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BOOK REVIEW
ON BEAUTY
Umberto Eco (2004). On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea (London: Maclehose
Press).
INTRODUCTION
What is beauty? Why do theories of beauty matter? What is the relationship between
the terms ‘beauty’ and the ‘beautiful’? This illustrated book by Umberto Eco
demonstrates that the idea of beauty is what unites art criticism and literary criticism
in the history of ideas.1 The examples that Eco invokes here are therefore drawn
from both works of art and from works of literature. In addition to the paintings and
photographs that are used in this book, Eco also cites at length from theorists of art,
literature, and aesthetics.2 These illustrations and citations are juxtaposed to his main
argument. The reader can go through the different levels of the book simultaneously
or complete the main thread of the argument in the book before returning to those
parts that he or she would like to read again. This book is a comprehensive account
of the history of ideas that attends to the history of beauty; it was published with
1 For a concise introduction to and a lexical analysis of these themes, see Andrew Edgar and
Peter R. Sedgwick (1999, 2008). ‘Aesthetics,’ Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts (London and
New York: Routledge), pp. 4-7; Raymond Williams (1976, 1983). ‘Aesthetic,’ and ‘Art,’ in
Keywords:A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana Press), pp. 31-33 and pp. 40-
43 respectively; and Meyer H. Abrams and Geoffrey G. Harpham (2009).‘Aestheticism,’ in A
Handbook of Literary Terms (New Delhi: Cengage Learning), pp. 13-14.
2 For a brief account of Umberto Eco’s semiotic and linguistic theories, see Andrew Edgar
and Peter R. Sedgwick (2002). ‘Umberto Eco,’ in Cultural Theory: The Key Thinkers (London
and New York: Routledge), pp. 64-67. Readers interested in the semiology of the image in
art and photography should also see Roland Barthes (1977). Image Music Text, translated by
Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press), pp. 15-51; and Roland Barthes (1984). Camera Lucida
(London: Flamingo, Fontana Paperbacks) as a way of comparing the semiotic and
semiological approaches of Barthes and Eco to the structure and function of the image.

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books on the history of ugliness; and on ‘the infinity of lists’ as companion volumes.
This is however the first of the three volumes in this series. The main topics and
themes in this book include the following: the aesthetic ideals of the ancient Greeks;
the analytic distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in the history of
art, music, and drama; the relationship between beauty and its components such as
proportion and harmony; the metaphysics of light and colour in the Middle Ages;
the beauty of monsters; the role of beauty in the chivalric tradition of Knights; the
representation of ladies, heroes, and other disquieting forms of beauty; the
relationship between reason and beauty; theories of the sublime in art and poetry;
the idea of romantic beauty; the religious dimensions of the aesthetic; the invocation
of new physical objects in the locus of the beautiful; the beauty of machines; the
theory of the ready-made object; and the representation of contemporary forms of
beauty in the media.
ON GREEK AESTHETICS
Eco begins his history with the aesthetic ideals of ancient Greece because the Trojan
War was fought for the hand of Helen. She is however ‘absolved of the calamities’
that ensued in the wake of her marriage to Paris because of her immortal beauty. In
other words, the point that Eco makes is that the beauty of Helen was not just a
matter of aesthetics in the domestic sense of the term.
It went on to affect the history of the Greek and Trojan states and became the subject
matter of both Homer’s epic poetry and Greek tragedy. In addition to the Greek
poets, the Greek philosophers were preoccupied with beauty as well. This idea is
taken up extensively for analysis in the dialogues of Plato (where there is an attempt
to differentiate between the ‘ideal, spiritual, and functional’ forms of beauty). These
three aspects were required to account for the ‘inner beauty of the soul’ as opposed
to the ‘outer beauty of the physical body.’ The true object of Platonic beauty however
was the contemplation of ideal geometrical forms that are twice removed from
empirical reality. The whole point of being trained as a Platonic philosopher was to
come to terms with these forms of geometrical beauty by ascending to higher levels
of intellection. This is a philosophical motif that eventually percolated into the
ontology of mathematics, the language of nature, the history of science, and the

