Eco Umberto (ed.) On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea

Seeker & Warburg, 2004. — 418 p. — ISBN: 0436205173.Beauty is neither a history of art, nor a history of aesthetics but Umberto Eco draws on the histories of both these disciplines to define the ideas of beauty that have informed sensibilities from the classical world to modern times. In terms of form and style, Beauty has been conceived for a vast and diversified readership: taking in painting, sculpture, architecture, film, photography, the decorative arts, novels and poems, it offers a rich and intelligent panorama of this huge subject. It traces the philosophy of aesthetics through history and examines some of the many treatises that have sought to define it. Beauty is Umberto Eco at his most captivating and eclectic: we read not only of Botticelli and Michelangelo but of how the fashion of the 1960s owes much to ancient Egyptian dress, and how ancient Roman and eighteenth-century hairstyles have much in common. It makes the familiar new, and sheds a brilliant new light on the unfamiliar. Illustrated in full colour throughout and produced to the highest standards, Beauty is an indispensable book.The Aesthetic Ideal In Ancient Greece
The Chorus of the Muses
The Artist's Idea of Beauty
The Beauty of the Philosophers
[b]Apollonian and Dionysiac
The Gods of Delphi
From the Greeks to Nietzsche
[b]Beauty as Proportion and Harmony
Number and Music
Architectonic Proportion
The Human Body
The Cosmos and Nature
The Other Arts
Conformity with the Purpose
Proportion in History
[b]Light and Color in the Middle Ages
Light and Color
God as Light
Light, Wealth, and Poverty
Ornamentation
Color in Poetry and Mysticism
Color in Everyday Life
The Symbolism of Color
Theologians and Philosophers
[b]The Beauty of Monsters
A Beautiful Portrayal of Ugliness
Legendary and Marvelous Beings
Ugliness in Universal Symbolism
Ugliness as a Requirement for Beauty
Ugliness as a Natural Curiosity
[b]From the Pastourelle to the Donna Angelicata
Sacred and Profane Love
Ladies and Troubadours
Ladies and Knights
Poets and Impossible Loves
[b]Magic Beauty between the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
Beauty Between Invention and Imitation of Nature
The Simulacrum
Suprasensible Beauty
The Venuses
[b]Ladies and Heroes
The Ladies...
… and the Heroes
Practical Beauty...
… and Sensual Beauty
[b]From Grace to Disquieting Beauty
Toward a Subjective and Manifold Beauty
Mannerism
The Crisis of Knowledge
Melancholy
Agudeza, Wit, Conceits.
Reaching Out for the Absolute
[b]Reason and Beauty
The Dialectic of Beauty
Rigor and Liberation
Palaces and Gardens
Classicism and Neoclassicism
Heroes, Bodies, and Ruins
New ldeas, New Subjects
Women and Passions
The Free Play of Beauty
Cruel and Gloomy Beauty
[b]The Sublime
A New Concept of Beauty
The Sublime Is the Echo of a Great Soul
The Sublime in Nature
The Poetics of Ruins
The "Gothic" Style in Literature
Edmund Burke
Kant's Sublime
[b]Romantic Beauty
Romantic Beauty
Romantic Beauty and the Beauty of the Old Romances
The Vague Beauty of Je Ne Sais Quoi
Romanticism and Rebellion
Truth, Myth, and Irony
Gloomy, Grotesque, Melancholic
Lyrical Romanticism
[b]The Religion of Beauty
Aesthetic Religion
Dandyism
Flesh, Death, and the Devil
Art for Art's Sake
Against the Grain
Symbolism
Aesthetic Mysticism
The Ecstasy Within Things
The Impression
The New Objekt
Solid Victorian Beauty
Iron and Glass: The New Beauty
From Art Nouveau to Art Deco
Organic Beauty
Artides of Everyday Use: Criticism, Commercialization, Mass Production
[b]The Beauty of Machines
The Beautiful Machine?
From Antiquity to the Middle Ages
From the Fifteenth Century to the Baroque
The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
The Twentieth Century
[b]From Abstract Forms to the Depths of Material
"Seek His Statues among the Stones"
The Contemporary Re-Assessment of Material
The Ready Made
From Reproduced to Industrial Material to the Depths of Material
[b]The Beauty of the Media
The Beauty of Provocation or the Beauty of Consumption?
The Avant-Garde, or the Beauty of Provocation
The Beauty of Consumption