God is the true beauty behind every created beauty. They are there to tell us what God is like, not us.
Take art as an example. The degree to which human art expresses God’s beauty is the degree to which God delights in it (and so should we). This is why God the Father rejoices over Jesus with “This is My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” Jesus is the exact representation of God’s being, the perfect mirror eternally showing who is the fairest of them all. God’s kind of beauty is His beauty.
The world, the Word, and His Son are the only perfect reflections. Since we only see His beauty “imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror” (1 Cor. 13:12, NLT), our artistic expressions and interpretations lack clarity and precision. Yet we can express, appreciate, and enjoy what we know about God.
Beautiful art will reflect the excellence, goodness, harmonies, virtue, and redemptive glory of God. In this, beauty is in the eye of the Beholder as long as we recognize God as the Beholder of all beauty.
~Steve DeWitt; Interview With Trevin Wax (2012) on Eyes Wide Open
