Lima, Peru (with self-portrait)

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Much that is said about beauty and its importance in our lives ignores the minimal beauty of an unpretentious street, a nice pair of shoes or a tasteful piece of wrapping paper, as though these things belonged to a different order of value from a church by Bramante or a Shakespeare sonnet.  Yet these minimal beauties are far more important to our daily lives, and far more intricately involved in our own rational decisions, than the great works which (if we are lucky) occupy our leisure hours.  They are part of the context in which we live our lives, and our desire for harmony, fittingness and civility expressed and confirmed in them.  Moreover, the great works of architecture often depend for their beauty on the humble context that these lesser beauties provide.  Longhena’s church on the Grand Canal would lose its confident and invocatory presence, were the modest buildings which nestle in its shadow to be replaced with cast-concrete office blocks, of the kind that ruin the aspect of St.  Paul’s.

Beauty:  A Very Short Introduction, by Roger Scruton

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