Timeline of ancient aesthetics

Rider, Attic red-figured cup,
middle of 5th century BC.

A few notes on significant developments in aesthetics and theory of art from the earliest times to the late Classical period (c. 3rd century). I will add further entries as they occur to me. Please note this is predominantly a timeline of Western theory, as I cannot do justice to other traditions.

Prehistory

The reflections of Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures on beauty and the production of art, if any, are unknown, beyond what little we can deduce from the objects themselves and their contexts.

Early civilisations: Mesopotamia, Egypt

No philosophy of art or of beauty has survived from the ancient civilisations. Cultural products are praised in terms of their magnificence of materials and quality of workmanship, not in terms of an autonomous notion of ‘beauty’ as we understand it today.

Artistic representation in ancient Egyptian art usually conformed to highly stylised principles that flowed from a belief in an unchanging social and cosmic order. Despite their apparent lack of a philosophy of art, the Egyptians belong in any history of Western aesthetics, as many thinkers from ancient Greece travelled to north Africa to learn mathematics and other wisdom from this venerable and deeply respected civilisation.

The Greeks

The ancient Greek philosophers were the first to reflect upon (what we would call) aesthetic questions. The Greeks thought beauty was objective: objects were beautiful in and of themselves. Art is a kind of technē, i.e. a craft or skill, especially the knowledge (‘know-how’) associated with making things.

8th century BCE

Homer: The Iliad

• Originally an oral composition. 8th century BCE is the rough date for the written version.
• Opens with an appeal to the Muse. This is the first known theory of artistic creation: a god speaks through the poet.
• In History of Aesthetic (1892) Bernard Bosanquet points to the famous passage describing the shield of Achilles where Homer remarks ‘that was a marvellous piece of work!’ Bosanquet calls this ‘one of the earliest aesthetic judgements that Western literature contains’ (p12).

8th–7th century BCE

Hesiod: Theogeny

• Again gods speak through the poet. In the opening lines Hesiod claims to commune with the Muses on Mount Helicon, and they breathe his poetry into him: ‘And one day they taught Hesiod glorious song.’
• The Muses comment: ‘we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things.’ This is an interesting critical judgement on the nature of poetry.

6th century BCE

Pythagoras and his school

Pythagoras (or at least his school) devised a theory of music based on mathematics and exerted a strong influence on Plato. Everything in the world, including beauty, could be explained in terms of numbers and the relationships between them.

Early theorists

Beardsley: ‘In the latter part of the 6th century, and increasingly in the 5th century, the more self-consciously theoretical masters of various crafts and arts began to think about the principles on which they worked, and to write them down.’ These were probably works of criticism on particular art forms, such as poetry and music, rather than of aesthetics.

5th century BCE

Xenophanes, Heraclitus and Pindar

Scattered surviving comments, such as Xenophanes’ criticism of Homer and Hesiod’s portrayal of the gods, or Pindar’s remarks on poetry and poets, are arguably our earliest examples of literary criticism.

Aristophanes

Comic playwright whose plays sometimes contain criticism, e.g. of Euripides’ plays.

Polykleitos

Sculptor who wrote Canon, the most renowned ancient treatise on art, now sadly lost. Polykleitos made an accompanying statue, also called Canon, to exemplify his theory in practice – this probably closely resembled the Doryphoros or Spear-bearer, of which copies survive. The treatise discussed ideal mathematical proportions for the parts of the human body, and argued that statues of the human figure should achieve beauty and the good by striking a balance between the relaxed and tensed body parts and the directions in which the parts move.

c.380 BCE

Plato

Plato addresses aesthetic and art-theoretical issues in several of his dialogues. Here are three of particular interest.

The Republic

• Discusses what role poets should have in the ideal state: especially Books III and X.
• Coins the image of “holding a mirror to nature.”
• Art has a powerful emotional impact; is thus dangerous.
• Poets create mere imitations of imitations – copies of a world that is itself already a poor copy of ideal Forms – and therefore have no real knowledge or authority. 
• Poets should (mostly) be banned from the ideal Republic. But Plato issues a challenge at the end, inviting defences of the poets to justify letting them back in.

Ion

• Do critics have knowledge of their craft, or are they inspired by the gods, i.e. have no agency? Plato concludes the latter. There is no techne of criticism.
• Extends theory of divine inspiration to (good) poetry.

