History of beauty / edited by Umberto Eco ; translated by Alastair McEwen.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Eco, Umberto.

Language:

English

Italian

Subjects (All):

Aesthetics--History.

Aesthetics.

History.

Art--Philosophy--History.

Art.

Art--Philosophy.

Art--History.

Literature--History.

Literature.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

438 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Rizzoli, 2004.

Summary:

"What is beauty? What is art? What is taste and fashion? Is beauty something to be observed coolly and rationally or is it something dangerously involving?" So begins Umberto Eco's intriguing journey into the aesthetics of beauty, in which he explores the ever-changing concept of the beautiful from the ancient Greeks to today.

Contents:

Comparative Tables

Nude Venus 16

Nude Adonis 18

Clothed Venus 20

Clothed Adonis 22

Face and Hair of Venus 24

Face and Hair of Adonis 26

Madonna 28

Jesus 30

Kings 32

Queens 34

Proportions 34

Chapter I The Aesthetic Ideal in Ancient Greece

1 The Chorus of the Muses 37

2 The Artist's Idea of Beauty 42

3 The Beauty of the Philosophers 48

Chapter II Apollonian and Dionysiac

1 The Gods of Delphi 53

2 From the Greeks to Nietzsche 57

Chapter III Beauty as Proportion and Harmony

1 Number and Music 61

2 Architectonic Proportion 64

3 The Human Body 72

4 The Cosmos and Nature 82

5 The Other Arts 86

6 Conformity with the Purpose 88

7 Proportion in History 90

Chapter IV Light and Color in the Middle Ages

2 God as Light 102

3 Light, Wealth, and Poverty 105

4 Ornamentation 111

5 Color in Poetry and Mysticism 114

6 Color in Everyday Life 118

7 The Symbolism of Color 121

8 Theologians and Philosophers 125

Chapter V The Beauty of Monsters

1 A Beautiful Portrayal of Ugliness 131

2 Legendary and Marvelous Beings 138

3 Ugliness in Universal Symbolism 143

4 Ugliness as a Requirement for Beauty 148

5 Ugliness as a Natural Curiosity 152

Chapter VI From the Pastourelle to the Donna Angelicata

1 Sacred and Profane Love 154

2 Ladies and Troubadours 161

3 Ladies and Knights 164

4 Poets and Impossible Loves 167

Chapter VII Magic Beauty between the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

1 Beauty Between Invention and Imitation of Nature 176

2 The Simulacrum 180

3 Suprasensible Beauty 184

4 The Venuses 188

Chapter VIII Ladies and Heroes

1 The Ladies... 193

2 ...and the Heroes 200

3 Practical Beauty... 206

4 ...and Sensual Beauty 209

Chapter IX From Grace to Disquieting Beauty

1 Toward a Subjective and Manifold Beauty 214

2 Mannerism 218

3 The Crisis of Knowledge 225

4 Melancholy 226

5 Agudeza, Wit, Conceits... 229

6 Reaching Out for the Absolute 233

Chapter X Reason and Beauty

1 The Dialectic of Beauty 237

2 Rigor and Liberation 241

3 Palaces and Gardens 242

4 Classicism and Neoclassicism 244

5 Heroes, Bodies, and Ruins 249

6 New Ideas, New Subjects 252

7 Women and Passions 259

8 The Free Play of Beauty 264

9 Cruel and Gloomy Beauty 269

Chapter XI The Sublime

1 A New Concept of Beauty 275

2 The Sublime Is the Echo of a Great Soul 278

3 The Sublime in Nature 281

4 The Poetics of Ruins 285

5 The "Gothic" Style in Literature 288

6 Edmund Burke 290

7 Kant's Sublime 294

Chapter XII Romantic Beauty

1 Romantic Beauty 299

2 Romantic Beauty and the Beauty of the Old Romances 304

3 The Vague Beauty of Je Ne Sais Quoi 310

4 Romanticism and Rebellion 313

5 Truth, Myth, and Irony 315

6 Gloomy, Grotesque, Melancholic 321

7 Lyrical Romanticism 325

Chapter XIII The Religion of Beauty

1 Aesthetic Religion 329

2 Dandyism 333

3 Flesh, Death, and the Devil 336

4 Art for Art's Sake 338

5 Against the Grain 341

6 Symbolism 346

7 Aesthetic Mysticism 351

8 The Ecstasy Within Things 353

9 The Impression 356

Chapter XIV The New Object

1 Solid Victorian Beauty 361

2 Iron and Glass: The New Beauty 364

3 From Art Nouveau to Art Deco 368

4 Organic Beauty 374

5 Articles of Everyday Use: Criticism, Commercialization, Mass Production 376

Chapter XV The Beauty of Machines

1 The Beautiful Machine? 381

2 From Antiquity to the Middle Ages 385

3 From the Fifteenth Century to the Baroque 388

4 The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 392

5 The Twentieth Century 394

Chapter XVI From Abstract Forms to the Depths of Material

1 "Seek His Statues among the Stones" 401

2 The Contemporary Re-Assessment of Material 402

3 The Ready Made 406

4 From Reproduced to Industrial Material to the Depths of Material 407

Chapter XVII The Beauty of the Media

1 The Beauty of Provocation or the Beauty of Consumption? 413

2 The Avant-Garde, or the Beauty of Provocation 415

3 The Beauty of Consumption 418.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (page 431) and indexes.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy has dustjacket retained.

ISBN:

0847826465 :

OCLC:

56906791