Summary
Umberto Eco: The History of Beauty
This extraordinary book with rich visual as well as textual content is intended for a small circle of intellectuals who from all spheres of science, and especially art, delve into morality, therefore also into philosophy. The book was edited by Umberto Eco.
We owe the title of the original «Storia della bellezza» to Eco, but the book deals not only with the philosophical definition of the term beautiful, but in parallel follows the storia di un`idea dellóccidente, that is, the history of a Western idea. The texts signed by Umberto Eco and Girolamo de Michele are an excellent synthesis of philosophy, history, art history and human everyday life. The book is divided into XVII chapters, which deal with the most significant determinants of individual periods and are followed chronologically. Each chapter poses a question, e.g. the beauty of monsters, from the shepherdess to the angelic figure of a woman, the religion of beauty, etc. They are also richly supplemented with written testimonies of writers, historians and artists, as well as numerous excerpts and illustrations from the codex, (from Homer's Iliad (8th - 7th century BC), through Dante Alighieri and his Divine Comedy (1265 - 1321) all the way to Luigi Pareyson and his Aesthetics 1954) so you can easily learn a lot of new concepts, for example, what are Cynocephali, Scapods, what is an instructive bestiary or rational planning of evil.
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