Quotes on "Beauty" from the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics: Part 1

Encyclopedia of Aesthetics: 4-volume Set (Hardcover)
by Michael Kelly (Editor)

Aristotle largely departed from the infinite, immeasurable, and supreme sense of beauty found in his predecessors, especially Plato, and restricted beauty to size, order, and proportion, to harmony and symmetry on the one hand, to function, aptness, use, fulfillment of a purpose on the other. He associated beauty predominantly with form, understood in terms of two related spheres of meaning: one related to figure, shape, appearance, and apprehension; the other related to function, excellence, and utility. More perhaps than any other distinction central to Aristotle's though is that beauty measured, always more or less. Things are more or less beautiful as they are more or less orderly, fulfill their formal purposes more perfectly, give more or less pleasure in their apprehension. Aristotle represents the dominant European tradition of ideas of beauty through the Renaissance, still present today in Thomist thought, linking beauty with order and with pleasure and its apprehension."