The Ancient Greek philosophers initially felt that aesthetically appealing objects were beautiful in and of themselves. Plato felt that beautiful objects incorporated proportion, harmony and unity among their parts. Aristotle found that the universal elements of beauty were order, symmetry and definiteness.
According to Islam, human works of art are inherently flawed compared to the work of Allah, and to attempt to depict in a realistic form any animal or person is insolence to Allah. This has had the effect of narrowing the field of Muslim artistic possibility to such forms as mosaics, calligraphy, architecture and geometric and floral patterns.
Indian art evolved with an emphasis on inducing special spiritual or philosophical states in the audience, or with representing them symbolically.
As long ago as the 5th Century B.C., Chinese philosophers were already arguing about aesthetics. Confucius (551 - 479 B.C.) emphasized the role of the arts and humanities (especially music and poetry) in broadening human nature. His near contemporary Mozi (470 - 391 B.C.), however, argued that music and fine arts were classist and wasteful, benefiting the rich but not the common people.
Western Medieval art (at least until the revival of classical ideals during the Renaissance) was highly religious in focus, and was typically funded by the Church, powerful ecclesiastical individuals, or wealthy secular patrons. A religiously uplifting message was considered more important than figurative accuracy or inspired composition. The skills of the artisan were considered gifts from God for the sole purpose of disclosing God to mankind.
With the shift in Western philosophy from the late 17th Century onwards, German and British thinkers in particular emphasized beauty as the key component of art and of the aesthetic experience, and saw art as necessarily aiming at beauty. For Friedrich Schiller (1759 - 1805), aesthetic appreciation of beauty is the most perfect reconciliation of the sensual and rational parts of human nature. Hegel held that art is the first stage in which the absolute spirit is immediately manifest to sense-perception, and is thus an objective rather than a subjective revelation of beauty. For Schopenhauer, aesthetic contemplation of beauty is the most free that the pure intellect can be from the dictates of will.
British Intuitionists like the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671 - 1713) claimed that beauty is just the sensory equivalent of moral goodness. More analytic theorists like Lord Kames (1696 - 1782), William Hogarth (1697 - 1764) and Edmund Burke hoped to reduce beauty to some list of attributes, while others like James Mill (1773 - 1836) and Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903) strove to link beauty to some scientific theory of psychology or biology.