IN what consists the Beauty of Visual Form? The older writers
on what we now know as the science of art did not ask themselves
this question
IN what consists the Beauty of Visual Form? The older writers
on what we now know as the science of art did not ask themselves
this question. Although we are accustomed to hear that order,
symmetry, unity in variety, was the Greek, and in particular
the Platonic, formula for beauty, we observe, on examining the
passages cited in evidence, that it is rather the moral quality
appertaining to these characteristics that determines them as
beautiful; symmetry is beautiful, because harmonious, and
inducing order and self-restraint. Aristotle”s single
pronouncement in the sense of our question is the dictum: there
is no beauty without a certain magnitude. Lessing, in his
‘Laocoon,’ really the first modern treatise in aesthetics,
discusses the excellences of painting and poetry, but deals
with visible beauty as if it were a fixed quality, understood
when referred to, like color. This is undoubtedly due to his
unconscious reference of beauty to the human form alone; a
reference which he would have denied, but which influences his
whole aesthetic theory. In speaking of a beautiful picture, for
instance, he would have meant first of all the representation
of beautiful persons in it, hardly at all that essential beauty
of the picture as painting, to which every inch of the canvas
is alike precious. It is clear to us now, however, that the
beauty of the human form is the most obscure of all possible
cases, complex in itself, and overlaid and involved as it is
with innumerable interests and motives of extra-aesthetic
character. Beauty in simple forms must be our first study;
and great credit is due to Hogarth for having propounded in
his ‘Analysis of Beauty’ the simple question,–what makes the
quality of beauty to the eye?