My interest in this essay is an investigation of beauty in the transformation of standards of value. This requires that I address not simply an aesthetics of beauty—the sensuous experience common to the judgment that something is beautiful—but a poetics of beauty, in the sense that beauty is not merely a passive reflection of experience, but an active bringing forth. Contemporary discussions of beauty in art, if the question is addressed at all (artists understandably weary at the insistence that art be “beautiful” in traditional or accepted standards of the time) tend, as do other such questions, to be technical discussions of style or production. My approach is to return to a simpler notion of beauty, away from techne and technique, to Sophia and wisdom—to the way in which beauty is transformative in the life of a person or culture.