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 been historically determined by social, scientific, or philosophical conditions.
Although the concept is as old as humanity itself, the term was first used in a title in Aesthetica (1750) by Alexander Baumgarten, who defined the discipline and differentiated it from other branches of philosophy concerned with the theory of sensitivity. In the prolegomena of this work, aesthetics was defined as the
Theory of the liberal arts, inferior gnoseology, art of thinking beautifully, art analogous to reason, [in short, as the] science of sensible knowledge.
