Beauty

Umberto Eco, ed. History of Beauty . Translated by Alastair McEwen. New York: Rizzoli, 2004. 438pp.

Bursting with splashy reproductions of art work from the ancient Greeks to the present, Eco’s History of Beauty could pass for a survey of Western art. Eco’s purpose, however, is broader; he intends a history of beauty and conceptions of beauty. In earlier eras, the association of beauty with fine art was not so instinctive as it is with us. Instead, “Beauty was a quality that could be possessed by natural things . . . while the task of art was solely to do the things it did well . . . to such an extent that art was a term applied even-handedly to the work of painters, sculptors, boat builders, carpenters, and barbers alike.” Hundreds of quotations about beauty and art from philosophers, theologians, artists, and critics fill the margins. Along the way, Eco and his collaborators discuss classical notions of proportion, light and color, ugliness and beauty, the sublime, and the functional beauty of modern machinery. Eco, who has published work on Thomas Aquinas’s aesthetics, gives due attention to the religious impulse behind the pursuit of beauty, and devotes several chapters to a sensitive treatment of the medieval mystical-aesthetic notion that “color is the cause of beauty.” History of Beauty is not only fascinating intellectual history, but a delight to the eyes and desirable to make one wise.