isolated, spontaneous responses to art but must evolve as an intellectual attribute, the senses nourishing
the mind. This tendency to emphasize the role of the mind’s internal operations in the formulation of
judgments of taste reached a climax later in the century in the writings of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).
One of Baumgarten’s achievements, also developed by Kant, was to separate the realm of the “aesthetic”
(artistic form) clearly from the moral content of a work of art (Kaufman, 1995, 455).
In his essay Of the Standard of Taste (first published in 1757), David Hume was also keen to explain the
workings of taste as the formulation of empirical knowledge: data received by the senses and through
experience formed its basis. Empiricism was a core Enlightenment value, drawn from the realm of
scientific enquiry and, in particular, from the methodological principles of the seventeenthcentury
philosopher John Locke, who had regarded knowledge as the result of experiential learning rather than of
purely abstract reasoning (Locke, 1694). Hume argued that in the workings of taste sense data were
filtered through the mind’s capacity to store and compare previous experiences of art and of human nature:
in order for a specific judgment to be right, our immediate pleasure or displeasure in front of a work of
art must be mediated by “A perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to the
object” (cited in Harrison, Wood and Gaiger, 2000, 509). For Hume, taste was a matter of “sentiment” in
the eighteenthcentury sense of finely tuned intuitions (or “delicacy”) of the mind. It was nourished by
reason and education, as well as by the imagination. True men of taste were therefore rare (Harrison,
Wood and Gaiger, 2000, 515).
Most eighteenthcentury theorists of taste wished to avoid the conclusion that it was to any significant
degree arbitrary or subjective. While some deployed the arguments above (that taste was derived from,
but not reducible to individual sense impressions or the pleasure to which these gave rise), others argued
that a universal view of beauty could be derived from identifying the qualities determining an object’s
“perfection.” The latter notion was derived from Plato’s notion of “perfect” or “ideal” forms. Plato had
conceived, in his work De Republica (The Republic, written c. 380 BCE) of “Eternal forms,” “Ideas” or
prototypes from which all (less perfect) earthly forms were derived. A central part of the classical
aesthetic was the belief that it was the role of the artist to create forms resembling as closely as possible
these ideal forms, through the application of beautiful proportion and harmonious composition. In the
eighteenth century many still believed this had been achieved by the artists and sculptors of classical
Greece and Rome, who had studied natural forms in order to derive from them and refine models of
perfect beauty. Winckelmann played a key role in promoting such views, his admiration for purer antique
forms serving also to undermine the fashion for the rococo (see Chapter 1; see also Kaufman, 1995, 446–
449; Walsh, 2012, 231–232).
Several of Winckelmann’s German compatriots, such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) and
Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) wished to challenge or modify his rationalizing neoclassicism
(Kaufman, 1995, 446–457). For Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), Hume and others, any standard of taste
developed in this way would risk the kind of arid and formulaic classicism promoted often dogmatically
by the academies. They preferred a practical view of taste that relied less on prescribed visual formulae
and allowed for its relativity, while distancing it from the purely arbitrary or “vulgar” (Macmillan, 1986,
23–26). Hutcheson paid great attention to the “essential” neoplatonic qualities of beauty, while stopping
short of reducing beauty and taste to formulaic definitions. In 1725 he had argued, in his An Inquiry into
the Original of our ideas of Beauty and Taste, that taste was exercised by an “inner sense” or intuitive
appreciation of beauty. This “sense” was informed by a recognition of the principles of neoplatonic
beauty, which had guided many seventeenthcentury artists but was reducible neither to such rational
certainties nor to the physical senses. This left some room for individual, subjective responses to works
of art, as well as culturally relative tastes: