theguardian.

com
Review: On Beauty edited by Umberto Eco | Books
Mike Phillips
6-8 minutes

On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea

edited by Umberto Eco
438pp, Secker & Warburg, £30

Umberto Eco is notorious as the Italian professor of semiotics who wrote a

bestseller, The Name of the Rose, which sparked off a host of imitators and
invigorated interest in the study of medieval art and culture. In addition to all
that, he has been an editor in TV and publishing, a columnist for an avant garde
monthly, and a prolific essayist. If there is such a thing as a renaissance man,
Eco is it.

On Beauty is an encyclopedia of images and ideas about beauty ranging from ancient
Greece to the present day. It begins with 20 pages of reproductions of paintings
and photographs, representing an enormous range of cultural icons, from Bronzini's
Allegory of Venus to characteristic snapshots of David Beckham and George Clooney.
More paintings decorate the next 400 pages of quotations from philosophers and
writers - Plato, Boccaccio, San Bernardo. Kant, Heine, et al. The book is arranged
according to various themes rather than chronologically, although, given the fact
that it begins with the aesthetic ideals of ancient Greece and ends with pop art
and the mass media, the chronology seems self-evident. On the other hand, as Eco
points out in his introduction, "this is a history of Beauty and not a history of
art (or of literature or music)". He goes on to ask the obvious question - "why is
this history of Beauty documented solely through works of art?" - and he replies by
claiming that "over the centuries it was artists, poets, and novelists who told us
about the things they considered beautiful and they were the ones who left us
examples. Peasants, masons, bakers or tailors also made things that they probably
saw as beautiful, but only a very few of these artefacts remain."

This is an answer which seems surprisingly unimaginative for a polymath of Eco's

acumen, if only because it provokes a great many more questions about the book's
structure and content. The introduction concludes that "Beauty has never been
absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the
historical period and the country" - beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Having
read this, I found myself wondering why the book confines itself to examples of
beauty from western Europe and the iconography of Hollywood movies. On this
evidence the populations of Russia, the Middle East, China, India, Japan, Africa
and South America have had no concepts of beauty or at least no artefacts worthy of
display, and while it is reasonable to suppose that the scope of On Beauty 's
illustrations is the product of individual taste, their limitations seem to be
defying the main thrust of its argument. As a result, although we've been told with
some force that this is a history of beauty, rather than art, it reads very much
like an eclectic primer of western aesthetics and painting. This impression is
reinforced by Eco's assertion of an essential "link between art and beauty". It
seems a curious claim after a century in which artists struggled to reject
precisely this link between themselves and Renaissance beliefs. (The "new realist"
painter Fernand Léger, for instance, lecturing in the 1930s, argued that art was
actually a barrier between the people and "the domain of the beautiful".)

The problem is highlighted in the chapters on "monstrosities", and "ugliness". Eco

describes the medieval fascination with representations of devilish monsters and
the pangs of hellfire, and argues that centuries of aesthetic theory presented
ugliness as the antithesis of beauty, that the moral significance of ugliness lies
in being a fundamental strand of a complex universe.
One revealing aspect of these arguments is that they are the product of a view from
the centre of a traditional European cosmos, and it's hard to imagine what the
notion of monstrosity might mean were it to be tested against the background of a
nonEuropean universe. But it's not only in the world outside Europe that
definitions of this kind begin to lose their force and meaning.

In a European environment ruled by a polymorphous clutch of moral and religious

rubrics, a large proportion of the population continues, for reasons which are
essentially mysterious, to be fascinated by phenomena that are grotesque, monstrous
or downright disgusting. The contemplation of medieval monstrosities can, no doubt,
be paralleled by the popularity of Victorian freak shows, or, in the present day,
our delight in the varieties of horror peddled through the cinema, TV and the
computer screen.

From a contemporary standpoint, our fascination with fabulous monsters has now been
divorced from morality, religious awe or even curiosity, and the underlying
aesthetic is more to do with pure sensation. The Renaissance invention of ugliness,
therefore, can no longer stand in support of the category beauty. For a large swath
of contemporary practitioners, also, the idea of a beautiful representation is part
of an aesthetic ideal which the American painter Barnett Newman described as "the
bugbear of European art".

