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1. Elaine Scarry’s wonderful book “On Beauty and Being Just” is one of the few contemporary books that takes “beauty” as a serious subject.   A passage:

“It sometimes seems that a special problem arises for beauty once the realm of the sacred is no longer believed in or aspired to.  If a beautiful young girl, or a small bird….has the metaphysical  behind it, that realm verifies the weight and attention we give confer on [them]…But if the metaphysical realm has vanished, one may feel bereft not only because of the giant deficit left by the vacant realm but because the girl, bird…now seem unable in their solitude to justify or account for the weight of their own beauty.”

2. From Freud’s “Moses of Michelangelo:” 

(His attempt to understand the power of great art.)

“I do not mean that connoissuers and lovers of art find no words with which to praise such objects to us.  They are eloquent enough, it seems to me.  But usually in the presence of a great work of art each says something different than the other; and none of them says anything that solves the problem for the unpretending audience.  In my opinion, what grips us so powerfully can only be the artist’s intention, in so far as he has succeeded in expressing it  in his work and getting us to understand it.  I realize that this cannot be merely a matter of intellectual comprehension; what he aims at is to awaken the same emotional attitude, the same mental constellation as that which in him produced the impetus to create.   But why should the artist’s intention not be capable of being communicated in words, like any other fact of mental life?”