Aesthetics in Digital Photography

Appendix 1A Brief Review of Aesthetics

“At any time, and for an infinite number of subjects,what some call Beautiful others refuse to acknowledge as such; thus, it seems we must conclude from this either that humans do not have the same idea of Beauty, or that their Senses resemble each other much less than was believed, making them perceive objects very differently.

Jean-Pierre DE CROUSAZ (1985 [1715–1754])

To complement Chapter 1, let us look at how Beauty was regarded from Antiquity onwards, to see how various conceptions of Beauty were first classified as “objectivist” and then progressively included subjective concepts. In Panofsky (1989) and Tatarkiewicz (1970), we can find detailed descriptions of the change summarized here.

A1.1. Aesthetics in the ancient world: objectivism ruled supreme

A1.1.1. Aesthetics in the classical Greek period: Hellenic Greek

The classical Athenian period (fifth and fourth centuries BCE¹) carried all the earliest references to aesthetics. In this period, Beauty was endowed with virtues that were aesthetic and moral. It was the product of three sources: “the material, provided by nature, knowledge, the fruit of tradition, and the work, given by the artisan”². The concept of creation was almost completely absent here, and faithfully following tradition was dominant. Tradition was expressed by the “canons”, which fixed precise shapes for the object (Figure A1.1). Canons were most often inspired from distant religious and liturgical sources, ...