Nietzsche's vision of beauty

The conflict between Apollo and Dionysus , as formulated by Friedrich Nietzsche in *The Birth of Tragedy* , is one of the most fruitful keys to understanding the relationship between beauty, art, and truth. This conflict does not simply oppose two aesthetic styles, but two fundamental ways of inhabiting the world. Luchino Visconti 's film * Death in Venice * offers an exemplary cinematic illustration of this, both subtle and tragic.

Torse d'Apollon, copie romaine en marbre. Original gerc perdu, en bronze, probablement du IVᵉ siècle av. J.-C. La version romaine est conservée au Cleveland Museum of Art

As with much of classical Greek statuary, the original Greek piece no longer exists. What we see is a Roman recreation, faithful in its formal ideal but already marked by a history of losses and fragments.

For Nietzsche, Apollo represents the principle of form, measure, clarity, and distance. He embodies the necessary illusion that allows human beings to endure existence. Apollonian art is an art of mastery: it orders the chaos of reality, transforms suffering into a beautiful and stable image, and imposes a moral as well as an aesthetic restraint.

Conversely, Dionysus represents intoxication, excess, the body, desire, and the dissolution of the individual into the totality of life. Dionysian art does not seek to appease, but to make one experience life in its most intense form, including its violence and cruelty.

Copie d'un Dionysos juvénile de type hellénistique, très répandu dans l’Antiquité et abondamment repris par les Romains

In Death in Venice , Gustav von Aschenbach embodies, almost to a caricature, the Apollonian ideal. A rigorous composer and moralist of art, he defends a conception of beauty founded on discipline, restraint, and the sublimation of desire. Art, according to him, must rise above the flesh and preserve itself from any contamination by raw emotion. This position is explicitly stated in his exchanges with his musician friend, who, on the contrary, defends a more instinctive and passionate vision of creation. From these dialogues onward, Visconti places the Nietzschean conflict at the heart of the narrative.

The arrival of Tadzio disrupts this fragile balance. The young boy is not merely handsome: he is beauty incarnate, silent, carnal, irreducible to any moral conceptualization. Tadzio is a Dionysian figure not through excess, but through the sheer presence of the living body. Faced with him, Aschenbach's Apollonian armature cracks. Beauty is no longer a controlled idea, but a force that acts, unsettles, and disarms. The aesthetic gaze transforms into fascination, then into obsession.

Tragedy, in the Nietzschean sense, arises precisely from this inability to maintain the fruitful tension between Apollo and Dionysus. Aschenbach is unable to relinquish his ideal of purity, nor to fully embrace the vital force coursing through him. He remains trapped in an idealized beauty which, deprived of mediation, becomes destructive. The sick, stifling Venice, ravaged by cholera, then acts as a mirror to the character's body and mind: a world where form disintegrates under the pressure of reality.

Visconti here strikingly echoes Nietzsche: beauty is never innocent. It can save when contained by form, but it becomes deadly when denied or absolutized. Death in Venice thus shows that true art is born not from the triumph of Apollo over Dionysus, nor vice versa, but from their unstable coexistence. When this balance is broken, beauty ceases to be a promise of elevation and becomes an ordeal, sometimes a fatal one.