The History of Ugliness

The long-awaited new edition of the world bestseller by Umberto Eco, author of the popular novels "The Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum", one of the most famous writers and philosophers of our time.

The book contains over 420 high-quality illustrations of masterpieces of world painting, sculpture, photography, cinema, and other forms of art – from antiquity to the avant-garde and kitsch of the 20th century.

Does ugliness always symbolize evil? Why have philosophers, artists, and writers for centuries consistently turned to deviations from the norm, disproportions, depicted the devil's tricks, the horrors of the underworld, the sufferings of martyrs, and the Last Judgment? How did contemporaries react to these works, and how do we perceive them today?

In "The History of Ugliness", Umberto Eco addresses the phenomenon of the grotesque, which has most often been viewed as the opposite of the beautiful, yet has never been thoroughly researched.

Typically, Ugliness is perceived as the opposite of beauty, but in reality, the beautiful and the grotesque are complementary concepts. It seems one can define one to understand what the other is. However, Ugliness has manifested itself in forms far more diverse and unpredictable than one tends to think.

By reading and examining this book, we embark on an incredible journey through the nightmares, horrors, and pathological obsessions of humanity over the past three thousand years of its existence. Sharp rejection coexists here with poignant bursts of compassion, disgust for ugly forms interspersed with decadent delight at seductive violations of all norms. Behind demons, fools, terrifying monsters, horrifying abysses, and astonishing anomalies lies a vast and largely unexpected iconographic layer. It is no coincidence that, encountering natural and spiritual ugliness, total disharmony and distortion, facing the insignificant, indecent, vulgar, and coarse, the disgusting, sinister, and terrifying, we exclaim: "How beautiful is Ugliness!"