We know that Plato has a point that may make us uncomfortable: "The polis should expel poets and keep only literature and art that serve politics." As far as the relationship between literature and reality is concerned, Plato thinks that the beauty of reality is higher than the beauty of art, and the art of poetry is untrue.
However, did Plato deny beauty? It seems that Plato did not divide people into nine categories in Federico, among which the first category is "those who love wisdom, beauty, poets and God" and the sixth category is "imitators". Plato thinks that art is an imitation of the real world, and the real world is an imitation of the rational world, so art is not real.
The Greek understanding of "art" is obviously different from today's. Poets and artists denied by Plato in The Republic are imitators and belong to the sixth category, that is, "craftsmen" who use technical knowledge to engage in productive labor.
Summarized as follows:
Federico's first-class "lovers of wisdom, lovers of beauty, admirers of poets and gods of love" are the people who have achieved the highest achievements in aesthetic education, that is, philosophers. The beauty of this kind of love is not artistic beauty, and has nothing to do with technology and skill. This kind of beauty is cognition (speculation) rather than practice.
So it can be seen that Plato's understanding of beauty is different from ours. Plato believes that beauty and truth are interlinked. He thinks that the rational world is the most real, while art is the second imitation of the rational world, which can be said to be very unreal.