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

Seeker & Warburg, 2004. — 418 p.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 color 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 ideas, 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.
Archives 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.