Beauty: Neglected,but alive and kicking

This article is a commentary on ‘Ten years of a model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments: The aesthetic episode – developments and challenges in empirical aesthetics’ (Leder & Nadal, 2014, this issue). It focuses on the importance of beauty in aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments. Beauty is considered as a formal inherent property of visual stimuli that has the potential to elicit visual pleasure by direct sensory stimulation. It is argued that any comprehensive model of aesthetic experience must account fully for cognitive aspects of aesthetics (cultural, conceptual, psychological, and individual factors) as well as intrinsic properties of beautiful visual stimuli and how they relate to basic mechanisms of visual perception, which are universal among humans.