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«Никогда художник не окунал так грубо свою кисть в гной и кровавые трещины ран» : Гюисманс, Грюневальд и смерть Прекрасного
In the early 16th century, the German painter Matthias Grünewald created an innovative depiction of the Crucifixion, in which Christ’s body was presented with hideous, bloody wounds, ulcers, and pus, and degraded to the state of formless flesh, in shocking detail. The work went unnoticed until the decadent writer Joris-Karl Huysmans offered an equally shocking description and interpretation of it in the late 19th century in his novel “Là-bas”. According to Huysmans, Grünewald had discovered a new type of spirituality, a “spiritual naturalism,” which in the novel grows out of the complex relationship between decadence and naturalism; also, he deems Grünewald’s Christ as the truest, most in keeping with the Christ of the early Christians. Huysmans rejects earlier depictions of Christ because of their “beauty” and their relevance to the “rich” classes of society. Huysmans's treatment makes serious claims in the field of philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of body. To understand it from a historical-philosophical perspective, one must answer the following questions: How exactly does the “ugly” Christ contrast with his visual predecessors? Why could “spiritual naturalism” only appear in the context of the Crucifixion? In search of answers, we take a path back through the history of philosophy, through Hegel to Plato and his aesthetics, and especially his ideas about the possibility of the Beautiful in the visible world. It is concluded that Huysmans is the author of a crucial philosopheme on the role of the ugly in the history of ideas, which in our historical and philosophical conceptual analysis we designate as the death of the Beautiful. This philosopheme became possible only on the basis of decadence and its ennui, and it brings to a logical conclusion both the history of beauty and decadence itself. It is concluded that Grünewald and Huysmans are thus involved in the “triumph” of the ugly, which, according to authoritative opinions, characterizes our era.