![]() These two quotations go to the heart of Eco’s book which traces the ever-changing understanding of what Beauty means. Midway through the book, de Michele makes this point:įor a painter portraying the Beauty of a body means responding to theoretical exigencies - what is Beauty and under what conditions is it knowable? - as well as practical ones - which canon, which tastes and social mores, allow us to describe a body as “beautiful”? How does the image of Beauty change over time, and how does it do so with regard to man and woman? The other eight were written by Italian novelist Girolamo de Michele. But how did the people who made it perceive the sculpture?Īs Italian intellectual Humberto Eco writes in History of Beauty, the 2004 book he edited:Įvery culture has always accompanied its own concept of Beauty with its own idea of Ugliness, even though - in the case of archeological finds - it is hard to establish whether the thing portrayed was really considered ugly or not…Įco wrote the book’s introduction and nine of its 17 chapters. You pick up a small sculpture which, to your Western eyes, seems to depict a deformed and twisted body. ![]() Consider the difficulty of those who pore through the dust and shards of earlier civilizations. ![]()
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