Umberto Eco begins On Ugliness with the observation that there is an entire history of beauty but such a history did not happen with ugliness. Why is this? Perhaps, the author reasons, since ugliness was frequently defined throughout the ages as the opposite of beauty.

Well, if there ever was a book taking a giant step to rectify a neglect of ugliness, this is the book – 450 pages and nearly 1000 full-color illustrations as well as dozens of primary source excerpts chock-full of the ugly. And here’s a sampling of the synonyms Eco lists for the word: repellent, horrible, disgusting, grotesque, abominable, repulsive, odious, indecent, foul, obscene, repugnant, monstrous, horrifying, nightmarish, revolting, sickening, deformed, disfigured.



Why are we so fascinated and drawn to the ugly and monstrous? Turns out, such wondering has a long history. For example, Umberto Eco quotes Bernard of Clarevaux bemoaning how Christians are fascinated with monsters and monstrosities, “What place is there in the cloisters for that ridiculous monstrosity, that strange kind of deformed shape or shaped deformity? What are foul apes doing there? Or ferocious lions? Or monstrous centaurs? Or half-men? Or dappled tigers? You can see many bodies beneath a single head and vice versa many heads atop a single body. On the one side you can see a quadruped with a serpent’s tail, and on the other a fish with a quadruped’s head. Here, a beast that looks like a horse with the hindquarters of a goat, there a horned animal with the hindquarters of horse. In short there is everywhere such a great and strange variety of heterogeneous forms that there is more pleasure to be had in reading the marbles than the codices and in spending the whole day admiring one by one these images rather than meditating on the law of God.”

Again, why is this? The answer is as complex as human nature is complex. Taking one approach, we can look at a quote Eco includes from a novel by J.-K. Huysmans, “These nightmares attached him repeatedly. He was afraid to fall asleep. For hours he remained stretched on his bed, now a prey to feverish and agitated wakefulness, now in the grip of oppressive dreams in which he tumbled down flights of stairs and felt himself sinking, powerless, into abysmal depths.”



In a word, the monsters portrayed in paint, sculpture, photography, film and literature mirror the content of our dreamscapes and nightmare visions. On some level we want to come to grips with our nocturnal experience and the monstrous in art is a prime way to do so.

The author includes Andy Warhol’s Orange Car Crash, a print using the photograph of an overturned car with three people pinned underneath. This is a nightmare we in the modern world face as a living possibility nearly every day. Again, the ugly is very much part of our day to day experience and a living nightmare is forever looming.
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Umberto Eco begins ‘On Ugliness’ with the observation that there is an entire history of beauty but such a history did not happen with ugliness. Why is this? Perhaps, the author reasons, since ugliness was frequently defined throughout the ages as the opposite of beauty.

Well, if there ever was a book taking a giant step to rectify a neglect of ugliness, this is the book – 450 pages and nearly 1000 full-color illustrations as well as dozens of primary source excerpts chock-full of the ugly. And here’s a sampling of the synonyms Eco lists for the word: repellent, horrible, disgusting, grotesque, abominable, repulsive, odious, indecent, foul, obscene, repugnant, monstrous, horrifying, nightmarish, revolting, sickening, deformed, disfigured.

If anybody wonders why we are so fascinated and drawn to the ugly and monstrous, such wondering has a long history. For example, Umberto Eco quotes Bernard of Clarevaux bemoaning how Christians are fascinated with monsters and monstrosities, “What place is there in the cloisters for that ridiculous monstrosity, that strange kind of deformed shape or shaped deformity? What are foul apes doing there? Or ferocious lions? Or monstrous centaurs? Or half-men? Or dappled tigers? You can see many bodies beneath a single head and vice versa many heads atop a single body. On the one side you can see a quadruped with a serpent’s tail, and on the other a fish with a quadruped’s head. Here, a beast that looks like a horse with the hindquarters of a goat, there a horned animal with the hindquarters of horse. In short there is everywhere such a great and strange variety of heterogeneous forms that there is more pleasure to be had in reading the marbles than the codices and in spending the whole day admiring one by one these images rather than meditating on the law of God.”

Again, why is this? The answer is as complex as human nature is complex. Taking one approach, we can look at a quote Eco includes from a novel by J.-K. Huysmans, “These nightmares attached him repeatedly. He was afraid to fall asleep. For hours he remained stretched on his bed, now a prey to feverish and agitated wakefulness, now in the grip of oppressive dreams in which he tumbled down flights of stairs and felt himself sinking, powerless, into abysmal depths.”

In a word, the monsters portrayed in paint, sculpture, photography, film and literature mirror the content of our dreamscape visions. On some level we want to come to grips with our nocturnal experience and the monstrous in art is a prime way to do so.

The author includes Andy Warhol’s ‘Orange Car Crash’ a print using the photograph of an overturned car with three people pinned underneath. This is a nightmare we in the modern world face as a living possibility nearly every day. Again, the ugly is very much part of our day to day experience and a living nightmare is forever looming.

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Maybe the grotesque, all that is bizzare, the multi faces of evil are indeed more appealing than beauty for one reason it's easier to understand. This book was way much better than Eco's studies of beauty, like I said before, probably because ugliness it's just something that stands out and therefore easier to define, but not only that, the supportive texts the author used to base his thoughts were more precise and let's just say more interresting. The funny part is that, it is known that in order to place something "ugly" you'd only have to identify the "beautiful", but as it happens the author's book "History of Beauty" was not so good and after reading this you'll actually find that it's easier to identify the "beauty" after you get the "ugly". ( )

"In everyday life we are surrounded by horrifying sights. We see images of children dying of hunger, reduced to skeletons with swollen bellies; we see countries where women are raped by invading troops, and others where people are tortured, just as we are continually exposed to images from the not too distant past of other living skeletons doomed to the gas chambers. We see bodies torn apart by the explosions of a skyscraper or an aeroplane in flight, and we live in terror that tomorrow it may be our turn. We all know perfectly well that such things are ugly, not only in the moral but in the physical sense, and we know this because they arouse our disgust, fear, and repulsion -- independently of the fact that they can also arouse our compassion, indignation, instinct of rebellion and solidarity, even if we accept them with the fatalism of those who believe that life is none other than a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. No knowledge of the relativity of aesthetic values can eliminate the fact that in such cases we unhesitatingly recognize ugliness and we cannot transform it into an object of pleasure. So we can understand why art in various centuries insistently portrayed ugliness. Marginal as the voice of art may be, it attempted to remind us that, despite the optimism of certain metaphysicians, there is something implacably and sadly malign about this world."




Henry Fuseli, Macbeth Consults the Apparition of a Helmeted Head, 1783



Pieter Paul Rubens, Saturn Devouring his Son, 1636-7



Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, 1562



Hans Memling, Triptych with the Last Judgement, detail, 1467-71



Bartolomeo Passerotti, Caricature, sixteenth-seventeenth century



Bernardo Strozzi, Vanitas, 1630



Théodore Géricault, A Study of Severed Limbs, 1818-9



Otto Dix, Sylvia von Harden, 1926



Gustave Dore, Illustration for Tom Thumb, in Tales of Mother Goose by Charles Perrault, 1862



Train crash at the Gare Montparnasse, 22 October 1895 ( )

Assim como a História da Beleza, a História da Feiúra pode ser lida do início ao fim, para melhor entendimento da evolução do conceito, em partes aleatórias, para quem quer focar em determinadas épocas ou conceitos (o feio no romantismo é especialmente interessante) ou consultado como obra de referência. ( )