On Ugliness

On Ugliness is an essay by Umberto Eco, published in 2007 by the Italian house Bompiani. It serves as a continuation of his 2004 work On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea. Like its predecessor, it combines literary excerpts and illustrations of artworks from antiquity to the present to explore what it means to be ugly.

Eco begins by noting that ugliness is a polysemic concept, tied to emotions such as rejection or disgust that hinder a purely rational approach. For the ancient Greeks, beauty was associated with harmony, so ugliness meant a lack of it, in both the physical and the moral sense. Christianity, viewing the universe as a divine work, shifted ugliness toward sin and suffering, and the art of death and the devil exaggerated horrific forms to instil fear in believers. Later chapters turn to the comic, the obscene and caricature, and the modern additions of kitsch and camp. The book closes with a survey of ugliness's current plurality of meanings, in line with postmodern relativism.