In search of beauty. Whether it be in art, nature or the cave of Plato’s ideas, it is driven by a desire for the absolute, for a moment torn from the eternal present, which flows unwaveringly in the divine dimension. At the end of the 15th century, a number of artists unwittingly discovered the forgotten ruins of Nero’s Domus Aurea.
One of them fell more in love with his decorative schemes than the others and reintroduced them into places that had been designed from an antiquarian perspective, capturing ancient art as an Aurean model. It was he, the Prince of the Pantheon, Raphael.
As we know, however, the human dimension is no friend of beauty. The native of Urbino personified the love of antiquity that was a feature of the Renaissance, to the point where he encouraged a work of reconstruction and restoration in a letter to Pope Leo X in which he expressed his awareness and regret that the disappearance of classical art was caused by neglect, and not by the barbarian invasions alone.
He enclosed a collection of drawings of Imperial Rome, an archaeological restoration project in the true sense of the word and a precursor of the plans that would not be developed until several centuries later but were never implemented.
After all, beauty succumbs to the passing of time, something Raphael Sanzio paints well with his words: “Time is a vindictive bandit to steal the beauty of our former selves.”
Confined in the splendour of her thirty-six years, the protagonist of this Lambda issue has remained forever beautiful and transformed into an idea of femininity and charm that has not been tarnished by time.
Her unmistakable walk, her enchanting velvety voice, her seductive glance, which eschewed melancholy but betrayed it when she was not smiling, and the artfully darkened mole, like a mouche on the faces of women at the French Court.
“I just want to be wonderful,” she said. She was because no actress has been imitated as much as Marilyn Monroe in her costumes designed by William Travilla: from Madonna in “Material Girl” to Margot Robbie in “Birds of Prey,” the race to pay tribute to her has never ceased since she died in her house in Los Angeles on that August day. Andy Warhol was the first person to do so when he dedicated the screen prints that made him famous to her.
Beauty, like time and space, is an idea that never gets old. “All beautiful things belong to the same age,” to quote Oscar Wilde.
Everything can be found there, from antiquities to the aristocratic and Bohemian circles in Budapest, where art, luxury and culture all mingled, from Hollywood stardust to balls in Monaco and the magic of fairytales, and finally to the state of biopsychological and social well-being that goes beyond the dualism of the body and the mind.
Article edited by Claudia Chiari
Celebre Magazine World Editorial Director