History of Beauty edited by Umberto Eco and On Ugliness

beautyHistory of Beauty is a heavy lift by many standards. Filled with sumptuous color plates (it is a Rizzoli book, enough said), and writing by Alastair McEwen, so maybe that’s why the edited by….never mind, argh.

Beauty is dissected and poked and rotated and placed in context and related contexts under your head will explode. It is a fantastic read if you only read one sentence at a time and mull it over, maybe reading it three times while you think about what was said. If the room you are in is very quiet, you might venture a paragraph, but not while hungry or tired or with an upcoming appointment.

The book begins with a lovely survey of various classifications of beauty through time, nude men and women of course were an easy find, plus Venus, Madonnas; I should have expected it after the male beauty included George Clooney under the “Clothed Adonis” category, but I did not and laughed out loud at the appropriate inclusion of a 1991 photograph of Madonna.

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