The Graceful Harmonist (OEST)

Your sense of beauty

There are works in which a quiet sweetness drifts through orderly form. What draws you is not merely that something is well arranged, but the moment a refined softness enters it as well. Meeting work built in flawless proportion, firmly inheriting the practice of antiquity and the classical school, you feel a deep calm. You carry an ease that opens brightly toward the people around you, and you naturally avoid work that overpowers through violent disorder. You stop before a transparent resonance of sound, or a smooth surface that betrays no brushstroke. The ideal harmony that appears when calculated order and cultivated grace become one is something you trust completely.

What moves you

Your heart lifts in a fine-sounding hall as the orchestra's lines cross in perfect order and an unclouded resonance fills the space. So does the experience of standing before a painting where figures with smooth skin are set inside a perfect triangle.

The beauty you tend to overlook

You tend to avoid uneven forms that break the mold and the disorder of raw feeling, but there is value there you should not overlook. The unguarded heat of an unbalanced composition or an imperfect line will bring new stimulus to your usual quiet gaze.

The composer in tune with you: Felix Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn revived Bach's St Matthew Passion in performance in 1829, and in 1843 founded the Leipzig Conservatory, passing classical practice on to those who came after him. As in the concert overture A Midsummer Night's Dream, Op. 21, his transparent woodwind and strings cross without the slightest disorder — a sound that resonates deeply with your love of an ideal harmony that never breaks.

The painter who resonates with you: William Bouguereau

Bouguereau, elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1876, held to a smooth finish that erased every trace of the brush. In The Birth of Venus (1879), a crowd of figures is arranged within a triangular composition on the basis of exact anatomical knowledge. A surface that refuses disorder and renders porcelain skin and classical beauty resonates with your sense of refinement.

What links the two

There is no historical connection between the two. But they share a quality: faithfully inheriting the classical practice of earlier masters, and polishing, inside the form, a perfect harmony and grace from which all disorder has been removed.

Three paintings for you

The Birth of Venus

William Bouguereau

Dante and Virgil

William Bouguereau