Eco, with his famously catholic erudition, has managed to put together an impressive number of specimens. Most of the time it was defined as the opposite of beauty, but almost no one ever devoted a treatise of any length to ugliness.” “In every century, philosophers and artists have supplied definitions of beauty,” he points out, “and thanks to their works it is possible to reconstruct a history of aesthetic ideas over time. Eco notes in his introduction, is rather harder to unearth than the history of beauty, which he treated in an earlier anthology. Eco divides his compendium into 15 themed chapters, each representing a different period or style in the history of ugliness. For the modern world, addicted to youth and ashamed of death, it is sickness, not sin, that is the real scandal. The matter-of-factness with which these images treat ugliness - their assumption that ugliness is not devilish or demonic, but simply, unavoidably there - makes them shocking in a way that the most fevered productions of the medieval imagination can’t match. There is the illustration from an early-19th-century medical text showing a man’s face destroyed by syphilis, reduced to lumps of blue-gray matter. There is Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson” (1632) with its respectable burghers gaping at the flayed arm of a corpse. 1490), in which the grandfather gazes thoughtfully at a boy, who is distracted by his pustulant, cauliflower-like nose. There is Ghirlandaio’s “Portrait of an Old Man with his grandson” (c. More disturbing than all these, however, are the straightforward, naturalistic representations of human deformity and decay.
Next to these visionary pictures, with their morose fusion of piety and misanthropy, the provocations of our century - like Frida Kahlo’s “The Broken Column” (1944), in which the artist’s body is shown split in half and studded with nails - seem merely flippant.
Anthony” (1505–06) with its hunched birdmen and huge crawling fish, or the greenish, pockmarked bodies of Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1515). Eco does not stint on details from Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Temptations of St. It is not just the overtly, deliberately terrifying pictures that have the power to breed monsters under the bed - though the classic examples of pictorial horror are all here. Page after page features the kind of bizarre, uncanny, and repulsive sights that, if you were to come upon them unprepared and at a susceptible age, you might never be able to forget. “On Ugliness” (Rizzoli, 456 pages, $45), the new anthology of grotesque images and texts edited by Umberto Eco, is a book to give children nightmares.
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