In “History of Beauty,” Umberto Eco explored the ways in which notions of attractiveness shift from culture to culture and era to era. With ON UGLINESS (Rizzoli, $45), a collection of images and written excerpts from ancient times to the present, all woven together with a provocative commentary and translated by Alastair McEwen, he asks: Is repulsiveness, too, in the eye of the beholder? And what do we learn about that beholder when we delve into his aversions? Selecting stark visual images of gore, deformity, moral turpitude and malice, and quotations from sources ranging from Plato to radical feminists, Eco unfurls a taxonomy of ugliness. As gross-out contests go, it’s both absorbing and highbrow.
Christ’s martyrdom earns a chapter. By the late Middle Ages, we learn, he was being depicted as a flesh-and-blood human, contorted in pain.(49) Fifteenth-century masterworks(52) share space here with Mel Gibson’s lacerated, cinematic Christ.(53) Eco asserts that while such a sight may be moving to some Christians, it might equally be sickening to a Buddhist or a Hindu.
Eco’s lexicon of all things repellent is exhaustive, including the “obscene, repugnant, frightening, abject, monstrous,” the “fetid, fearsome, ignoble, ungainly” and more. The wicked might fall under his heading “Witchcraft, Satanism, Sadism” or “The Ugliness of Woman From Antiquity to the Baroque Period.” With expertly chosen paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries, he demonstrates how images pretty to us might have stirred up misogynist anxieties not so long ago. Giacomo Grosso’s “Supreme Meeting” (1894)(218) depicts comely women, cavorting naked, strewn with flowers. The painting makes Eco’s ugliness cut because the women depicted are Satanists, hence repugnant and threatening to the moral order. Their very seductiveness might have excited fear of unbridled female potency — just the thing to prompt a shudder(tremble), a reflex inherent to any definition of ugliness.
The author includes several excerpts that tell us how deep are the roots of this fear. According to the Malleus Maleficarum (1486)(208), the malevolence of witches arises from “carnal lust, which is insatiable in them.” (Suggesting how much attitudes have evolved, the text goes on to thank the Almighty for sparing males such character flaws.) The idea that ugly is as ugly does held sway for some in the third century, when Tertullian argued that a pretty face became ugly when exposed to the extramarital gaze. In “Women, Wear a Veil,”(160) he inveighed against lipstick, rouge and hair coloring, telling matrons, “Don’t worry, O blessed ladies, no woman is ugly to her own husband; she was pleasing enough when she was chosen.”
But 2,000 years before Botox, in the first century, Martial had harsher words for mature women. “You walk around with a forehead more wrinkled than your stole / And breasts like cobwebs; the Nile crocodile / Has a tiny mouth compared with your maw.” For some, the decline of youth and fertility was hard on the eyes — and the nose. Elderly women were singled out for particular ridicule in a 13th-century commentary (“Smelly Old Lady”)(163) and another from the 15th century (“Malignant Old Woman”)(163). But Lucretia Marinelli’s “Nobility and Excellence of Women,”(167) from 1591, is a bold counterattack: “I say that all men are ugly compared with women; therefore they are unworthy of being loved.”
Poverty and illness cause some to avert their eyes, as does The Other, whose ethnicity or dress may place him in a minority within a society. Fascist material, like Gino Boccasile’s anti-Semitic postcard from 1943-44,(267) was used to illustrate the imagined moral inferiority of its subjects, as manifest in their physical features. But holding a mirror up to the propagandists, and proving what a malleable conceit ugliness was and is, Eco writes that “the facial features, the voice and the actions of the ‘ugly’ Jew became ... unequivocal signs of the moral deformity of the anti-Semite.”
Readers may strain to discern categorical ugliness in some of Eco’s chosen artworks and passages. In the chapter “Romanticism and the Redemption of Ugliness,” he includes turbulent — but therefore all the more lush — landscapes,(273,275) and an Emily Brontë passage describing the smoldering Heathcliff, whose “forehead, that I once thought so manly, and that I now think so diabolical, was shaded with a heavy cloud.”(286) By Eco’s criteria, anything stirring, or not utterly conventional and saccharine, would seem to merit inclusion in an encyclopedia of the off-putting.
