How a history of ugliness became a thing of beauty

STANDARDS of beauty change with time — it seems strange to some that anyone could have regarded the flabby, untoned bodies of 1970s films as beautiful. But ugly is easy, isn’t it? It’s misshapen, repellent, snagging on something instinctive in us. Ugliness is yeuch.

Umberto Eco shows that it isn’t so simple. It is 30 years since his first novel, The Name of the Rose, propelled the then middle-aged academic — he will be 80 next month — to worldwide fame. He has been a prolific writer ever since. Meanwhile, he has pursued his academic studies — albeit in the grand manner of one whom wealth has liberated from the publish-or-perish treadmill. He is in the fortunate position of being able to follow his interests.

The result, in this case, is a paradoxically beautiful book, with the kind of production values rarely seen outside expensive illustrated art books. On Ugliness — like Eco’s earlier book On Beauty — is an exquisite production, filled with images from paintings, stills from strange films and quotations from old books. It does not describe its thesis: it illustrates it, in great depth and sophistication.

Many of the illustrations — whether of grizzled tramps or leering demons — have an exaggerated, cartoonish form of ugliness that is hard to take seriously. Many are, in a weird way, beautiful.

Eco was originally a medievalist: there are few people who know as much about the 13th century or Thomas Aquinas. If this book has a flaw, it is that he dwells too lovingly on this period, explaining how our modern secular concept of ugliness is rooted in a medieval system where physical corruption was assumed to mirror the state of the soul. Demons and bad people were ugly, apart from a few exceptionally powerful ones, such as Lucifer, who might fool people by appearing beautiful.

When he does leave his favourite era, there is something rushed about the way he hurries past the birth of modernity, which we can see in Rembrandt’s paintings and Shakespeare’s plays. He explains how attitudes to nature changed: mountains stopped being dangerous and inaccessible (and thus ugly) and became sublime, picturesque, and beautiful. An industrial revolution threw up an urban proletariat and new forms of misery, which artists and writers then catalogued.

Simultaneously, industrial progress turned classical aesthetics on its head. If you thought a Greek temple was perfect and railway bridges hideous, how could you evaluate the majesty of the Eiffel tower? We are still, as a society, trying to work this out — trying, for example, to decide whether wind turbines are beautiful or ugly. There is much that Eco could have said about our contemporary dilemmas, but he never really gets to grips with them. This is a work of art and of erudition, but it is also the product of a kind of laziness.

Or perhaps — as ‘ugly’ so often is — the word ‘lazy’ is too harsh. Eco has earned the right to luxuriate in his knowledge, to display yet again his feel for the medieval mind. That is, or ought to be, enough. The aesthetics of the computer age can be left to other writers.