Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38990 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-20
• Released on: 2004-11-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 438 pages

Amazon.com Review
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.

From Publishers Weekly
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 Loveor Cranach's Venus with Cupid Stealing Honey seem, if possible, even more immediate, and related to our own amorous profanities and thefts.
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From Booklist
Given the sophistication of Eco's celebrated novels, the most recent being Baudolino (2002), and his scholarly work in semiotics, readers will expect his "review of ideas of Beauty over the centuries," as he so modestly characterizes this brimming and provocative volume, to be at once intellectually elaborate and great fun, and, indeed, it is. Focused primarily on the human form as depicted in works of art, beginning with the ancient Greeks and striding confidently into the age of the machine; elegantly designed and, yes, beautifully illustrated, Eco's mapping of our ever-changing definition of beauty draws on philosophy, theology, poetry, and science as he tracks beauty's permutations under the influence of ideas, mysticism, social upheaval, economics, politics, and technological innovation. A lover of language as well as image, Eco showcases literary beauty in the clarion writings he so judiciously excerpts. Erudite and ardent, Eco contemplates the complex relationship between nature and art, beauty and love, and vigorously explicates depictions of ugliness, without which our sense of beauty would not exist. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

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.