The analysis of beauty : written with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas of taste
William Hogarth's 1753 treatise on aesthetics, printed in London by J. Reeves for the author, argues that the serpentine line governs beauty and addresses artists, craftsmen and cultivated readers. Two large folding engravings pack a central scene—a sculpture yard, a country dance—inside borders crowded with numbered diagrams of faces, corsets, chair legs, candlesticks and curves, alongside a small woodcut of the line of beauty in its glass case.
