Abstract
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, should not the estheticists be eyeing the beholder, exploring his sensibilities, clarifying his preferences, explaining his attitudes? Instead, we find them preoccupied with analysis of the beautiful, be it in nature, people, or art, as if the observer was not there at all, as if beauty inhered in beautiful things independent of time and place, contingent only on its qualities. The narrowness of this approach is attested to by the frequent, almost cyclic changes in the fads of the observer's appreciation of beauty. Take mountains, for instance. Until the romantic poets and painters began to extol their beauty, they were often regarded as nuisances that obstructed the view. In his popular 17th-century travel book Voyage in Italy , 1 Lassels hardly mentions mountain scenery. Or take people. Through the ages until recently, it was the plump rather than the lean who served
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