What Makes a Work of Genius “Genius”?
This Seneca quote contains a great answer to this question
“There is a sequence about the creative process, and a work of genius is a synthesis of its individual features from which nothing can be subtracted without disaster.” Seneca the Younger, in Letters from a Stoic
The feeling that “This piece is complete” is exactly the feeling you get when you behold a work of genius. Because there’s nothing superfluous about it, you can’t take away the smallest part. By the same token, adding to it would just detract from it. The Taj Mahal and Micheangelo’s David come to mind when thinking of genius works of art.
I so love this sentence from Letters from a Stoic — letter XXXIII to be precise — because it touches upon the idea of beauty and perfection.
Other thinkers from various fields have conveyed the same notion, just with different words and in different contexts.
For instance, in his fascination book, The Gene: An Intimate History, Siddhartha Mukherjee points out, “A whole assembled from the sum of the parts is different from the whole before it was broken down into parts.”
He’s referring, of course, to the marvel that is the gene, a creation of Nature (or a Higher Power if you will). The parts are a phosphate, a sugar…
