The Statistical Analysis of Aesthetic Judgment: An Exploration

Abstract

A seventeenth‐century critic, Roger de Piles, has expressed in quantitative terms a series of aesthetic judgements on 56 painters, using four standard but complex conceptual categories. An attempt is made to explore the structure of his judgments and the effective content of his categories through principal component and cluster analysis. Inferences are made from the component analysis about the discriminatory power of his categories and their relative importance in registering his evaluations. Both hierarchical and re‐allocative clusterings produce groups that are to some extent at odds with conventional expectations. These are felt to raise questions of interest to students of de Piles's discursive writings and of the aesthetics of the period. Attempts to extend the application of such techniques to fresh substantive problems must come to terms appropriately with the constraints and assumptions entailed in the statistical procedures, but the exploration suggests that there could be productive applications in the comparative analysis of subjective judgments.