1. How Does our Modern Perception of Beauty Differ from that of the Past?
By Lisa Morrison

2. What do You Consider to be Beautiful?
Why do you consider it to be beautiful?
Do you think everyone considers it to be beautiful?

3. The Difficulty with Judging Beauty...
‘The combination of all the qualities of a person or thing that delight the senses and please the mind’
Collins English Dictionary
‘Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder’
3rd century BC in Greece

4. Ways of Knowing in Judging Beauty
Sense Perception
Emotion

5. Beauty is Highly Subjective

6. Areas of Knowledge which Contain Forms of Beauty
Mathematics
History
Natural Sciences
Human Sciences
The Arts
Ethics

7. The Arts What makes a ‘beautiful’ work of art?
Some suggest that there are ‘universal guidelines’ to determining whether a piece of art is beautiful:
What makes a ‘beautiful’ work of art?
The depiction of a beautiful object
By revealing beauty in everyday objects
The skill of the artist

8. The Arts Painted in 1434 ‘Inert perfection’ Illusion and detail
‘The Arnolfini Portrait’
Jan van Eyck

9. Tracey Emin: My Bed Exhibited in 1999 in the Tate Gallery
Shortlisted for the Turner Prize
Bought for £150,000
Tracey Emin: My Bed

10. Historical Views on Beauty
Symmetry
Order
Plays a role in science

11. Symmetry in the Modern Era?
Symmetry plays less of a role in structures and buildings.
Do you consider this to be beautiful?
Symmetry in the Modern Era?

12. Mathematics The Golden Ratio
The Perfect Human Form was said to include the Golden Ratio
‘The theory of relativity is too beautiful to be false’ - Albert Einstein

13. Human Physical Beauty Saint Catherine of Alexandria:
Was one of the most beautiful women in her time (3rd century AD)
Do you think she is beautiful?
Human Physical Beauty

14. Modern Depictions of Human Physical Beauty
How do you view these women?
Why do you think past and modern depictions of physical beauty have changed?

15. What Hasn’t Changed? The appreciation of inner beauty
The appreciation of beauty in nature
The appreciation of beauty in complex mathematical formulas

16. To Summarise
Will our perception of beauty continue to change over time?

17. Thank you for listening 