The Symposium

• c.385-370 BCE. Through the character Diotima of Mantinea, Plato offers a theory of absolute beauty that may be revealed to the pederast who makes a series of steps towards knowledge of the true, good and beautiful Forms.
• The object of Love is to bring forth works in beauty: wisdom, virtue, laws, but also art, e.g. the poetry of Homer and Hesiod.

Plato thought beautiful objects incorporated proportion, harmony and unity among their parts. He formulated the theory of mimesis or imitation. As art is twice removed from the Forms, Plato is sceptical of art’s epistemological and cognitive value: artists don’t know the truth and merely make copies of copies. There is no techne of criticism or of poetry: good instances of either come through divine inspiration.

c.350 BCE

Aristotle: Poetics

This is Aristotle’s only surviving work on art, though he wrote others.

• Defends poetry against Plato.
• More positive about mimesis and art’s cognitive value. Our love of imitation flows from a desire for knowledge and harmony.
• Articulated what later became, with some distortion, the ‘three unities’; contributed to later theories of ‘decorum’.
• Aristotle asks, why do we enjoy the fearful emotions of tragedy? Because evoking pity and fear purges the emotions. This notion (katharsis) is not entirely clear and has been much-debated since.

Ancient Greek philosophers were the first to define some of the most important concepts in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. They are thus effectively the founders of aesthetics, though the discipline was not formally established until much later. Their notions, such as divine inspiration, mimesis, absolute beauty and catharsis have played a role in aesthetics ever since.

Romans

The Romans had a fascination with Greek art and culture, although their own intellectual contribution is less significant.

c.15 BCE

Horace: Ars Poetica

• The poet Horace’s advice on how to write great poetry, written in verse. The poem lays down a body of advice for ‘decorum’ – what is suitable in good poetry – which later become the foundation of Neoclassical art theory. 
  
• Introduces a number of famous critical and literary terms, such as ‘in media res’ = ‘in the middle of things’ and the ‘purple patch’.
• These included ut pictura poesis, a Latin phrase meaning ‘as is painting so is poetry.’ Horace simply meant that imaginative writing deserved the same critical respect as painting in Roman culture. Later theorists have taken up the phrase in various ways. 

Late Classical

1st century CE

Longinus: On the Sublime

An important late Classical contribution. ‘Longinus’, whose identity is uncertain, asks what makes for greatness in writing? He studies the nature of the sublime (greatness, excellence) and how to achieve it, and the role of the writer, as well as criticising some contemporary literature.

• Poetry is the highest kind of philosophy.
• He laments the literary standards of his own Roman age.
• Longinus’ work made no impact until the 17th and 18th centuries, whereupon he influences the theories of sublime of Burke and then Kant.

Paul of Tarsus

Paul, or St Paul, wrote much of the New Testament. His contribution to art theory is his literary critical way of reading the Old Testament. The Hebrew Bible contains no explicit references to Jesus, so Paul was keen to try and reconcile it with the Christian New Testament by claiming foreshadowings of Jesus in a method known as typology. In this view, many of the people, events and symbols of the Old Testament were significant not only in themselves, but as types or figures of things to be revealed later.

4th-3rd centuries CE

The end phase of the Classical era saw the flourishing of the Neoplatonist school (key figures Proclus, Plotinus), which was highly influential on Western medieval philosophy. The Neoplatonists sought to uphold the philosophical tradition of Plato and explore its questions more deeply. Theirs was an idealist philosophy: consciousness is prior to the physical realm that most of us think of as reality.

c.250-70

Plotinus: On Beauty (from 1st Ennead) 

Plotinus advanced Plato’s view (cf. The Symposium) that the origin of beauty was a perfect Form of beauty, and added his own contributions. For Plotinus, beauty is formal unity. He departs from Plato by granting the arts more respect. The arts ‘do not simply imitate what is seen by the eye but refer back to the principles of nature... Arts produce many things not by means of copying, but from themselves. In order to create a perfect whole, they add what is lacking, because arts contain beauty themselves’ (IEP). 

Main sources

Bernard Bosanquet, History of Aesthetic (1892)
Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present: A Short History (1966)
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy