One of the fullest satisfactions of old age is that your children can have become, in spite of you and almost imperceptibly, your peers. Fully grown, easily your equal with regard to most of the nuances of maturity and experience, and your superior on any number of subjects, not least technology, they populate your circle with a sensibility different from your own, and at the same time, trust-worthily. Furthermore, they have become among your longest and most intimate friends—if you’re lucky—which I am. They can even be traveled with.

Visiting family in Tempe, Arizona last month, my daughter and I ran across some images of old men in the Phoenix Art Museum and the ASU Ceramics Research Center and Archives. Nudes, naked old men. Unlike paintings from the Old Masters, Eric Fischl, an old but contemporary master, exhibited some rather unflattering depictions that raised the perennial question: Are Truth and Beauty equivalents? (I say “No,” but hear Keats out.) 

“In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

When old age shall this generation waste,

                Thou [the urn, remember] shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

         "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

In Tempe, AZ, here is a half-naked Fischl, Study for Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man. Now, my daughter can credit the  subject matter of “old dudes” as “totally fine,” the poses “interesting,” and “the painting style engaging.” Fair enough, but not Beautiful, not even merely beautiful. An interesting palette, perhaps, and brushwork, but images of naked old men, honest images, are not beautiful. Which is not to say that there is not some truth, even much truth—along with humor and irreverence and, alas, pathos. But the aged bodies of undraped old men are not beautiful and cannot, I fear, be made so. No kouros, here, no Doryphorous, no charioteer, no Dying Gaul.

An old face, on the other hand, can be supremely, sublimely beautiful: i.e. the portrait busts of ancestral Romans. The beauty of dignitas and mortality. Old men, keep your pants and shirts on, buttoned!