Art and Aesthetics:
According to Aristotle (Ancient Greek Philosopher)
Taken from his work referred to as The Poetics
First, consider Aristotle’s notion of imitation.
The concept of form, especially in terms of formal causality,
provided a ground for later theories of beauty, which connected the
beauty of an object to its form. In other words, an object’s form is
the cause of its beauty. He is very much concerned with a
Metaphysics of Art (The study of higher things).
The main difference between Aristotle’s notion of form and Plato’s
notion of the Forms is that Aristotle thought the form of the object
was constituted by the essential or species-defining properties
inhering in the object. Plato maintained that the Forms of each
thing existed in a realm that transcended physical things.
Finally, Aristotle emphasized some characteristics that art requires
in order to be good. “Beauty is a matter of size and order”. Size is
important because something too small or too large is beyond
one’s capacity to perceive the whole, (which specifically related to
the length of plays but applies to all art forms).
Order concerns the relationship of the parts with each other and
with the whole, which was also very important to medieval
philosophers and artisans such as St. Thomas Aquinas.