William Hogarth’s Aestheticization of Beauty

Abstract

In The Analysis of Beauty, William Hogarth articulates his aesthetic thesis on beauty. Hogarth argues the universal quality of the aesthetic judgment, which resonates with absolutist moral theorists such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Adam Smith, among others. Among those anxieties of his predecessors, Hogarth’s main target for critique is Shaftesburian civic humanism theory, which highlights academic, moralizing and aristocratic taste and insinuates political alliance with the landed civic humanist gentleman. As a way of overcoming Shaftesburian aesthetics, Hogarth proposes a line of beauty which consists of the serpentine line and attempts to set it up as the universal quality inherent in the beautiful object. As examples that embody the line of beauty, he proposes the secularized female figures of Venus, Eve, Queen Elizabeth, a dancing lady, and a living woman, as opposed to the Shaftesburian masculine figures of Hercules, Apollo or Antinous. Hogarth wants to rectify “the misapplied encomiums” of his predecessors and attempts to radicalize their aesthetics. The process of aestheticization, however, shows that Hogarth tends to be slipping into the highly non-aesthetic realm of beauty in which the ideological configuration of woman itself is highly politically charged. In spite of the subversiveness of female representation, his presentation of the serpentine line of beauty, and female figures as its embodiment are already inscribing the constructed gendered female on the axis of male eyes. Further, his aesthetics is based upon the various displacement and marginalization of various figures such as blacks. In this light, the Hogarthian process of aestheticization of beauty and any metaphysical musings cannot escape from the politics of any form itself.