What is Artistic Beauty?

From the beginning of time, men and women have scrutinized, categorized, and

compared components of their surroundings in an attempt to better understand their world. In

the Bible's Genesis account, Adam, seemingly in appreciation of Eve's uniqueness and beauty,

poetically proclaims her, "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman,

for she was taken out of man."[Gen. 2:23 NIV] Much later, artists, writers, and philosophers have

sought to understand beauty, balance, and perfection -- the sublime. Their struggle to define

perfection and to set standards of beauty was termed aesthetics or, "the science of the beautiful,"

in 1753 by German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Baumgarten was considered

the first modern philosopher to approach the question of beauty systematically, introducing the

term aesthetics and defining the experience of beauty as the sensory recognition of perfection.

[Danto 1]. The works of his contemporary, Immanuel Kant, express the notion that beautiful

objects are without a specific purpose and that judgments of beauty

cause him to feel mournful, or lull him to sleep. In Republic, Plato "went so far as to banish

beauty and perfection is nearly impossible. Ultimately, beauty is "in the eye of the beholder."

Wilson, Kay; Walkup, Nancy; McCarter, Bill. "Aesthetics: Questioning the Nature of

combination of meaningful lyrics in addition to musical sounds, creates a mood. Some music

building were not [meant] to be a church. A figure could be embellished with all sorts of

In the world of physical art, such as sculpting and painting, traditional aesthetics of the

Some common words found in the essay are:
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