On Beauty avoids discussing these contradictions, and the consequence is a

beautifully produced guidebook to the classical and Renaissance practice that
linked together ideas about art and beauty. The promise of Eco's introduction,
however, never comes near fulfilment, and there's a curious sense that the book's
editor was only half involved, that the assembly of the various elements took place
on different sites and drew on different traditions. On the other hand, maybe that
is the logic of Eco's Renaissance-inflected sensibility. When he's experimenting,
trying to break new ground, the result can be a brilliant synthesis; when he's
recycling orthodoxies, as he is here, you get an incoherent hotch-potch of elements
- a bit of a fudge.

· Mike Phillips's London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain is published by

Continuum.

publishersweekly.com
HISTORY OF BEAUTY by Umberto Eco, Editor, Alastair McEwen, Translator , trans. from
the Italian by Alastair McEwen. Rizzoli $40 (438p) ISBN 978-0-8478-2646-9
2-3 minutes

Umberto Eco, Editor, Alastair McEwen, Translator , trans. from the Italian by
Alastair McEwen. Rizzoli $40 (438p) ISBN 978-0-8478-2646-9
HISTORY OF BEAUTY

This inspired book begins, after a little throat-clearing, with 11 verso-recto

"comparative tables"—sets of contact-sheet–like illustrations that trace
representations of "Nude Venus" and "Nude Adonis" (clothed sets follow) as well as
Madonna, Jesus, "Kings" and "Queens" over thousands of years, revealing with
wonderful brevity the scope of the task Eco has set for the book. What follows is a
dense, delectable tour through the history of art as it struggled to cope with
beauty's many forms. The text, while rigorous in its inquiries, is heavy on
abstractions, which get amplified by stiff translation: "In short, the question was
how to retable the debate about the Classical antitheses of thought, in order to
reelaborate them within the framework of a dynamic relationship." The selections,
however, are breathtaking—300 color illustrations, from Praxiteles to Pollock—and
they grant the text the freedom to delve into their complex mysteries. Eco's
categories for doing so (e.g., "Poets and Impossible Loves") and his historical
breadth in elaborating them are creative and impressive respectively. Long
quotations ranging from Plotinus and Petrarch to Xenophon and Zola allow each era
to speak for itself, while Eco links them with his own epoch-leaping connections.
Seen in terms of a timeless debate on the form and meaning of beauty, masterpieces
like Titian's Sacred and Profane Love or Cranach's Venus with Cupid Stealing Honey
seem, if possible, even more immediate, and related to our own amorous profanities
and thefts. (Dec.)

nytimes.com
On Ugliness - Edited by Umberto Eco - Book Review
Amy Finnerty
6-7 minutes

In “History of Beauty,” Umberto Eco explored the ways in which notions of

attractiveness shift from culture to culture and era to era. With ON UGLINESS
(Rizzoli, $45), a collection of images and written excerpts from ancient times to
the present, all woven together with a provocative commentary and translated by
Alastair McEwen, he asks: Is repulsiveness, too, in the eye of the beholder? And
what do we learn about that beholder when we delve into his aversions? Selecting
stark visual images of gore, deformity, moral turpitude and malice, and quotations
from sources ranging from Plato to radical feminists, Eco unfurls a taxonomy of
ugliness. As gross-out contests go, it’s both absorbing and highbrow.

Christ’s martyrdom earns a chapter. By the late Middle Ages, we learn, he was being
depicted as a flesh-and-blood human, contorted in pain. Fifteenth-century
masterworks share space here with Mel Gibson’s lacerated, cinematic Christ. Eco
asserts that while such a sight may be moving to some Christians, it might equally
be sickening to a Buddhist or a Hindu.

