Figure 2.

(a) The front cover of ‘The analysis of Beauty’ by William Hogarth (1753). The cover shows the curve defined by the author as the line of beauty. (b) About the lines on the right, Hogarth says ‘Though all sorts of waving‐lines are ornamental, when properly applied; yet, strictly speaking, there is but one precise line, properly to be called the line of beauty, which in the scale of them is number 4: The lines 5, 6, 7, by their bulging too much in their curvature becoming gross and clumsy; and, on the contrary, 3, 2, 1, as they straighten, becoming mean and poor’ (Chapter 10 [49]).