The Empress Josephine had landscape, woods, and swans at Malmaison, her home with Napoleon and then without him until her death. Josephine loved flowers and gathered and imported all that were rare and beautiful, but of all flowers, she loved roses best and had nearly every known species, over 250 varieties, growing in the gardens at Malmaison. A renowned fact is that The British Navy, enemy of France during the Napoleonic Wars, issued orders for safe passage of all ships carrying flowers of import to the Empress Josephine, hence a triumph of beauty.
Triumph of Beauty: Eternal Bloom
An enduring philosophical premise is that beauty is a subjective experience rather than an objective state, a relation between the human mind and something being perceived, hence, the proverb that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, and hence, the conclusion that beauty is in the mind’s perception, not inherently in any reality outside the mind.
But what about beauty as it exists in the mind’s eye of its creator?
When an artist creates an artwork, or in less typical example, when statesmen draft law, which is a form of beauty in the sense of truth as justice, if this action is performed with intense sincerity of purpose, the intense desire to create beauty primarily for beauty’s own sake, then perhaps within that crucible of human will an absolute is manifested that is indeed beautiful by ingredient rather than by definition and not so much to the senses as to the heart in that whoever may perceive the creation, in whatever way, will experience the creative intent more than just the manifest or dimensional creation itself. In other words, it is not the “eyes,” the basic senses, that behold beauty but the heart, and it is not persons who experience beauty but the spirit of the human emotions in persons constituting all people.
This absolute is the triumph of beauty, when someone of any background, any culture, any level of ignorance or education can perceive and experience and say either I do or do not understand, it is or is not familiar, it is or is not to my taste, yes, it is beautiful.
Such is the absolute that passes through time unchanged and passes through treachery or corruption unscathed; for absolute beauty ultimately has no enemies, not because beauty is without enemies, but because the absolute of beauty is a sacred seed of ideal faith, hope, charity, potential, and power within us all, and whenever this absolute is perceived manifestly, even by those seemingly antagonistic to beauty, so too is a full bloom of truth and eternalness perceived in that absolute beauty can never be fully denied, debated, or misinterpreted, much less debased, because of its synonymy with universal quintessence. Therefore, to oppose or harm beauty so vastly inclusive and yet so intimately symbolic would always be a sacrilege to oneself.
– Mary Jo Magar –