In 1753, artist William Hogarth declared a specific S-shaped line to be the 'Line of Beauty' (LoB). Hogarth's assertion has had a profound impact on diverse fields over the past two and a half centuries. However, only one recent (2022) study has investigated whether Hogarth's assertion accurately captures humans' actual aesthetic preferences, and no research has explored why people find the LoB beautiful. We conducted two studies testing the hypothesis that the LoB's perceived beauty is an incidental by-product of cognitive systems that evolved to attend to fitness-relevant morphological features in people. In Study 1, we replicated the finding that female bodies whose lumbar curvature approximates the biomechanical optimum for dealing with the exigencies of pregnancy are rated as more attractive. In Study 2, we found that abstract lines extracted from these bodies were perceived as more beautiful than other lines. These results suggest that the preference for Hogarth's LoB is an incidental by-product of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other purposes. More broadly, these findings suggest that an evolutionary psychological approach - in particular the concept of evolutionary by-product - may be useful for understanding, explaining, and predicting people's aesthetic preferences for certain abstract symbols, which otherwise might seem arbitrary and inexplicable.

Centre for Healthy Ageing Health Futures Institute Murdoch University Murdoch Australia

Department of Psychology University of Konstanz D 78457 Konstanz Germany

Faculty of Science Charles University Prague Czech Republic

Houston Christian University Houston USA

Psychology Department University of Colorado Colorado Springs Colorado Springs USA

School of Psychology Murdoch University Murdoch Australia

Zobrazit více v PubMed

Hogarth, W. The Analysis of Beauty: Written with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas of taste. (Printed by J. Reeves for the Author, 1753).

Podolak K, Kondolf GM. The line of beauty in river designs: Hogarth’s aesthetic theory on Capability Brown’s eighteenth-century river design and twentieth-century river restoration design. Landsc. Res. 2016;41:149–167. doi: 10.1080/01426397.2015.1073705. DOI

Vallance A. Early furniture-VIII. cupboards (continued) Burlingt. Mag. Connoiss. 1913;22:337–338.

Howard S. The steel pen and the modern line of beauty. Technol. Cult. 1985;26:785–798. doi: 10.2307/3105619. DOI

Saviello J. Verlockungen: Haare in der Kunst der Frühen Neuzeit [Allurements: Hair in early modern art] Gebr. Mann Verlag; 2017.

Erwin T. William Hogarth and the aesthetics of nationalism. Huntingt. Libr. Q. 2001;64:383–410. doi: 10.2307/3817918. DOI

Lindberg MK. “A delightful play upon the eye”: William Hogarth and theatrical dance. Dance Chron. 1980;4:19–45. doi: 10.1080/01472528008568787. DOI

Richardson A. An aesthetics of performance: Dance in Hogarth’s analysis of beauty. Dance Res. 2002;20:38–87. doi: 10.3366/1290815. DOI

Hübner R, Ufken E. Is Hogarth’s ‘Line of Beauty’ really the most beautiful? An empirical answer after more than 250 years. i-Perception. 2022;13:20416695221087738. doi: 10.1177/20416695221087738. PubMed DOI PMC

Al-Shawaf L, Lewis DMG, Barbaro N, Wehbe YS. SAGE Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Sage; 2021. pp. 70–95.

Buss DM, Haselton MG, Shackelford TK, Bleske AL, Wakefield JC. Adaptations, exaptations, and spandrels. Am. Psychol. 1998;53:533. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.53.5.533. PubMed DOI

Park JH. Distinguishing byproducts from non-adaptive effects of algorithmic adaptations. Evol. Psychol. 2007;5:47–51. doi: 10.1177/147470490700500105. DOI

Poore HR. Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgement of Pictures. Baker & Taylor; 1903.

Lewis DMG, Russell EM, Al-Shawaf L, Buss DM. Lumbar curvature: A previously undiscovered standard of attractiveness. Evol. Hum. Behav. 2015;36:345–350. doi: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2015.01.007. DOI

Whitcome KK, Shapiro LJ, Lieberman DE. Fetal load and the evolution of lumbar lordosis in bipedal hominins. Nature. 2007;450:1075–1078. doi: 10.1038/nature06342. PubMed DOI

Lewis, D. M. G., Al-Shawaf, L., Semchenko, A. Y., Flores, J. & Ewen, R. L. Lumbar curvature as a standard of attractiveness: a replication and extension of Lewis et al. (2015). [Unpublished manuscript]. Murdoch University, Australia. (2022).

Fernand R, Fox DE. Evaluation of lumbar lordosis. A prospective and retrospective study. Spine. 1985;10:799–803. doi: 10.1097/00007632-198511000-00003. PubMed DOI

Package 'knotR' v. R package version 1.0–2 (2017).

Lewis, D. M. G., Evans, K. C. & Al-Shawaf, L. in The Oxford handbook of human mating (ed. Buss, D. M.) 178–205 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2023).

Sugiyama LS. Is beauty in the context-sensitive adaptations of the beholder?: Shiwiar use of waist-to-hip ratio in assessments of female mate value. Evol. Hum. Behav. 2004;25:51–62. doi: 10.1016/S1090-5138(03)00083-7. DOI

Marlowe F, Wetsman A. Preferred waist-to-hip ratio and ecology. Personal. Individ. Differ. 2001;30:481–489. doi: 10.1016/S0191-8869(00)00039-8. DOI

Yu DW, Shepard GH., Jr Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Nature. 1998;396:321–322. doi: 10.1038/24512. PubMed DOI

Swami V, Tovée MJ. Does hunger influence judgments of female physical attractiveness? Br. J. Psychol. 2006;97:353–363. doi: 10.1348/000712605X80713. PubMed DOI

Sugiyama LS. The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Wiley; 2015. pp. 292–343.

Wetsman A, Marlowe F. How universal are preferences for female waist-to-hip ratios? Evidence from the Hadza of Tanzania. Evol. Hum. Behav. 1999;20:219–228. doi: 10.1016/S1090-5138(99)00007-0. DOI

DeBruine LM, Jones BC, Crawford JR, Welling LL, Little AC. The health of a nation predicts their mate preferences: Cross-cultural variation in women’s preferences for masculinized male faces. Proc. R. Soc. B. 2010;277:2405–2410. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.2184. PubMed DOI PMC

Ranson J, et al. Lordosis in humans: Women’s accurate perceptions of men’s context-dependent preferences. Personal. Individ. Differ. 2023;204:112004. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2022.112004. DOI

Semchenko AY, et al. Lordosis in humans. Personal. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 2022 doi: 10.1177/01461672221115. PubMed DOI

Goetz CD, Easton JA, Lewis DMG, Buss DM. Sexual exploitability: Observable cues and their link to sexual attraction. Evol. Hum. Behav. 2012;33:417–426. doi: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.12.004. DOI