Introduction: Transformations in the Enlightenment Culture of Beauty

This chapter discusses six main transformations in the Enlightenment culture of beauty: a growing critical engagement with the relationship between physical beauty and inner virtue; increasing emphasis on the viewer’s response to beauty rather than the objective features of physical beauty; a diversification of the dominant ideals of beauty; the growing visibility amongst a widening group of people of a critical engagement with the significance of beauty, especially its relationship to sexual desire; the integration of beauty into new ideas of essentialized and embodied categories of people; and a democratization of the culture of beauty, facilitated in large part by its commercialization. Beauty culture became more accessible to a greater range of people, while longstanding and evaluative understandings of difference – notably of gender, age and race – were woven tightly into the virtues supposedly embodied in beauty in ways that made a palpable difference to people’s lives.