“Works of the highest grade have beauty in all parts, from the essential to the superfluous, and are therefore perfectly beautiful. Beauty in itself is nothing other than the perfection of every concept, for which reason the most perfect things, invisible as well as visible, are called beautiful. This should guide us in looking at the works of the ancients: their beauty does not always consist of the same part, but lies in the fact that that part which the idea has chosen has been represented most beautifully.”

—from Reflections Upon Beauty and Taste in Painting (1762) by Anton Raphael Mengs, as selected by James Lee Byars in the 1986 catalogue The Philosophical Palace