| Popis: |
A beautiful body was considered evidence of moral purity: to be as white as alabaster or marble was seen as a sign of spiritual purity. Proper proportions silenced the call for spirit and soul in a person. In view of the later developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it would have been most fitting to stress the orandum est ut sit: one ought to beseech the gods that in spite of the body’s health a healthy soul and a healthy spirit may find room. The use of Juvenal’s phrase was a particularly malicious distortion, because he never intended to assert the nonsensical notion that a healthy body posits a healthy soul and vice versa. The concept of kalokagathia, which German Classicism inherited from the Enlightenment and then developed further, was already turning into a cult of the physical in the nineteenth century. |
