There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness…

The sentence comes from “Of Beauty”, one of the shorter Essays. Bacon has been observing that very beautiful people are seldom of great virtue, “as if nature were rather busy not to err, than in labor to produce excellency”, and that the best part of beauty is the one “which a picture cannot express”. Then comes the line, and Bacon asks whether Apelles or Dürer was the greater “trifler”, one making a face by geometrical proportions, the other by taking the best parts of several faces: such faces would please nobody but the painter, since a better face than ever was can be made only “by a kind of felicity”, not by rule.

Bacon published his Essays in three growing editions, in 1597, 1612 and 1625; “Of Beauty” belongs to the second. Lord Chancellor until his fall in 1621, he wrote as a man of the world.

The line was taken up by Edgar Allan Poe, who quotes it in “Ligeia” with “exquisite beauty” for “excellent beauty”, a version now as common as the original.

Essays, “Of Beauty”, 1625

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