Aesthetics in Digital Photography

1The Legacy of Philosophers

Everyone reasons about the beautiful: it is admired in the works of nature: it is demanded in the productions of the Arts: at each moment its quality is conferred or denied; however, if one were to ask men with the surest and most exquisite taste what is its origin, its nature, the precise notion of it, its true idea, its exact definition; whether it is something absolute or relative; whether there is an essential, eternal, unchanging beautiful that would be the rule and the model for a subaltern beautiful; or whether beauty is like fashions: one would immediately see divided opinions; some declare their ignorance, while others fall into skepticism. How is it that almost all men agree that there is a beautiful; that so many among them feel strongly where it lies, yet so few know what it is?

Denis DIDEROT (1751)

The importance that philosophers have accorded the idea of Beauty, from Antiquity onwards, can be seen in the abundance of major writings arising from this concept. The “theoretical works” of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, based on the “practical works” of Apelles, Phidias and Praxiteles, provided a general framework for reflection that traveled from Greece to the Roman world and, through Medieval times, finally arrived into the Renaissance. In the Renaissance, this framework was accorded a pre-eminent place in a particularly vibrant artistic and intellectual life. In the century of the Enlightenment, the world of ideas often carried the ...