Remembering Hogarth

that precise serpentine-line cannot be anything else than perfect : and that we can find in the desert as well : the perfect and harmonious female backline

... absolutely! ... the most beautiful line in the world and a constant inspiration! ... Watteau, Art Nouveau, Matisse, Moore ... 'the line of beauty' ... it is everywhere in nature ... from the back of a blue petal to the bones of the earth ... something to contemplate, something to celebrate ... and at its most human ... the female form, yes.

The question remains unsolved:
Why do we find this serpentine-line so beautiful?
- Do we have the sensation of beauty because the female backline is shaped like this? So that we find women with this backline attractive?
- Or is the similarity of the female backline with the precice serpentine-line a coincident?
- Or is it the other way round, and we find this line beautiful out of a deeper reason (What?), and the female body adapted to that archetypical attractiveness?

Now, those are deep questions ... ones for speculation and 'taste' ... interesting to note that ideas of Beauty change through time and with culture ... when Hogarth was writing, in the mid-eighteenth century, the Ideal was changing (perhaps had just changed) from a 'divine' geometry to an earthly 'observed' sense of the beautiful ... the end of neo-platonism and the rise of scientific empiricism ... which brings me full circle to your questions, thoroughly embedded in a modern, empirical, sensibility - in rationalism, in cause and effect. Perhaps then the answer may be to forget the reason and to enjoy the feeling?

Thanks for stimulating my thought processes, Siegfried!

beauty !