Since the very beginning of the modern age, a relationship has been held between aesthetic education and moral progress, taste and virtue, kalòs kai agathòs. This essay aims at focussing on the practical effects of eighteenth-century theories on «aesthetic culture», this being conceived not only as an amount of knowledges in the artistic field or as an active participation in the philosophical debate on the main aesthetic categories (beauty, sublime, picturesque, genius and so on) but, also, as a peculiar and essential form of spiritual and moral improvement.
