ABSTRACT
A host of historians, critics and philosophers embraced the pure beauty, the Schonheit, which classical sculptures appeared to embody. Among them, Johann Gottfried Herder paid particular attention to the aesthetic mechanisms by which such beauty was perceived. Herder sets out in Kritische Waldchen to develop an inductive theory of aesthetics, refuting the position expressed in Riedel's Theorie der schonen Kunste that the human mind possesses an innate sense of what is beautiful. The habit of aesthetic discrimination can be developed to the point of becoming "second nature” because of the way in which our senses learn to grasp the world and convert its maelstrom of stimuli into meaningful data. Herder explores the aesthetic implications of the assumption that colour was a distraction alien to sculpture in its most perfected state. Herder's formulation is affirmed by the observations of Marc Jeannerod concerning neural activity during "object-oriented action". Sculpture can stimulate a perpetual oscillation of actions anticipated and inhibited.