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Gods of Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein.3 Plato also invokes ideas like ‘number,
harmony, order, measure, proportion, ratio, and splendour’ in his description of the
beautiful. It is in the dialogues of Plato then that we find the embryonic vocabulary
of aesthetics that will be taken up by those who are ‘belated’ in the Greek tradition of
aesthetics.4
THE TRUE, THE GOOD, AND THE BEAUTIFUL
In addition to aesthetics, there was an ethical dimension to beauty as well; that is
because for the Greeks beauty is not reducible to aesthetic objects. It was more of an
attitude to life that is preoccupied with justice, a sense of limits, the pursuit of areté,
and the avoidance of tragic flaws like hubris and excess (lest it activate the death
instinct).5 Furthermore, the Greek philosophers did not invoke the beautiful in
isolation; they thought more in terms of the conceptual triad of ‘the True, the Good,
and the Beautiful.’6 The Greek deities that correspond to these ideals and the
violation of these ideals were the gods, Apollo and Dionysus. Greek tragedy, as
Nietzsche pointed out, was basically a conflict between the values represented by
Apollo and Dionysus; and the catharsis that would ensue in the collective minds of
spectators when confronted by the tragic consequences of this conflict on stage.7 This
conflict of values was however not reducible to Greek tragedy. It was to be taken up
later as conflicting impulses in the history of Western art as well. It also represents
the psychic conflicts that Sigmund Freud would identify with the different layers of
the human mind (which he went on to model in psychoanalytic theory by invoking
3 See Christopher Norris (1991). Spinoza and the Origins of Critical Theory (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell), The Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory Series, edited by Michael Payne and
Harold Schweizer.
4 For a theory of belatedness in the history of poetry, see Harold Bloom (1997). The Anxiety of
Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
5 There is an interesting analysis in Lacanian psychoanalysis on the relationship between
beauty and desire, see Jacques Lacan (1992). ‘The Function of the Beautiful,’ The Seminar of
Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 1959-1960, translated by Dennis Porter, edited by
Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Tavistock/Routledge), pp. 231-240.
6 See Stuart McCready (2001). ‘Pleasure, Happiness and the Good: Insights of the Greek
Philosophers,’ The Discovery of Happiness (London: MQ Publications), pp. 56-79.
7 See the entries on ‘Apollo/Apollonian’ and ‘Dionysus/Dionysian,’ in Peter R. Sedgwick
(2009). Nietzsche:The Key Concepts (London andNew York: Routledge), pp. 3-4 and pp. 37-39
and Friedrich Nietzsche (1993). The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, translated by
Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin Books).

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the Oedipus myth in the Theban plays of Sophocles).8 An important function of art
criticism and literary criticism then has been to explore the crucial analytic
distinction between the forms of beauty associated with Apollo and those associated
with Dionysus. The former is usually invoked in the ideal context of sculpture and
individuation; and the latter is mainly associated with rapturous forms of music and
the loss of individuation during collective festivities as embodied in the structure
and performance of Greek tragedy.9
GREEK ART, MUSIC, AND MATHEMATICS
The mathematical dimensions of music were not lost on the Greeks because they
understood the structural relationship between ‘mathematical ratios and musical
sounds.’ Greek musicians even experimented with managing the moods of
individual subjects by varying the kinds of music that they would be exposed to
during a performance. The Greeks for instance differentiated between the Phrygian
and Hypophrygian modes in music; the former would ‘excite’ the listening subject
while the latter would have a ‘calming’ effect. The Greek preoccupation with ‘ratio
and proportion’ had important consequences for their approach to architecture as
well. So, for instance, the façade of classical Greek buildings would correspond to
the ratios that constituted the intervals of the musical scale. These forms of aesthetic
continuity between approaches to art, music, and mathematics in ancient Greece
began to percolate into mainstream European society during the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance through the treatises of Leon Alberti, Albrecht Dürer, Luca Pacioli,
and Vitruvius. This diffusion of Greek thought led to the large-scale application of
ideas like ‘eurhythmy, symmetry, and proportion between bodily parts’ in European
art, architecture, and sculpture.10 The idea of proportion was however considered
mainly from the point of view of the spectator and not defined in terms of
mathematical abstraction even if this meant introducing structural distortions in the
art object or an architectural construct to make it look better. The best known
example of this is the artificial bulge built into the middle of a column in the façade
of Greek temples in order to make them look straight from a distance; other aspects
of the Greek aesthetics of proportion included ideas like ‘form, moral beauty,
8 Sophocles (2001). The Complete Plays, translated by Paul Roche (New York: Signet Classics).
For an analysis of whether this appropriation of Oedipus was adequate for the purposes of
psychoanalytic theory and for a comparison of the Oedipus and Hamlet complexes, see
Harold Bloom (1994). ‘Freud: A Shakespearean Reading,’ The Western Canon: The Books and
School of the Ages (New York: Riverhead Books), pp. 345-366.
9 Friedrich Nietzsche (1977). ‘Art and Aesthetics,’ The Nietzsche Reader, translated by R. J.
Holligdale (London: Penguin Books), pp. 125-148.
10 For a lucid description of the role played by Greek thought in European art, see Edith
Sichel (1926). The Renaissance (London: Williams and Norgate Ltd.)

