 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, discussions of beauty and taste dealt with a variety of objects, including visual arts, literature, music, human bodies, food, and manners. This article will concentrate on the areas that received the most attention from writers: literature and the visual arts. Questions at stake included: How can one define beauty—via the senses, reason, or conventional rules? How does the human mind perceive a beautiful object? Who has the right to judge? None of these questions were definitively answered, but Enlightenment ideas of beauty shaped the legacy of classical French culture, not only for France to this day, but for the whole Western world that it dominated during the eighteenth century.