Practical Form

Abstract

In early eighteenth-century Britain, writers asked after the nature and causes of the pleasure we feel when we encounter beauty. It took a painter, however, to steer the nascent field of philosophical aesthetics toward questions of spatial form. Drawing inspiration from William Hogarth’s 1753 treatise on beauty, this book traces the development of form as a concept in and for aesthetics. Hogarth’s experience as a draftsman and printmaker guided his dissent from the developing consensus on aesthetic pleasure and standards of taste. The immediate cause of aesthetic pleasure, he argues, is beautiful form, which is detected through the activity of formal abstraction. The insight that formal abstraction has heuristic value in judging beauty emerges from the way practitioners think about skill across the domains of art and craft. Zitin’s account of the history of form in eighteenth-century thought substitutes women and artisans, as virtuosos of aesthetic judgment, for the proverbial man of taste, a substitution with the power to reshape our understanding of canonical statements on aesthetics from the writings of Shaftesbury to Kant’s Third Critique.