On Ugliness [Hardcover]

The Italian title of this book is `A History of Ugliness'. This is the accompanying volume to Eco's `On Beauty', and follows more or less the same kind of structure, although there are no opening comparative thumbnails of ugliness to match the Venuses and Adonises of its earlier companion. Interestingly, the word `ugliness' is not printed with an initial capital, as was `Beauty' in the earlier publication. I refer to Eco's exploration of the concept of ugliness throughout this review, but this volume is really a source-book. Each chapter consists of Eco's summation of and commentary upon the chosen texts that follow. In this respect, the book is to be doubly treasured.

Whilst this format is repeated from that of `On Beauty', there is nevertheless a change is one of emphasis; in this volume there is a subtle move away from a focus on art to a focus instead on literature. It took me awhile to notice this. Take, for example, the seventh chapter on `The Devil in the Modern World', where Dante, Tasso, Milton, and Goethe - and on to Ian Fleming - dominate discussion rather than Fuseli or Grunewald. The following chapter on `Witchcraft, Satanism, Sadism' features artworks by Goya, Rosa, Fuseli, Titian, Bosch, and Caravaggio, but there are no references to these in the accompanying text. Instead, we have Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Ovid, Sade, Poe, Conrad, Orwell, Kafka, even Eco himself. It should come as no surprise to learn that the two artists with the greatest number of illustrated works in this book (five each) are Fuseli and Bosch.

Eco commences his review in the classical world, where morality was more directly linked with physicality. Christianity to a certain extent opposed classical precepts by seeing beauty in all of God's creation, even in Christ's suffering. But if beauty is good, whence evil? Eco's exploration moves on in later chapters to explorations of the diabolic, of fantastical creatures, of the excesses of carnival and the obscene.

It is interesting how in modern secular times, the `evil one' "becomes more dangerous and worrying because he is no longer innocently ugly as he was once portrayed." Quoting Schiller, Eco suggests that today's `civilised' behaviour exists only because cinema has replaced public executions. I would also add football matches. He amply demonstrates that the taste for cruelty is well-rooted in human nature, "the devil no longer has any function regarding these practices": the `evil one' is within us all.

Our journey through the history of ugliness arrives in chapter ten with the Romantics and some revealing considerations for the thoughtful art-theorist. Lessing's view that "poetry, the art of time, describes an action, while sculpture (like painting, the art of space) can only portray an instant" is invoked. Thus the fixing of that instant requires that "the disfiguring violence of physical pain" be portrayed beautifully. Poetry has time to make that reconciliation in myriads of ways. And Eco's book epitomises that distinction between literary description and artistic portrayal. (One can also mention here how poetry relies on imagination whereas art negates it.)

What Lessing actually wrote is that, "Painting, as an imitative faculty, can express ugliness: painting, as a fine art, cannot ..." The former is truth, nature's truth; the latter is what? Convention? Nobility? Lessing says `Pleasure', but we would still prefer the latter on our walls, and not be constantly reminded of the former. To a large extent, Lessing's view was superseded by that of the Sublime, whose ugliness is also explored by Eco through, for instance, the form of the gothic novel.

Eco follows the route from Romanticism to industrial ugliness ("the squalor of progress") and on to the avant-garde, where beautiful things are painted in an ugly way, and ugliness is painted beautifully. "Today, everyone recognise [sic] as beautiful all those works that had horrified their fathers." This includes such modern conceptions of ugliness as kitsch and camp.

Eco's exploration comes right up to the new millennium. He concludes that ugliness, like beauty, is a relative term - relative to time and to culture - and that ugliness can contribute to beauty. And yet the physiological reaction to ugliness, whether it be a painted representation, a literary description, a piece of heavy metal music, or an excerpt from a horror movie "leads us to correct the relativist perspective". Pictures of the persecutions portrayed by Bosch are set side-by-side with that of a punk rocker. Auschwitz, 9/11, child-abuse, torture, famine: "No knowledge of the relativity of aesthetic values can eliminate the fact that in such cases we unhesitatingly recognise ugliness and we cannot transform it into an object of pleasure."

There are some surprising typographical errors, and we have `Clusone' on page 64 but `Glusone' on page 67; and the illustration on page 93 is not credited. But these are minor quibbles. The book is replete with illustrations. There are some marvellous reproductions of artistic works, many of which were quite new to my eyes, such as Fuseli's `Macbeth', Waterhouse's `Ulysses & the Sirens', and Memlings's `Last Judgement'.

The book ends with an essential bibliography, references, and indices of authors/sources and artists.

A companion to Eco's other work, "On Beauty", this is very much the flip side of the same coin. Clearly designed to look very similar, "On Ugliness" is an essential purchase if you already own "On Beauty". As with the other book, it is chronological look at Ugliness, though it is also thematic - I suppose one could say that Eco highlights the key themes in each period of history.

Those hoping for the whole book to be in the voice of Eco might be disappointed; this is more of an anthology than a presentation of an academic thesis. However, there is a good introduction by Eco, and his skill has definitely been expertly deployed in the selections made, both of the images and the texts.

Beware - some of the images are not for those of a fragile disposition - they are pretty ugly!