History of Beauty
Edited by Umberto Eco.  New York:  Rizzoli International Publications
Second Edition, April 2005.  Pp. 438

Reviewed by Dr. Susan K. Hedahl

            From one of the finest contemporary Renaissance minds, Umberto Eco, comes this visual and intellectual romp, History of Beauty.   It is certainly about visual art, but it is more.  Eco opens the book with an excellent essay on the related, yet different, concepts of beauty, art, culture, fashion and multiple adjacent topics, to expand this work beyond consideration as merely an art history book. 

            This work charts an historical chronology of beauty from the ancient Greeks to the twentieth century.  There are twenty-seven richly illustrated chapters, replete with detailed texts.  Some of the unexpected chapter titles include,  "Chapter V.  The Beauty of Monsters," and "Chapter XIII, The Religion of Beauty."    Eco adds eleven comparative tables "designed to visualize immediately how the diverse ideas of Beauty were re-visited and developed (and perhaps varied) in different epochs, in the works of philosophers, writers and artists that were sometimes very distant from one another." (p. 14)  In other words, a particular epoch's development and explication of what is understood to the "the beautiful" influences emerging views of beauty in other than just the visual arts 

"The beautiful" reveals itself as both fixed, and subject to historical change as its varied expressions recycle and emerge in unexpected ways.  One such cross-media link between the visual and the sermonic (written), is this:  "...we cannot say whether those who sculpted monsters on the columns or capitals of Romanesque churches considered them to be beautiful, yet we do have a text by St. Bernard (who did not consider such portrayals to be either good or useful) in which we learn that the faithful took pleasure in contemplating them (and in any case, in his condemnation of them, St. Bernard reveals that their appeal was not lost on him). (p. 12). 

The eleven comparative tables offer mega-categories of archetypes of beauty through many ages:  Venus (clothed and unclothed), Adonis (clothed and unclothed), Face and Hair of both Venus and Adonis, Madonna, Jesus, Kings, Queens, Proportions.  Eco uses these tables and then explores other realities in connection with them throughout the book:  ugliness, symbolism, nature, the sublime, the gloomy, melancholic, and the mechanical.

If you had to choose a single book that eloquently, humorously and in enormous historical and visual detail, looks at Western concepts of beauty, this is the book.

Eco has a wildly playful imagination and combined with enormous erudition, this book

truly charms.