Beauty is the combination of qualities such as shape, color or form that pleases the aesthetic senses. A beautiful object may be an animal, person, building or landscape, a work of art, or even a picture in a magazine.
Historically, the concept of beauty has fluctuated significantly across time, society and cultures. This has resulted in many controversies around what makes something beautiful, and even what is and isn’t a beautiful thing.
The most famous ancient conception of beauty is that of Plato and Aristotle, which treats it as a matter of instantiating definite proportions or relations among parts. Polykleitos’s ‘Canon,’ for example, was held up as a model of harmonious proportion that could be replicated by sculptors and students alike.
It is this idea that eighteenth-century philosophers such as Hume and Kant rejected. They saw that when we treat beauty as a subjective state, it can be lost as an objective value. In addition, they perceived that if we treated beauty merely as a matter of taste, there would be no reason to think about it as a central value or an underlying principle of any culture or people.
This approach, however, is not without its problems. It has to be distinguished from a more traditional view that sees beauty as an objective principle of nature or a universally recognizable quality.
Classical and Islamic Concepts of Beauty
The classical conception of beauty was based on the idea that things were made in the image of a divine creator, in the way that each element in a mosaic represents an elaboration of a larger pattern. This is particularly true in Islamic decorative arts and religious texts, where each piece evokes God’s limitlessness.
As the nineteenth century progressed, a growing Romantic understanding of beauty emerged in poetry and literature. For example, in Keats’ ‘Ode on the Grecian Urn’ (1820), the urn is seen as a ‘foster-child of silence and slow time’ that ‘produces the deepest reflections’. The urn, according to Keats, ‘elicits from me the deepest questions about my own mortality’.
It also evokes a ‘delightful trouble’ and ‘love’ and a ‘trembling that is all delight.’
During the twentieth century, as the world became more war-torn and violence increasingly infected human life, philosophers struggled to reconcile the idea of beauty with the complexities of modernity. This was especially evident in the works of Dadaists and Surrealists, who sought to disrupt it by tearing up traditional poetic forms and planting urinals in art shows.
A new appreciation of beauty has been found in neuroesthetics, which suggests that a person’s brain activity can affect their perception of something. For example, research by Semir Zeki at University College London has shown that when a person looks at art, the brain’s medial orbital frontal cortex gets activated. This is a part of the brain that is associated with reward and pleasure, and it has been shown that this activity is related to the appreciation of certain kinds of art.