Ideas of beauty, from the Greeks to the present day

What is beauty, and why do art and buildings move us? Philosophers, artists and architects have answered in different ways for two and a half millennia. Here you can follow the conversation chapter by chapter, together with the works and buildings it was about.

• The Greeks
• Rome and late antiquity
• The Middle Ages
• The Renaissance
• Classicism and the Academies
• The Enlightenment: Taste, Feeling and the Sublime
• Kant and the Judgement of Taste
• Romanticism and Idealism
• The Nineteenth Century
• Modernism
• The Post-War Era and the Present
• Outlook: China and Japan