History of beauty
By: edited by Umberto Eco ; translated by Alastair McEwen
Edition: Paperback edition.
Publisher: Rizzoli International Publications, Incorporated
Published: 2010
Language: eng
Number of pages: 438
ISBN-13: 9780847835300
Subjects: History; Literature; Art; Aesthetics; Philosophy; History and criticism
Work titles: Storia della bellezza. English
Description: 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.
Notes: Originally published in hardcover: New York : Rizzoli, 2004.

"The texts were written by Umberto Eco ... and Girolamo de Michele, who also edited the research on the passages of the anthology."

Includes bibliographical references (page 431) and indexes.
Table of contents: title: Comparative tables. Nude Venus; title: Nude Adonis; title: Clothed Venus; title: Clothed Adonis; title: Face and hair of Venus; title: Face and hair of Adonis; title: Madonna; title: Jesus; title: Kings; title: Queens; title: Proportions; title: The aesthetic ideal in ancient Greece. The chorus of the Muses; title: The artist's ideal of beauty; title: The beauty of the philosophers; title: Apollonian and Dionysiac. The Gods of Delphi; title: From the Greeks to Nietzsche; title: Beauty as proportion and harmony. Number and music; title: Architectonic proportion; title: The human body; title: The cosmos and nature; title: The other arts; title: Conformity with the purpose; title: Proportion in history; title: Light and color in the Middle Ages. Light and color; title: God as light; title: Light, wealth, and poverty; title: Ornamentation; title: Color in poetry and mysticism; title: Color in everyday life; title: The symbolism of color; title: Theologians and philosophers; title: The beauty of monsters. A beautiful portrayal of ugliness; title: Legendary and marvelous beings; title: Ugliness in universal symbolism; title: Ugliness as a requirement for beauty; title: Ugliness as a natural curiosity; title: From the Pastourelle to the Donna Angelicata. Sacred and profane love; title: Ladies and troubadours; title: Ladies and knights; title: Poets and impossible loves; title: Magic beauty between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Beauty between invention and imitation of nature; title: The simulacrum; title: Suprasensible beauty; title: The Venuses; title: Ladies and heroes . The ladies; title: ... And the heroes; title: Practical beauty; title: And sensual beauty; title: From grace to disquieting beauty. Towards a subjective and manifold beauty; title: Mannerism; title: The crisis of knowledge; title: Melancholy; title: Agudeza, wit, conceits; title: Reaching out for the Absolute; title: Reason and beauty. The dialectic of beauty; title: Rigor and liberation; title: Palaces and gardens; title: Classicism and Neoclassicism; title: Heroes, bodies, and ruins; title: New ideas, new subjects; title: Women and passions; title: The free play of beauty; title: A cruel and gloomy beauty; title: The sublime. A new concept of beauty; title: The sublime is the echo of a great soul; title: The sublime in nature; title: THe poetics of ruins; title: The "Gothic" style in literature; title: Edmund Burke; title: Kant's sublime; title: Romantic beauty. Romantic beauty; title: Romantic beauty and the beauty of the old romances; title: Romanticism and rebellion; title: Truth, myth, and irony; title: Gloomy, grotesque, melancholic; title: Lyrical Romanticism; title: The religion of beauty. Aesthetic religion; title: Dandyism; title: Flesh, death, and the devil; title: Art for art's sake; title: Against the grain; title: Symbolism; title: Aesthetic mysticism; title: The ecstasy within things; title: The impression; title: The new object. Solid Victorian beauty; title: Iron and glass: the new beauty; title: From Art Nouveau to Art Deco; title: Organic beauty; title: Articles of everyday use: criticism, commercialization, mass production; title: The beauty of machines. The beautiful machine?; title: From antiquity to the Middle Ages; title: From the fifteenth century to the Baroque; title: The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; title: The twentieth century; title: From abstract forms to the depths of material. "Seek his statues among the stones"; title: The contemporary re-assessment of material; title: The ready made; title: From reproduced to industrial material to the depths of material; title: The beauty of the media. The beauty of provocation or the beauty of consumption?; title: The avant-garde, or the beauty of provocation; title: The beauty of consumption.