Beautiful

As is natural, in Leopardi’s works the “beautiful” refers to two distinct ambits: that relative to literature and in particular poetry, and that relative to female comeliness. Apart the Zibaldone, his reflections on the “beautiful” in literature are in particular entrusted to his poetic writings against Romanticism; his considerations on female comeliness are instead considerable above all in his autobiographical works, in some letters and obviously in the lyrics of the Canti (beautiful are Silvia and Nerina, most beautiful are the “simulacra” of the two dead young girls in the “sepolcrali” or sepulchral poems, and very beautiful is also Aspasia: “skilled / enticer”, “very beautiful, / in my opinion, such that you are better than all others”).

In the  Zibaldone we find some of both:

The object of the Fine Arts “is not the beautiful but the Truth” [2] – it is relative, and dependent upon “convenience” [8-9, 154-6, 187, 208, 1259, 1084-5, 1098, 1404-11, 2513] – “the eternal fount for what is great (as for what is beautiful) are writers” [340] – “the natural and maximum fount of the beautiful” [693, 1252-3] – the idea of the beautiful is formed through inurement,

Also in art [1183-201, 1212-3, 1538-9, 1718, 1832-3, 3231] – “beautiful literature, and poetry the most” have as their object the beautiful, “which is like as to say the false, because truth (thus wills the sad fate of man) was never beautiful” [1228-9] – judgements on physical beauty [1356, 3983-4, 3988] – “the principle of the fine arts etc. etc. is to be recognised in nature, and not the beautiful” [1411-5] – the idea of the beautiful is tied to regularity [1539-40] – “Withholding from study all that is beautiful (as we do nowadays), extinguishing style and literature, and the senses of value and pleasure they possess ... we remove from studies a most important part, perhaps the most, of the pleasure they give  ... one will thus perform a great disservice, true damage (and not mediocre by God) to humanity” [4366].