Awards
2008 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Elizabeth C. Mansfield, Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis
Elizabeth C. Mansfield
Elizabeth C. Mansfield’s Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) is an ambitious and innovative book, covering a wide chronological range of material on the subject of creating beauty.
Mansfield traces development and change in the concept of beauty as outlined by Cicero in the famous and ever-provocative story of Zeuxis painting a picture of a perfect beauty for the people of Kroton by choosing five of their most beautiful virgins and combining their best features into a single work. She investigates the ways in which that story has been interpreted over the centuries in the visual arts, in literature, and in history. She covers everything from traditional historical narratives to radical contemporary approaches, considering the full range of the subject, from the classical to the contemporary. Mansfield makes fascinating connections to the Zeuxis myth by introducing unexpected topics, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Pablo Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, and the twenty-first-century plastic-surgery performances of Orlan.
Mansfield approaches her subject not only from the visually literate perspective of an art historian, but also from other angles: philosophical, literary, psychoanalytical, feminist, and philological. Her conclusion is that the many retellings of the Zeuxis myth reveal a persistent anxiety about the value of nature as a model for the ideal, as well as an interpretation of the male who creates and the female who is created. Mansfield finds that this legend “encodes a disguised history of Western art, an unconscious record of the West’s reliance on mimetic representation as a vehicle for social and metaphysical solace.”
Elizabeth C. Mansfield, Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis (2007)
Mansfield’s writing is refreshing for its breadth, for its clarity, for its freedom from jargon, and for its accessibility. Her highly original analysis of her subject is intellectually stimulating to readers at all levels with interests ranging from archaeology to art history, from philosophy to literature, from art criticism to gender studies.
This book is a fascinating and convincing treatment of the “dialogue between the real and ideal,” with implications for pictorial traditions beyond those of the Western world. Too Beautiful to Picture is an ideal introduction—or a provocative centerpiece—for university courses in classics, art, theory, aesthetics, and philosophy on the subject of myth and mimesis.
Jury: Carol Mattusch, George Mason University, chair; Susan Platt, independent scholar, Seattle; Perri Lee Roberts, University of Miami; Marianna Shreve Simpson, Johns Hopkins University; David M. Sokol, University of Illinois, Chicago.
