HISTORY OF BEAUTY - UMBERTO ECO

I remember reading the sequel to this, ON UGLINESS, in college. In fact, it was the desire for a quote I half-remembered from that book that drove me to pick-up this at the library since someone else had ON UGLINESS. I’ve got OU now and I’m working my way through it, but it’s clear they should function as one volume. Beauty is a harder subject to write about. You know that “happy families are all alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” quote? It works for beauty and ugliness too. Beauty is static, a timeless ideal; Ugliness changes. One gets the sense that Eco knows this, BEAUTY has several chapters that are basically about Ugliness. Even that quote I half remembered, which was by Baudelaire and about ugliness (I’ll go more into this in the ON UGLINESS review), was in this book. Irregardless, consider these one huge volume on Western aesthetics and it’s a remarkable achievement. The format itself might be the best thing about it for me. HOB is basically a picture book. Each chapter takes one narrow theme (depictions of heaven in the middle ages, art deco designs) and goes in. Eco gives us small essays as well as tons of beautiful large reprints of the images he’s discussing. He also includes tons of long quotes from writers like Plato, Shakespeare and the aforementioned Baudelaire (who gets a lot in, Eco is clearly a big fan). It’s great to see he’s tackling issues around the creation of beauty in non-visual art as well as visual. I really wish I had copies of these to keep, they’d be great coffee table books, something you can dip into and out of, enjoying it piecemeal. I had to sort of sprint through the thing to finish it in time, but the book really wants to be admired over time. Additionally, I wish the book would have focused more on human physical beauty and how it changes over time and how large social forces shape and use this designation. It is also, by its own admission, “Western”  But, the book is already long enough, perhaps I just need to read more philosophy of beauty stuff to get that itch scratched. Very moving, 444 delicate paintings.