The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture XXIV

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture XXIII

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture XXII

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture XXI

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture XX

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture XIX

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture XVIII

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture XVII

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture XVI

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture XV

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture XIV

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture XIII

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture XII

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture XI

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture X

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture IX

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture VIII

Health of the soul.

... We should think of the most authoritative part of our

soul as a guardian spirit given to each of us by god, living in

the summit of our body, which can properly be said to lift us

from the earth towards our home in heaven, as if we were a

heavenly and not an earthbound plant. For where the soul first

grew into being, from there our divine part attaches us by

the head to heaven, like a plant by its roots, and keeps our 

body upright. If therefore a man's attention and effort have been

centred on appetite and ambition, all his opinions are bound to

have become mortal, and he can hardly fail, in so far as it is

possible, to become entirely mortal, as it is the mortal part that

he has increased. But a man who has given his heart to learning

and true wisdom and exercised that part of himself is surely

bound, if he attains to truth, to have immortal and divine 

thoughts, and cannot fail to participate in immortality as fully

as is possible for human nature; and because he has always

looked after the divine element in himself and kept his guardian

spirit in good order he, above all men, must be happy. There is

of course only one way to look after anything and that is to

give it its proper nourishment and motions. And the motions

that are akin to the divine in us are the thoughts and revolutions 

of the universe. We should each therefore attend to these

motions and by learning thoroughly about the harmonies and

revolutions of the universe repair the damage done to the

circuits in our head in connection with our coming into being,

and so restore our understanding, in accordance with its 

original nature, to its likeness with the object of understanding.

When that is done we shall have achieved the goal set us by 

the gods, the life that is best for this present time and for all time

to come.

Timaeus

Plato

(Translated by Desmond Lee)

Sculpture in progress

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture VII

... The first are afraid of invalidating Beauty dynamically- that is, as

an operative power- by separating what is yet combined in the feeling;

the others are afraid of invalidating Beauty logically- that is, as a concept-

by bringing together what is yet separate in the understanding. The 

former want to think of Beauty as it operates; the latter want to have it

operate as thought. Both must therefore miss the truth, the former 

because they seek to rival infinite Nature with their limited intellectual

capacity, the latter because they are trying to restrict infinite Nature to 

their own intellectual laws. The first are afraid of robbing Beauty of its

freedom by analysing it too closely; the others are afraid of destroying 

the definiteness of its conception by combining it too boldly. But 

the former do not reflect that the freedom in which they quite rightly 

place the essence of Beauty is not lawlessness but harmony of laws,

not arbitrariness but the utmost inner necessity; the latter do not reflect

that the definiteness which they equally rightly demand of Beauty

consists not in the exclusion of certain realities but in the absolute 

inclusion of them all, so that it is therefore not restriction but infinity. 

We shall avoid the rocks upon which they both of them founder if we 

start from the two elements into which Beauty is divided for the intellect, 

and then later ascend to the pure aesthetic unity through which she 

works upon the perceptions, and in which both those conditions 

completely disappear.

Eighteenth Letter

On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Friedrich Schiller

(Translated by Reginald Snell)

Sculpture in progress

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture VI

... Our second business, then, is to make this combination perfect,

to accomplish it so purely and completely that both conditions

entirely disappear in a third, and no trace of the division remains

behind in the whole; otherwise we are isolating and not uniting 

them. All the disputes that have ever prevailed in the philosophical 

world, and still prevail to some extent nowadays, about the conception 

of Beauty, have the single origin that people either began the enquiry

without the requisite strictness of discrimination, or else did not carry

it through to a completely pure combination. Those philosophers who

blindly trust the guidance of their feelings in considering the subject 

can arrive at no concept of Beauty, because they distinguish nothing  

individual in the totality of the sensuous impression. The others, 
who take the intellect as their exclusive guide, can never arrive at a 
concept of Beauty, because they never see in its totality anything
but the parts, and spirit and matter remain, even in completest union,
for ever separate to them.






Eighteenth Letter
On the Aesthetic Education of Man
Friedrich Schiller
(Translated by Reginald Snell)






Sculpture in progress

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture V

... It is really a question of two utterly different operations,

which in this enquiry must necessarily support each other.

Beauty, it is said, links together two conditions which are

opposed to each other and can never become one. It is

from this opposition that we must start; we must comprehend

and recognize it in its whole purity and strictness, so that

the two conditions are separated in the most definite way;

otherwise we are mixing but not uniting them. Secondly, 

it is said that Beauty combines those two opposite conditions, 

and thus removes the opposition. But since both conditions

remain eternally opposed to one another, they can only be

combined by cancellation.

Eighteenth Letter

On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Friedrich Schiller

(Translated by Reginald Snell)

Sculpture in progress

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture IV

... How are we to remove this contradiction?

Beauty combines the two opposite conditions of perceiving

and thinking, and yet there is no possible mean between the

two of them. The one is made certain through experience,

the other directly through reason.

This is the precise point to which the whole question

concerning Beauty is leading; and if we succeed in solving

this question satisfactorily we have at the same time the

clue which will lead us through the whole labyrinth of

aesthetics.

Eighteenth Letter 

On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Friedrich Schiller

(Translated by Reginald Snell)

Sculpture in progress

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture III

... It appears to follow from this that a condition must exist

midway between matter and form, between passivity and

activity, and that Beauty transports us into this intermediate

condition. This is the conception of Beauty that the majority

of people actually form for themselves, as soon as they begin

to reflect on her workings, and all experiences do point that 

way. But on the other hand nothing is more inconsistent and

contradictory than such a conception, since the distance

between matter and form, between passivity and activity,

between sensation and thought, is infinite, and the two 

cannot conceivably be reconciled. 

Eighteenth Letter

On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Friedrich Schiller

(Translated by Reginald Snell)

Sculpture in progress

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture II

Eighteenth Letter


THROUGH Beauty the sensuous man is led to form and to
thought; through Beauty the spiritual man is brought back 
to matter and restored to the world of sense.


On the Aesthetic Education of Man
Friedrich Schiller
(translated by Reginald Snell)




Sculpture in progress

The Garden of Earthly Delights-sculpture

Normal growth and decay; natural death.

Decline is caused by excess of wastage over intake, growth by

the opposite. And when the structure of the entire creature is

young, and the triangles of its constituent elements are new,

like a ship straight from the stocks, they are locked firmly

together, though the consistency of the whole aggregate is soft,

having been recently formed of marrow and fed on milk. So

the triangles composing the food and drink which the structure

takes into itself from the outside are older and weaker than

those in itself, which are new, and it breaks them up and

absorbs them, and so it makes the animal big by nourishing it 

on many similar triangles. But when the root of the triangles is

loosened by fighting numerous combats with many opponents

over a long period of time, they can no longer cut up into

their own likeness the triangles of the food taken in, but are

themselves easily broken up by the newcomers; and in the

process every creature fails and declines into the condition

which we call 'old age'. Finally, when the bonds of the triangles

in the marrow fail and part under stress, the bonds of the

soul are also loosened; and when this happens in the course of

nature the soul departs gladly- for everything that takes place

naturally is pleasant, whereas what is contrary to nature is

painful. So a death by disease or injury is painful and forced,

but one that brings life to its natural close by old age is of all

deaths least distressing and brings pleasure rather than pain.

Timaeus

Plato

(translated by Desmond Lee)

Sculpture in progress

The Dance of Life XVIII

The Dance of Life XVII

The Dance of Life XVI

The Dance of Life XV

The Dance of Life XIV

The Dance of Life XIII