The aestheti cs of evoluti on: Darwin versus Venus de’ Medici

Abstract

The article addresses the aesthetic views of Charles Darwin, which are considered within the framework of wider Victorian discussions on the nature of beauty as well as influential earlier thought on the topic. Particular emphasis is placed on 1860s–1880s fashion satire, since these visual and textual sources can yield useful insights into the cross-pollination between scientific knowledge and the popular culture of the era. The juxtaposition of a statue of Venus and a fashionable lady of the day, ubiquitous in mid-Victorian journalism and caricature, lurks across the pages of several of Darwin’s works, where it takes on a completely different meaning. While fashion satire presented Venus as a timeless ideal, which at the same time was seen as an epitome of «natural» beauty, Darwin questioned the very possibility of such an ideal. Rather than concentrated in a fixed set of bodily forms and proportions, he saw beauty in nature and in human societies as perpetually fluid and infinitely variable, as if following the logic of fashion, which many of his contemporaries blamed for corrupting classical aesthetics. Indeed, in The Descent of Man Darwin directly attacks Venus de’ Medici, pointing to the limitations of this image of perfection and proposing a radical non-human aesthetics instead.