Yet, in his analysis, the intentionally disharmonious can be anointed as a thing of beauty. By the 20th century, with “The Avant-Garde and the Triumph of Ugliness,” jarring forms, as exemplified by those of Picasso,(9) became central to an artistic creed that would have baffled the ancients, just as it did many gallerygoers of the day. Happily for readers, Eco chooses images — hundreds of them — as adroitly as his words, demonstrating the power of art to elevate even the most pitiable subject. “Ugliness can be redeemed,” he writes, “by a faithful and efficacious artistic portrayal.” He includes an image of a first-century statue of an aged “market lady.”(161) The decrepit crone becomes a paragon when carved in stone and placed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Ugliness can also be redeemed by human relationships and individual choice, even in this vapid age of Most Beautiful People lists. Inner virtue counts, and we may defy aesthetic guidelines when deciding where we’d most like to rest our eyes. The message in Domenico Ghirlandaio’s “Portrait of an Old Man With His Grandson” (circa 1490)(18) seems to be that love is blind. The old man has a deformed face, but the little boy seems oblivious to any defect as he gazes up, entranced, into his grandfather’s eyes.
The new beauty
by Roger Blackley
Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness is actually an extraordinarily attractive anthology.
Skin-deep beauty is notoriously subject to individual and social taste. But what about ugliness? Could that be a less transient, more essential condition? Umberto Eco’s On Beauty appeared in 2004, offering a wildly eclectic range of texts and pictures tied together by a highly readable narrative. Eco now revisits this winning formula with On Ugliness, a companion volume dedicated to beauty’s dark other.
As distinct from the extensively theorised notion of beauty, the history of ugliness is a far more marginal affair and one that, like beauty, takes on specific forms in different cultures and periods. Indeed, an awareness of the subjective nature of beauty is at the heart of European aesthetics, as when Hegel argues that non-Europeans would “consider our sculptures, pictures and music as meaningless or ugly”. Perhaps nothing registers historical change as vividly as the fate of the voluptuous figure, celebrated in former eras but currently redefined as fat and consequently ugly.
It is this historical relativity, crystallised as that curious phenomenon we know as “period” taste, that makes Eco’s companion volumes such compelling cultural history. He distinguishes between “ugliness in itself” and the portrayal of ugliness – the latter exemplifying Aristotle’s assertion that a masterful imitation of the repulsive can itself create beauty. And it is through such artistic portrayals that we gain access to the history of ugliness.
The astonishing images are the book’s greatest strength. They range from the well known to the utterly obscure and nutty, including a Renaissance depiction of a man eating his own arm. The superb irony is that On Ugliness is an extraordinarily beautiful book and one that will undoubtedly appeal to a broad audience.
Whether your interest is philosophy, literature, fashion or art – or demons, disembowelment, pestilence and pus – this anthology of the monstrous and repellent will delight with its compelling reproductions and brief but apposite quotations from a mind-boggling library of philosophy, history, poetry and fiction.
Beginning with “Ugliness in the Classical World”, we range across apocalypses, monsters and the “Ugliness of Woman between Antiquity and the Baroque”. Satanism and sadism lead towards the “Redemption of Ugliness” that comes with Romanticism. This was when the theory of the Sublime profoundly altered perceptions of the ugly and the horrific, rendering them thrilling and desirable – at least at a safe distance. Literature and art obliged with a “Gothic” corpus of murky terrors.
It is the avant-garde “Triumph of Ugliness” that most clearly illustrates Eco’s distinction between actual and formal ugliness, as well as confirm!ing the immense power of art. Adolf Hitler, himself a mediocre painter, purged German museums of “degenerate” art – especially those Expression!ist evocations of the sordid social climate that tolerated the emerging dictatorship. Ugliness has always had a social character, perceived by the “upper” classes as a possession of the “lower”. Yet in the republic of art it is the ugly duckling that often emerges as a masterpiece, while the expensive, critically acclaimed work gradually reveals itself as kitsch.
As in any decent anthology, it is the art of juxtaposition that performs a particular historical magic. One amazing spread near the end of the book, in the chapter “Ugliness Today”, contrasts two images of elaborately pierced, goggle-eyed grotesques from a 16th-century Hieronymus Bosch painting with a 1998 photograph of a punk.(428,429) Though Bosch intended to show Christ’s killers as outlaw barbarians, we nevertheless experience a frisson of familiarity. In the piercing department, my teenage niece could more than compete with Bosch’s villains.
On Ugliness will look handsome on the coffee table, but it is a book that also asks to be dipped into, its pictures and texts opening unexpected vistas into our human condition. Beauty may be transient but ugliness is forever – and far more interesting.
ON UGLINESS, edited by Umberto Eco (Harvill Secker, $95