Beauty and Ugliness

Beatrice Loayza | 4Columns | 8th May 2026

Renaissance artists had a fixation with beauty. Having inherited the ancient Greek view that beauty arose from symmetry and geometry, they added to it by introducing anatomical realism. Further, they thought that outward beauty expressed inner virtue. Of course, there was also a fascination with ugliness, which was deemed to manifest absence – an absence of virtue,  a disordered soul. Modern values eclipse these views; we prioritise the interesting; “strange faces are infinitely more alluring”.