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Beauty and Art

17502000

Oxford History of Art

Elizabeth Prettejohn is Professor of Modern

and Rome in the Nineteenth Century ; author of Art at the University of Plymouth, and was

The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites , Interpreting formerly Curator of Paintings and Sculpture

Sargent , and Rossetti and His Circle ; and at Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery. She

editor of After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and

is co-author of the exhibition catalogues

Aestheticism in Victorian England and (with Dante Gabriel Rossetti , Sir Lawrence Alma-Tim Barringer) Frederic Leighton: Antiquity,

Tadema, and Imagining Rome: British Artists Renaissance, Modernity.

Oxford History of Art

Titles in the Oxford History of Art series are up-to-date, fully illustrated introductions to a wide variety of subjects written by leading experts in their field. They will appear regularly, building into an interlocking and comprehensive series. In the list below, published titles appear in bold.

WESTERN ART

Modern Architecture

Native North American

Archaic and Classical

Alan Colquhoun

Art

Greek Art

Contemporary

Janet Berlo & Ruth Phillips

Robin Osborne

Architecture

Polynesian and

Classical Art

Anthony Vidler

Micronesian Art

From Greece to Rome

Architecture in the

Adrienne Kaeppler

Mary Beard &

United States

South-East Asian Art

John Henderson

Dell Upton

John Guy

Imperial Rome and

Latin American Art

WORLD ART

Christian Triumph

Jas Elsner

Aegean Art and

WESTERN DESIGN

Architecture

Twentieth-Century Design

Early Medieval Art

Donald Preziosi &

Jonathan Woodham

Lawrence Nees

Louise Hitchcock

Design in the USA

Medieval Art

Jeffrey L. Meikle

Veronica Sekules

Early Art and Architecture

of Africa

Nineteenth-Century

Art in Renaissance Italy

Peter Garlake

Evelyn Welch

Design

African Art

Gillian Naylor

Northern European Art

John Picton

Susie Nash

Fashion

Contemporary African Art

Christopher Breward

Early Modern Art

Olu Oguibe

Nigel Llewellyn

PHOTOGRAPHY

African-American Art

The Photograph

Art in Europe 17001830

Sharon F. Patton

Graham Clarke

Matthew Craske

Nineteenth-Century

American Photography

Modern Art 18511929

American Art

Miles Orvell

Richard Brettell

Barbara Groseclose

Contemporary

After Modern Art

Twentieth-Century

Photography

19452000

American Art

David Hopkins

Erika Doss

WESTERN SCULPTURE

Contemporary Art

Australian Art

Sculpture 19001945

Penelope Curtis

WESTERN

Andrew Sayers

ARCHITECTURE

Byzantine Art

Sculpture Since 1945

Andrew Causey

Greek Architecture

Robin Cormack

David Small

Art in China

THEMES AND GENRES

Roman Architecture

Craig Clunas

Landscape and Western

Janet Delaine

East European Art

Art

Malcolm Andrews

Early Medieval

Jeremy Howard

Architecture

Ancient Egyptian Art

Portraiture

Roger Stalley

Marianne Eaton-Krauss

Shearer West

Medieval Architecture

Indian Art

Eroticism and Art

Nicola Coldstream

Partha Mitter

Alyce Mahon

Renaissance Architecture

Islamic Art

Beauty and Art

Christy Anderson

Irene Bierman

Elizabeth Prettejohn

Baroque and Rococo

Japanese Art

Women in Art

Architecture

Karen Brock

REFERENCE BOOKS

Hilary Ballon

Melanesian Art

The Art of Art History:

European Architecture

Michael OHanlon

A Critical Anthology

17501890

Donald Preziosi (ed.)

Barry Bergdoll

Mesoamerican Art

Cecelia Klein

Oxford History of Art

Beauty and Art

17502000

Elizabeth Prettejohn

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp

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and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

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Elizabeth Prettejohn 2005

First published 2005 by Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the proper permission in writing of Oxford University Press.

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This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

0192801600

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Prettejohn, Elizabeth

Beauty and art 17502000 / Elizabeth Prettejohn.

p. cm. (Oxford history of art)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. ArtPhilosophy. 2. Aesthetics. I. Title. II. Series.

n66.p74 2005

701'.17'0903dc22

2004061707

isbn 0192801600

Picture research by Elisabeth Agate

Copy-editing, typesetting, and production management by The Running Head Limited, Cambridge , www.therunninghead.com

Printed in Hong Kong on acid-free paper by C&C Offset Printing Co. Ltd Contents

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I should like to thank the anonymous reviewers for Oxford University Press, Stephen Bann, Tim Barringer, Colin Cruise, Joan Esch, Chris Green, Shelley Hales, John House, Sally Huxtable, Katy Macleod, Anna Gruetzner Robins, Debbie Robinson, and most of all Charles Martindale, the best of critics and most devoted lover of beauty. Elisabeth Agate has been a creative and resourceful picture researcher, and I should like to thank my editors, Katharine Reeve, Penny Isaac, and Matthew Cotton, as well as David Williams at The Running Head, whose work has improved the book in countless respects. This book is dedicated to the members of the Art History Research Seminar group at the University of Plymouth, who prove that disinterested intellectual enquiry may still be possible even in the instrumentalist world we now inhabit.

Since the eighteenth century philosophers have explored the human faculty of taking pleasure in the beautiful. During the same period the historical study of works of art has grown steadily in range and sophistication. Surprisingly, these two areas of enquiry have remained largely separate. Philosophical aesthetics has concentrated on the human subjects experience of the beautiful in general terms: what do we mean when we call something in nature or art beautiful? Art history, on the other hand, has attended to the particular class of objects that societies, past and present, have designated art: what are the characteristics of the historical artefacts that have been valued aesthetically? This book brings together human subjects and crafted objects. It aims to juxtapose the abstract question of beauty, as it has been posed since the beginning of modern philosophical aesthetics in eighteenth-century Germany, with the concrete objects that have been made or enjoyed in the same period. How have artists responded to speculations on the beautiful? Which works of art have been called beautiful, and why?