Editing Beauty (section)

===Age of Reason===
[[File:Sandro_Botticelli_-_La_nascita_di_Venere_-_Google_Art_Project_-_edited.jpg|left|thumb|400x400px|''[[The Birth of Venus]]'' ({{circa}} 1485) by [[Sandro Botticelli]].<ref>{{citation |last=Ames-Lewis |first=Francis |date=2000 |title=The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FrcsXlpD6NIC&q=Botticelli+Apelles+Birth+of+Venus&pg=PA194 |location=New Haven, Connecticut |publisher=Yale University Press |isbn=0-300-09295-4 |page=194}}</ref> The goddess [[Venus (mythology)|Venus]] ([[Aphrodite]]) is the classical personification of beauty.]]
The [[Age of Enlightenment|Age of Reason]] saw a rise in an interest in beauty as a philosophical subject. For example, Scottish philosopher [[Francis Hutcheson (philosopher)|Francis Hutcheson]] argued that beauty is "[[unity in variety]] and variety in unity".<ref>{{cite book|author=Francis Hutcheson|title=An Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue: In Two Treatises|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=XF4uAAAAYAAJ|year=1726|publisher=J. Darby|isbn=9780598982698|access-date=June 14, 2020|archive-date=February 3, 2023|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230203045639/https://books.google.com/books?id=XF4uAAAAYAAJ|url-status=live}}</ref> He wrote that beauty was neither purely subjective nor purely objective—it could be understood not as "any Quality suppos'd to be in the Object, which should of itself be beautiful, without relation to any Mind which perceives it: For Beauty, like other Names of sensible Ideas, properly denotes the ''Perception'' of some mind; ... however we generally imagine that there is something in the Object just like our Perception."<ref>Kennick, William Elmer (1979). ''Art and Philosophy: Readings in Aesthetics; 2nd ed.'' New York: St. Martin's Press. p. 421. {{ISBN|0312053916}}.</ref>

[[Immanuel Kant]] believed that there could be no "universal criterion of the beautiful" and that the experience of beauty is subjective, but that an object is judged to be beautiful when it seems to display "purposiveness"; that is, when its form is perceived to have the character of a thing designed according to some principle and fitted for a purpose.<ref>Kennick, William Elmer (1979). ''Art and Philosophy: Readings in Aesthetics; 2nd ed.'' New York: St. Martin's Press. pp. 482–483. {{ISBN|0312053916}}.</ref> He distinguished "free beauty" from "merely adherent beauty", explaining that "the first presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be; the second does presuppose such a concept and the perfection of the object in accordance therewith."<ref name="Kennick_517">Kennick, William Elmer (1979). ''Art and Philosophy: Readings in Aesthetics; 2nd ed.'' New York: St. Martin's Press. p. 517. {{ISBN|0312053916}}.</ref> By this definition, free beauty is found in seashells and wordless music; adherent beauty in buildings and the human body.<ref name="Kennick_517"/>

The Romantic poets, too, became highly concerned with the [[nature (philosophy)|nature]] of beauty, with [[John Keats]] arguing in ''Ode on a Grecian Urn'' that:

:  Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all
:  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.