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suitability to the purpose, and mutual collaboration.’ There was also a preoccupation
with the mystical symbolism of numbers like four and five during these periods in
European history because they not only corresponded to a number of natural
phenomena, but represented the human quest for moral perfection. An important
theory that is worth mentioning in this context relates the epistemic subject, the
artist, and the discourse of philosophy to the world-at-large; it was known as ‘homo
quadratus’ - what it meant, to put it simply, was that the ‘cosmos is like a large man
and man is like a small cosmos.’ In other words, the Greeks were not just interested
in the cosmos as such, but in how the epistemic subject relates to the cosmos in the
attempt to attain harmony and a sense of proportion; technical terms like
‘microcosm, macrocosm, and heterocosm’ then are a part of that intellectual heritage
of how the subject of aesthetics, knowledge, and ethics relates to the cosmos.
THE METAPHYSICS OF LIGHT AND COLOUR
It is also important to note the role played by light and colour in the aesthetics of the
Middle Ages. Though the towns and villages of Europe were dark after dusk, the
paintings of the period give the impression that the surroundings were bright; these
paintings were conceived to be ‘luminous’ and radiate light rather than merely reflect it.
Thomas Aquinas defined beauty as requiring three important attributes; they were
‘proportion, integrity, and claritas.’ What Aquinas meant by ‘claritas’ included both
‘clarity and luminosity.’ The importance of light cannot be underestimated in this
period; it was invoked by painters from both an aesthetic and a metaphysical point
of view. The aesthetics itself was a reflection of the underlying metaphysics since
light was situated in the locus of God in a number of cultures including the Semitic,
the Egyptian, and the Persian. The ethical schema within their value systems was
described as an ongoing struggle between the ‘forces of light’ and the ‘forces of
darkness’ in these cultures. Pictorial representations of such conflicts used the
symbolism of fire and colour to make their symbolic points. The divine was thought
to take the form of a ‘luminous current’ that permeated the cosmos. In addition to
the image of the luminous current, God was also conceived as a ‘fountain of light or
as a stellar ray.’ All these symbolic images of light in the locus of God had the idea of
a cosmic ‘flow’ in common. The symbolism of light was also related to the
symbolism of colour. The rich adorned themselves with the colour purple. Given the
high cost of dyes, this colour came to symbolize the nobility. Prominent colours also
included blue and black because of their use in stained glass windows in mediaeval
churches and in the outfits of Knights. The play of light on colour was an important
cause for creating the effect of beauty; that is why the symbolism of colours like
purple, blue, black, and green (which symbolized birth and regeneration) played an
important part in both the metaphysics of light and the cosmology of light in the

