What is beauty? What is art? What is taste and fashion? Is beauty something to be observed coolly and rationally or is it something dangerously involving? So begins Umberto Eco's intriguing journey into the aesthetics of beauty, in which he explores the ever-changing concept of the beautiful from the ancient Greeks to today. While closely examining the development of the visual arts and drawing on works of literature from each era, Eco broadens his enquiries to consider a range of concepts, including the idea of love, the unattainable woman, natural inspiration versus numeric formulas, and the continuing importance of ugliness, cruelty, and even the demonic.
Professor Eco takes us from classical antiquity to the present day, dispelling many preconceptions along the way and concluding that the relevance of his research is urgent because we live in an age of great reverence for beauty, "an orgy of tolerance, the total syncretism and the absolute and unstoppable polytheism of Beauty."
In this, his first illustrated book, Professor Eco offers a layered approach that includes a running narrative, abundant examples of painting and sculpture, and excerpts from writers and philosophers of each age, plus comparative tables. A true road map to the idea of beauty for any reader who wishes to journey into this wonderful realm with Eco's nimble mind as guide.
Amazon.com: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but it also has a lot to do with the beholder's cultural standards. In History of Beauty, renowned author Umberto Eco sets out to demonstrate how every historical era has had its own ideas about eye-appeal. Pages of charts that track archetypes of beauty through the ages ("nude Venus," "nude Adonis," and so forth) may suggest that this book is a historical survey of beautiful people portrayed in art. But History of Beauty is really about the history of philosophical and perceptual notions of perfection and how they have been applied to ideas and objects, as well as to the human body. This survey ranges over such themes as the mathematics of ideal proportions, the problem of representing ugliness, the fascination of the exotic and art for art's sake. Along the way, the text examines the intersection of standards of beauty with Christian belief, notions of the Sublime, the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, and bourgeois culture. More than 300 illustrations trace the history of Western art as it relates, in the broadest sense, to the topic of beauty.
Yet despite its wealth of information, History of Beauty is an odd and unsatisfying book. Beginning with ancient Greece and ending with a too-brief chapter on "The Beauty of the Media," the text focuses exclusively (and unapologetically) on the Western world. Ultimately, it seems that "beauty" serves simply as a sexy peg on which to hang an abbreviated history of Western culture. Readers expecting a sophisticated treatment of the subject will be surprised at the textbook-like design, with numbered sections and boldfaced words keyed to small-type excerpts from writings by thinkers ranging from Boethius to Barthes. The main narrative (or perhaps the translation from the Italian?) can be ponderous and awkward. Only nine of the 17 chapters were written by Eco; the remainder are by lesser-known Italian novelist Girolamo de Michele. All in all, it looks as though someone had the bright idea of translating a textbook for Italian students into English, hoping to coast on the fame of Eco's name. --Cathy Curtis
Needs To Be Better Researched Seems to be a reworking of earlier books like Arthur Marwick's book BEAUTY IN HISTORY. To assume that art is a representation of beauty of it's time is for future people to think we valued Picasso's notions of ideal form in his abstract depictions of women. Just as people falsely assume Ruben was painting beautiful women, he was doing nothing of the sort. His journals contain amble notes about how he preferred the male form. Sometimes art is just an expression or an exercise in politics, skill and who is paying the bill.
History of Beauty This is an excellent archive of writing about and images of beauty from Classical Antiquity to the present day. The one thing that the book makes abundantly clear is that what is considered "beautiful" is constantly changing. The concept of that which is beautiful is as old as the human race itself and will continue to be redefined as long as history lasts. Umberto Eco's strength in bringing this collection of texts and images together is his use of little known sources from the Middle Ages as well as Italian Renaissance authors such as Baldassare Castiglione who deserve to be better known. Binding, design and organisation are all first rate and this is a very readable and accessable text. Beauty is all that pleases................
Great I don't know how to put it, but I found the book to be quite fascinating in terms of giving specific levels of the idea of beauty in culture, society, and especially in history. It adjusts the idea of beauty and how it affects everyone's perception of psychology versus the time periods of different eras and such. It is enlightening and informative, as well as a book that keeps the notion of beauty in a broad perspective so as to not lean to one side more then another. It is fascinating to know how intelligent Eco really is, and that he seems to have moved my artistic passion through notion of looking at beauty through the eyes of a person who has been able to grasp this concept thoroughly well.
Beauty Elevated Eco's study of beauty and what constitutes it inspires an investigation into the nature of beauty itself, and in the process it also takes one on a tour of much of the most influential art of western history. An uplifting, thoughtful book by a great genius of modern times.
A guide to Transitions in Art I have been a fan of Mr. Eco's work since I read 'The Name of the Rose'. This book is a great example of the devotion Mr. Eco has in the imagery he describes in all of his other work (fictional and Non-Fictional). The book is sincere and a great guide though work which exemplifies the Beauty in the transitions Art has evolved though. The hard cover version of this book is beautiful indeed.
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