Beauty is seductive. Beauty is power. True beauty is a myth: as early as in Homer’s Iliad, Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera vied with one another over who was the most beautiful. Yet Paris’s famous decision was suspect—the juror proved to be corrupt in this early casting show. What is considered beautiful is not only a question of taste spanning all epochs and cultures. Scholars, artists, literary figures, and musicians look for the supposedly objective criteria for beauty in nature or the theory of harmony, for example. In contrast, the subjective perception of what is beautiful engenders personal ideals—from Mary Magdalene to the miracles of plastic surgery. All of these facets comprise the myth of beauty that this volume fans out based on selected works from the holdings of the Upper Austrian State Museum in LinzExhibition: Schlossmuseum Linz 6.5.–8.11.2015