Those who love the ugly find it beautiful. But the idea of ugliness is much more complex to define than that of beauty. Umberto Eco presents an essay on what constitutes ugliness, from classical antiquity to the present day.
The concept of the grotesque has, over the centuries, been linked to that of grace and beauty. The ugly, the cruel, and the demonic are parameters for the existence of beauty. But not always considered its opposite. A history of beauty relies on a broad range of theoretical evidence capable, at the same time, of defining the taste of a given era. The trajectory of ugliness, on the other hand, must seek its own documentation in the visual or verbal representations of things or people considered ugly. But is taste debatable? How can the absence of perfection be measured?
With his usual perspicacity and erudition, Umberto Eco poses these questions in * The History of Ugliness* , an essay on the transformations of this concept over time. After chronicling, in * The History of Beauty *, the course of beauty in Western civilization, Eco turns to ugliness and makes us reflect: if beauty or ugliness is in the eye of the beholder, it is also true to remember that this gaze is influenced by the cultural standards of the observer. For a Westerner, an African ritual mask may evoke strangeness and terror, while for a native, it may represent a benevolent deity. Saying that beauty and ugliness are relative to time and culture does not mean, however, that attempts have not always been made to view them as defined standards within a stable model.
In the fifteen chapters of this book, Umberto Eco reflects on the various transformations of the concept of ugliness not only in the world of art, but also in various fields of knowledge, such as philosophy, theology, science, politics, and economics. History of Ugliness is neither a history of art nor a study of aesthetics, but uses both to delineate the idea of ugliness from Classical Antiquity to the present day. And so, both the anthological texts and the extraordinary illustrations of this book take us on a surprising journey, through nightmares, terrors, and loves spanning nearly three thousand years, where movements of repudiation go hand in hand with touching gestures of compassion, and the rejection of deformity is accompanied by decadent ecstasies with the most seductive violations of any classical canon.
Between demons, madmen, hideous enemies, and disturbing presences, between terrifying abysses and deformities that flaunt the sublime, between freaks and the undead, a vast and often unsuspected iconographic vein is discovered. Beautifully illustrated, History of Ugliness is a captivating intellectual and sensory adventure. A lover of words as much as images, Umberto Eco transformed this sophisticated yet moving work into a seductive and irresistible invitation to a journey through the realm of the grotesque.
