According to Aristotle's commendable formula . . . the beautiful is defined as that which the eye can easily embrace in its entirety and which can be surveyed as a whole.

--- Friedrich Kittler, "The World of the Symbolic--A World of the Machine", cited by http://noraproject.org/. Text via Google Books

This is evocative because it connects cognitive capacity to aesthetics, not least the aesthetics of programmers who use elegance as a criterion for good code.