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Middle Ages. In other words, as St. Bonaventure put it, ‘light is the principle of all
Beauty’ – a point that the Italian poet Dante understood when he wrote:
O splendour of God! By means of which I saw
The lofty triumph of the realm veracious,
Give me the power to say how I saw!
There is a light above, which visible
Makes the Creator unto every creature,
Who only in beholding him has peace… 11
The main difference between Aquinas and St. Bonaventure though is that for the
former, light is mainly ‘physical in its nature;’ whereas for the latter, it is considered
to be a ‘metaphysical’ category since it reveals an attribute of God himself. What
Dante’s poetry represents then is the attempt to work-through these opposing
dimensions of light and make them converge into a unified symbol.
THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE UGLY
Likewise beauty takes on a more significant meaning when it is contrasted with
something ugly. The reason Eco finds it important to invoke this term in a study of
beauty is that there is an important difference between what is ‘ugly in nature’ and
‘representations of ugliness’ in art. What is ugly in nature is not ugly in art because
the act of representing something in art makes it a form of ugliness rather than
restrict it to what is inherently ugly in nature. That is the transformative power of
art. A good instance of this transformative power is the representation of the figure
of ‘Socrates as Silenus.’ The character of Socrates in the Platonic dialogue is not as
ugly as the historical figure on which it is based because of the representational
power that we attribute to Plato as a writer. Furthermore, Socrates emerges in a
specific narrative or dialectical context in the Platonic dialogues that makes him
attractive to Alcibiades (who even attempts to seduce Socrates). That is why Kant
feels compelled to point out that ‘fine art reveals its superiority in the beautiful
descriptions it gives of things that in nature would be ugly or unpleasant.’12 There
are a number of characters in the history of art who come under this category; they
include the representation of the devil with horns, androgynes, astomari, fauns,
pygmies, sciapods, etc. These characters are considered ugly in nature but not in art;
it is important not to conflate what is ugly in nature with what is known as ugliness
in art. The paintings of Hieronymous Bosch is the best example that Eco can invoke
for the transformative power of art to make misshapen creatures into something
artistic or even attractive albeit within its representational confines.
11 Dante Aligheri, Paradiso XXX, vv. 97-120 cited in the text under review, p. 129.
12 Immanuel Kant cited by Eco in the text under review, p. 133.

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FORMS OF BEAUTY
The final part of this history of beauty is the attempt to list the canonical forms of
beauty during the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the
Renaissance before Eco considers aesthetic philosophies like romanticism and the
‘art-for-art’s-sake’ movement. Eco begins with an analysis of the ‘transfiguration of
beauty’ in courtly love and its relationship to the perpetual deferral of desire in the
relationship between the Lady and the Knight who is sworn into her service. In this
model of courtly love the Lady is always the object cause of desire, but not the object
of jouissance (since this form of courtly love is not meant to be consummated). That is
why it was of great interest to both artists and poets. The inscrutable and enigmatic
women in the work of Leonardo da Vinci, for instance, might have well begun from
the tradition of the Lady (who remains fundamentally unknown to her lover) in
courtly love. Reformation artists however preferred a model of beauty that was
either practical or sensuous, but not one that remained totally unfathomable. The
main forms of beauty during these periods included ‘the gracious, the sacred, the
profane, the superhuman, the cruel, the gloomy, the romantic, and the sublime.’ This
will come as a revelation to most readers who will not be able to conjure up any of
these forms except perhaps ‘the sacred, the profane, and the romantic.’ And, finally,
Eco considers the religion of beauty in aesthetic movements that celebrated art as an
end in itself rather than as a means to improving society.
CONCLUSION
While analysing each of these forms of beauty at length is beyond the scope of this
review, it will at least give readers a feel for the genealogy of beauty in the history of
Western art.
Umberto Eco’s history culminates in the representation of beauty in contemporary
media as that is the main source of ideas about the contemporary canons of beauty
in the modern world. This necessarily involves a melange of representations
including those of modern art, popular art, graphic art, comic book art, the ready-
made, the avant-garde, and so on. The proliferation of these forms of the beautiful,

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Eco concludes, makes it difficult to identify the aesthetic ideal in contemporary society in a
way that was possible for the earlier eras in the history of ideas. This is a book that is
under-theorised by Eco’s high standards (as a semiotician) in the bid to interest the
common reader. What is bound to impress both academic and common readers
however is that it is completely un-obtrusive. The reader can use it to theorise the
analytic distinction between terms like beauty and the beautiful without being told
categorically how to think about the history of beauty. Needless to say, that must
have taken a lot of theoretical restraint on the part of Umberto Eco who is best
known for his work in areas like the history of linguistics and the semiotics of
popular culture. This book will be an invaluable addition to those interested in not
only the history of art and architecture, but also to those who are keen to engage
with the history of ideas.
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN