the song of the sirens. Unlike the unfortunate sailors who had gone before him, however, cunning Odysseus is prepared. Earlier in the story, Circe had given him a detailed warning about the trials to come.

The wise Odysseus, famed for his cunning, obeys these instructions to the letter and gets to hear the song of the sirens in safety. Unlike every traveller who had gone before him, Odysseus experiences the sound of irresistibly enticing beauty and lives to tell the tale.

I find myself in something of a quandary, not only because of the essential differences between the Spanish and English languages but also because writing is not, and never has been, the natural mode of expression for a painter, and I am no exception to the rule. My translator, moreover, has had to cope with my personal linguistic quirks, perhaps a trifle baroque, and this has been a further source of complication. You are, therefore, regretfully forewarned. I shall do everything in my power to convey to you as accurately as possible my feelings, rather than ideas, concerning ‘beauty and the grotesque’.

Despite all the obstacles, and believing as I do that what really counts is communication, whether by means of words or signs, I think that the best thing I can do, to start with, is to tell you something of my personal experience as an artist: that is to say, of the insatiable curiosity that has driven me all my life to try my hand, albeit timidly, at other disciplines. These disciplines have turned out to be complementary to my principal activity as a painter: engraving, the illustration of literary texts, the production of sets for theatre, and sculpture. To conclude this preamble, I must insist that I am not writing as a specialist in beauty, aesthetics or semiotics. To pose as such would be to indulge in impersonation, hypocrisy and pedantry, all of which vices I detest. As for my views on the ‘ugly’ or ‘the grotesque’, I hope that they will become clear later in my comments on their paradoxical relation to beauty.

It is hard to admit, but even talking about beauty is a challenge to the present status quo, as the subject of beauty, which was earlier so urgent and widely discussed (even if it was in an acutely negative context, as, for example, in the era of modernism) and became the basis of an entire discipline – aesthetics – has lost its former popularity. The subject of beauty became unfashionable, even a sign of aesthetic (and political) retrogression. Why did this happen? There was, of course, a tradition, formulated back in the modernist era that linked beauty to the past, and therefore considered an interest in it to be a manifestation of obscurantism. However, another reason that is much later and much more acutely felt by us today is that beauty was inextricably linked to the terrible totalitarian experience of the twentieth century.

This is why many consider it fundamentally blasphemous to use positive aesthetic categories (and the most hallowed among them, beauty) in the description of totalitarian cultures. Poetry, and beauty right along with it, is impossible after Auschwitz. It seems even more impossible, so to speak, during Auschwitz. And was it not right of Umberto Eco simply to omit these dark alleyways of twentieth-century history from his landmark anthology On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea – which is neither a history of art nor a history of aesthetics but rather an attempt to draw on the histories of both these disciplines to define the ideas of beauty that have informed sensibilities from classical to modern times? Starting with the aesthetic ideal of ancient Greece and ending with the beauty of machines, abstract forms, provocation and consumption, Eco does not even mention ‘totalitarian beauty’, as if the revival of Beauty and the production of totalitarian kitsch in Nazi Germany, Franco’s Spain, Stalinist Russia or Eco’s native Italy of 1932 (when he was born) never happened, or as if this painful period of history did not constitute an epicentre of Western history of the twentieth century.

Introduction

In putting together the programme for the 2011 Darwin Lectures with their theme of Beauty, the organisers aimed to begin with a lecture on Beauty and Mathematics. I believe it would indeed be possible to produce a riveting lecture or chapter strictly confined to this topic, narrowly construed. I have, however, taken the liberty of widening the discussion, to ask about the part played by considerations of elegance and aesthetics – by beauty – in humanity’s age-old quest for understanding how the world works.

This being said, the chapter nevertheless begins with a discussion of what I hope is a persuasive account of the interplay between Beauty and Truth in purely mathematical contexts. Against this background, I go on to consider the extent to which Beauty has guided, and still does guide, our advances towards understanding how the real world actually works. The chapter concludes with a brief look at the more complex landscape of intersections among beliefs and values, beauty, truth and tomorrow’s world.