Aesthetics, as a reflection on the image, cannot be understood as an immutable discipline. The perception of aesthetic values—whether related to beauty or ugliness, harmony or imbalance—has historically been determined by social, scientific, or philosophical conditions.
Although the concept is as old as humanity, the term was first used in a title in Aesthetica (1750) by Alexander Baumgarten, who defined the discipline and differentiated it from the other branches of philosophy concerned with the theory of sensibility. In the prolegomena of this work, aesthetics was defined as the
Theory of the liberal arts, inferior gnoseology, the art of thinking beautifully, an art analogous to reason, [in short, as the] science of sensible knowledge.
