Since the Renaissance, different line types have been distinguished by artists and art theorists. However, it took another hundreds of years until the British artist William Hogarth attributed different degrees of beauty to them. Particularly, in his book “The Analysis of Beauty” (1753) he depicted seven waving lines, declared line number 4 as the most beautiful, and called it the “line of beauty”. Until today, the line of beauty has a persistently strong influence in many areas such as landscape art and design, calligraphy, furniture design, architecture, dance, etc. It is astonishing that Hogarth's assumptions have never been empirically tested. Therefore, we asked participants to rate Hogarth's lines by their beauty. As a result, line number 4 was indeed the most preferred, although number 5 was judged similarly. An analysis revealed that curvature was nonlinearly related to beauty and explains more than 90% of the variance in the mean aesthetic judgments.

自文艺复兴以来，艺术家和艺术理论家对不同的线条类型进行了区分。然而，又过了几百年，英国艺术家威廉·霍加斯（William Hogarth）才将不同程度的美归于它们。特别是在他的著作《美的分析》（1753年）中，他描绘了七条波浪线，宣称第4行是最美的，并称其为“美的线”。直到今天，美的线条在风景艺术和设计、书法、家具设计、建筑、舞蹈等许多领域都具有持续强大的影响力。令人惊讶的是，霍加斯的假设从未经过实证检验。因此，我们要求参与者根据美感来评价 Hogarth 的台词。结果，第 4 行确实是最优选的，尽管第 5 行的判断类似。