Society & Culture
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right?" How many times have we heard that? But the implication that beauty is purely a subjective thing is a relatively recent notion. It comes originally from Plato, but Irish novelist Margaret Hungerford may have coined the phrase in the 19th century...but what about the Medieval notions of beauty? Those are pre-modern, pre-Romantic, and quite profound. In this shorter-than-usual podcast, Director Hodges investigates some of the ways beauty has been understood in the long past. The builders of the great cathedrals of the 12th and 13th centuries had some specific ideas about number, light, and symbol that were specially relevant in their day, as they still held that there is an invisible spiritual realm that could be reflected to us in materials like stone, light, music, and space. Perhaps they are still relevant today?