Eco’s lexicon of all things repellent is exhaustive, including the “obscene,

repugnant, frightening, abject, monstrous,” the “fetid, fearsome, ignoble,
ungainly” and more. The wicked might fall under his heading “Witchcraft, Satanism,
Sadism” or “The Ugliness of Woman From Antiquity to the Baroque Period.” With
expertly chosen paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries, he demonstrates how
images pretty to us might have stirred up misogynist anxieties not so long ago.
Giacomo Grosso’s “Supreme Meeting” (1894) depicts comely women, cavorting naked,
strewn with flowers. The painting makes Eco’s ugliness cut because the women
depicted are Satanists, hence repugnant and threatening to the moral order. Their
very seductiveness might have excited fear of unbridled female potency — just the
thing to prompt a shudder, a reflex inherent to any definition of ugliness.

The author includes several excerpts that tell us how deep are the roots of this
fear. According to the Malleus Maleficarum (1486), the malevolence of witches
arises from “carnal lust, which is insatiable in them.” (Suggesting how much
attitudes have evolved, the text goes on to thank the Almighty for sparing males
such character flaws.) The idea that ugly is as ugly does held sway for some in the
third century, when Tertullian argued that a pretty face became ugly when exposed
to the extramarital gaze. In “Women, Wear a Veil,” he inveighed against lipstick,
rouge and hair coloring, telling matrons, “Don’t worry, O blessed ladies, no woman
is ugly to her own husband; she was pleasing enough when she was chosen.”
But 2,000 years before Botox, in the first century, Martial had harsher words for
mature women. “You walk around with a forehead more wrinkled than your stole / And
breasts like cobwebs; the Nile crocodile / Has a tiny mouth compared with your
maw.” For some, the decline of youth and fertility was hard on the eyes — and the
nose. Elderly women were singled out for particular ridicule in a 13th-century
commentary (“Smelly Old Lady”) and another from the 15th century (“Malignant Old
Woman”). But Lucretia Marinelli’s “Nobility and Excellence of Women,” from 1591, is
a bold counterattack: “I say that all men are ugly compared with women; therefore
they are unworthy of being loved.”

Poverty and illness cause some to avert their eyes, as does The Other, whose
ethnicity or dress may place him in a minority within a society. Fascist material,
like Gino Boccasile’s anti-Semitic postcard from 1943-44, was used to illustrate
the imagined moral inferiority of its subjects, as manifest in their physical
features. But holding a mirror up to the propagandists, and proving what a
malleable conceit ugliness was and is, Eco writes that “the facial features, the
voice and the actions of the ‘ugly’ Jew became ... unequivocal signs of the moral
deformity of the anti-Semite.”

Readers may strain to discern categorical ugliness in some of Eco’s chosen artworks
and passages. In the chapter “Romanticism and the Redemption of Ugliness,” he
includes turbulent — but therefore all the more lush — landscapes, and an Emily
Brontë passage describing the smoldering Heathcliff, whose “forehead, that I once
thought so manly, and that I now think so diabolical, was shaded with a heavy
cloud.” By Eco’s criteria, anything stirring, or not utterly conventional and
saccharine, would seem to merit inclusion in an encyclopedia of the off-putting.

Yet, in his analysis, the intentionally disharmonious can be anointed as a thing of

beauty. By the 20th century, with “The Avant-Garde and the Triumph of Ugliness,”
jarring forms, as exemplified by those of Picasso, became central to an artistic
creed that would have baffled the ancients, just as it did many gallerygoers of the
day. Happily for readers, Eco chooses images — hundreds of them — as adroitly as
his words, demonstrating the power of art to elevate even the most pitiable
subject. “Ugliness can be redeemed,” he writes, “by a faithful and efficacious
artistic portrayal.” He includes an image of a first-century statue of an aged
“market lady.” The decrepit crone becomes a paragon when carved in stone and placed
in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ugliness can also be redeemed by human relationships and individual choice, even in
this vapid age of Most Beautiful People lists. Inner virtue counts, and we may defy
aesthetic guidelines when deciding where we’d most like to rest our eyes. The
message in Domenico Ghirlandaio’s “Portrait of an Old Man With His Grandson” (circa
1490) seems to be that love is blind. The old man has a deformed face, but the
little boy seems oblivious to any defect as he gazes up, entranced, into his
grandfather’s eyes.