Decoupling beauty and truth: Lichtwark’s Education of the Eye
by John Hartley “Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible.” Noted the Russian novelist Fydor Dostoevsky, “God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.” When 18th century Scholars used anthropology, physiognomy, and phrenology to apportion value according to race and beauty, clearly something has gone terribly wrong. Yet…