Beautiful. One of three C18 aesthetic categories, with the Picturesque and the Sublime. Edmund Burke, in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), perhaps the most influential C18 English work on aesthetics, especially in the 1757 expanded edition, did not accept that architectural Beauty was connected with proportions of an idealized human body, denied that there was any ‘inner sense’ of Beauty, and argued against the notion of mathematical means of measuring it. Beauty was a property which causes love, and consisted of relative smallness, smoothness, absence of angularity, and brightness of colour. Sir Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight held that the Beautiful had a smooth, undulating appearance, with no harshness, surprises, or broken lines, a concept which they applied to landscapes. Archibald Alison (1757–1839) believed that architectural Beauty of proportion was dependent upon an association of fitness of form, shape, size, and scale for the function. Apprehension of the Beautiful should be accompanied by pleasure, which Alison defined as the ‘emotion of Taste’. See Kant.

Bibliography

E. Burke (1757);
H. Osborne (1970)

Beautiful ★ 2000 (PG-13)

Field's directorial debut is a cloying beauty pageant satire that wants you to like it. REALLY wants you to like it. Unfortunately, the jokes and characters are U-G-L-Y and they ain't got no alibi. Minnie Driver is Mona, a bright girl from an abusive home who escapes her grim reality by trying to win beauty pageants. She's shown as a little ugly duckling who uses any means necessary to win her way up the escalating ladder of swimsuitability. Finally, she qualifies for the Holy Grail of beauty pageants, the Miss American Miss competition. Along the way, however, she has become a single mother, which automatically disqualifies her as a contestant. She comes up with a plan where her daughter Vanessa (Pepsi prodigy and demonchild Hallie Kate Eisenberg) is passed off as the child of her patient best friend Ruby (Adams). Mona then screeches complaints about the kid's behavior being a distraction to her goal (which is no way to treat your child, even if she is Satan's handpuppet) while an ambitious reporter (Stefanson) tries to reveal her secret. Overly padded, and it doesn't even have a nice personality. 112m/C VHS, DVD . Minnie Driver, Hallie Kate Eisenberg, Joey Lauren Adams, Kathleen Turner, Leslie Stefanson, Bridgette WilsonSampras, Kathleen Robertson, Michael McKean, Gary Collins, Brent Briscoe; D: Sally Field; W: Jon Bernstein; C: Robert Yeoman; M: John (Gianni) Frizzell.

beau·ti·ful / ˈbyoōtəfəl/ • adj. pleasing the senses or mind aesthetically: beautiful poetry. the mountains were calm and beautiful. ∎  of a very high standard; excellent: the house had been left in beautiful order.PHRASES: the beautiful people1. fashionable, glamorous, and privileged people.2. (in the 1960s) hippies.DERIVATIVES: beau·ti·ful·ly / -f(ə)lē/ adv. [as adj.] the rules are beautifully simple.