Qāḍī Saʿīd Qummi on the Definition of Art and Beauty

It is widely held that although very few works by Muslim philosophers deal exclusively with art and beauty, nonetheless specific discussions on these subjects can be extracted from their works. This is certainly true in the case of Qāḍī Saʿīd Qummi, who gives a separate treatment of art and beauty in his commentary on the fourth chapter of the Uthulojiā (The Theology of Aristotle). The essential question of this article is: what are the meanings of beauty and art in the writings of Qāḍī Saʿīd Qummi? This article will show that Qummi divides beauty into intellectual beauty and sensible beauty, and states that sensible beauty is the manifestation of intellectual beauty, and hence all beauty is the manifestation of the Light of Lights, i.e. the Divine Reality.Along with an emphasis on the role of conjunctive and disjunctive imagination (i.e. the levels of being which are intermediary between the material realm, and dependent on and independent of the perceiver respectively) in the creation of beauty, Qāḍī Saʿīd Qummi considers that art is the manifestation the artist’s conception of beauty on sensible matter. As such he considers artistic beauty to be complementary to the beauty of nature.