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

Includes bibliographical references (page 431) and indexes.

Introduction -- Comparative tables -- Nude Venus -- Nude Adonis -- Clothed Venus -- Clothed Adonis -- Face and hair of Venus -- Face and hair of Adonis -- Madonna -- Jesus -- Kings -- Queens -- Proportions -- Chapter 1: Aesthetic Ideal In Ancient Greece -- 1: Chorus of the muses -- 2: Artist's idea of beauty -- 3: Beauty of the philosophers -- Chapter 2: Apollonian And Dionysiac -- 1: Gods of Delphi -- 2: From the Greeks to Nietzsche -- Chapter 3: Beauty As Proportion And Harmony -- 1: Number and music -- 2: Architectonic proportion -- 3: Human body -- 4: Cosmos and nature -- 5: Other arts -- 6: Conformity with the purpose -- 7: Proportion in history -- Chapter 4: Light And Color In The Middle Ages -- 1: Light and color -- 2: God as light -- 3: Light, wealth, and poverty -- 4: Ornamentation -- 5: Color in poetry and mysticism -- 6: Color in everyday life -- 7: Symbolism of color -- 8: Theologians and philosophers -- Chapter 5: Beauty Of Monsters -- 1: Beautiful portrayal of ugliness -- 2: Legendary and marvelous beings -- 3: Ugliness in universal symbolism -- 4: Ugliness as a requirement for beauty -- 5: Ugliness as a natural curiosity -- Chapter 6: From The Pastourelle To The Donna Angelicata -- 1: Sacred and profane love -- 2: Ladies and troubadours -- 3: Ladies and knights -- 4: Poets and impossible loves -- Chapter 7: Magic Beauty Between The Fifteenth And Sixteenth Centuries -- 1: Beauty between invention and imitation of nature -- 2: Simulacrum -- 3: Suprasensible beauty -- 4: Venuses -- Chapter 8: Ladies And Heroes -- 1: Ladies -- 2: Heroes -- 3: Practical beauty -- 4: Sensual beauty -- Chapter 9: From Grace To Disquieting Beauty -- 1: Toward a subjective and manifold beauty -- 2: Mannerism -- 3: Crisis of knowledge -- 4: Melancholy -- 5: Agudeza, wit, conceits -- 6: Reaching out for the absolute -- Chapter 10: Reason And Beauty -- 1: Dialectic of beauty -- 2: Rigor and liberation -- 3: Palaces and gardens -- 4: Classicism and neoclassicism -- 5: Heroes, bodies, and ruins -- 6: New ideas, new subjects -- 7: Women and passions -- 8: Free play of beauty -- 9: Cruel and gloomy beauty -- Chapter 11: Sublime -- 1: New concept of beauty -- 2: Sublime is the echo of a great soul -- 3: Sublime in nature -- 4: Poetics of ruins -- 5: Gothic style in literature -- 6: Edmund Burke -- 7: Kant's sublime.

Chapter 12: Romantic Beauty -- 1: Romantic beauty -- 2: Romantic beauty and the beauty of the old romances -- 3: Vague beauty of Je Ne Sais Quoi -- 4: Romanticism and rebellion -- 5: Truth, myth, and irony -- 6: Gloomy, grotesque, melancholic -- 7: Lyrical romanticism -- Chapter 13: Religion Of Beauty -- 1: Aesthetic religion -- 2: Dandyism -- 3: Flesh, death, and the devil -- 4: Art for art's sake -- 5: Against the grain -- 6: Symbolism -- 7: Aesthetic mysticism -- 8: Ecstasy within things -- 9: Impression -- Chapter 14: New Object -- 1: Solid Victorian beauty -- 2: Iron and glass: the new beauty -- 3: From Art Nouveau to Art Deco -- 4: Organic beauty -- 5: Articles of everyday use: criticism, commercialization, mass production -- Chapter 15: Beauty Of Machines -- 1: Beautiful machine? -- 2: From antiquity to the Middle Ages -- 3: From the fifteenth century to the Baroque -- 4: Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries -- 5: Twentieth century -- Chapter 16: From Abstract Forms To The Depths Of Material -- 1: Seek his statues among the stones -- 2: Contemporary re-assessment of material -- 3: Ready made -- 4: From reproduced to industrial material to the depths of material -- Chapter 17: Beauty Of The Media -- 1: Beauty of provocation or the beauty of consumption? -- 2: Avant-garde, or the beauty of provocation -- 3: Beauty of consumption -- Bibliographical references of anthology translations -- Index of anthology authors -- Index of artists.

From the Publisher: 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. While closely examining the development of the visual arts and drawing on works of literature from each era, Eco broadens his enquiries to consider a range of concepts, including the idea of love, the unattainable woman, natural inspiration versus numeric formulas, and the continuing importance of ugliness, cruelty, and even the demonic. Professor Eco takes us from classical antiquity to the present day, dispelling many preconceptions along the way and concluding that the relevance of his research is urgent because we live in an age of great reverence for beauty, "an orgy of tolerance, the total syncretism and the absolute and unstoppable polytheism of Beauty." In this, his first illustrated book, Professor Eco offers a layered approach that includes a running narrative, abundant examples of painting and sculpture, and excerpts from writers and philosophers of each age, plus comparative tables. A true road map to the idea of beauty for any reader who wishes to journey into this wonderful realm with Eco's nimble mind as guide.