Historia de la fealdad

A comprehensive review of the "canons" of ugliness, signed by the great Umberto Eco.

After the History of Beauty, here is the History of Ugliness. Apparently, beauty and ugliness are concepts that mutually imply each other, and ugliness is generally considered to be the antithesis of beauty, to the point that defining the former would be enough to know what the latter is. However, the various manifestations of ugliness throughout the centuries are richer and more unpredictable than commonly believed.

Both the anthological fragments and the extraordinary illustrations in this book lead us, then, to travel a surprising itinerary made of nightmares, terrors, and loves of almost three thousand years, where feelings of revulsion and moving compassion go hand in hand, and the rejection of deformity is accompanied by decadent ecstasies before the most seductive violations of all classical canons. Among demons, madmen, terrible enemies and disturbing presences, between repulsive abysses and deformities that border on the sublime, navigating among freaks and ghosts, an extraordinarily broad and often unsuspected iconographic vein is discovered.

So, after having contemplated throughout these pages natural ugliness, spiritual ugliness, asymmetry, lack of harmony, and deformity, in a succession of the mean, weak, vile, banal, casual, arbitrary, crude, repugnant, clumsy, horrendous, insipid, nauseating, criminal, spectral, bewitching, satanic, repellent, disgusting, unpleasant, grotesque, abominable, hateful, filthy, dirty, obscene, frightful, abject, monstrous, horrifying, vicious, terrible, terrifying, tremendous, repulsive, nauseous, fetid, ignoble, unfortunate, lamentable, and indecent, the first foreign editor who saw this work exclaimed: "How beautiful ugliness is!"