The History Of Beauty
(Umberto Eco)
What is beauty? Someone could answer: it is what Nicole Kidman has got, if such a person thinks this actress is beautiful. But I could mention other beautiful things: works of art, mudical compositions, urban and natural landscapes, female and male models...Umberto Eco and Girolamo de Michele published Historia de la belleza (Barcelona: Lumen 2005) not to define the concept of beauty but to explain in seventeen chapters the historical reasons that created it. This way a reader will meet the presence of beauty both in the aeshethic ideals of the Greek and in the mediatic consumer products of today. Eco embraces the main historical periods of the Western culture in an effort to understand that beauty is a historical notion that has been subject to change in the course of centuries due to philosofical, literary artistic technological and social reasons. The book was translated into Spanish by Maria Pons Irazazabal. What attracts the attention, apart from the fact that it is fully illustrated, are the tables of comparative images. You can observe, for example, the evolution of naked Venus: from the Venus of Willendorf, a sculpture of the Third millennium B.C., going past the Venus de Milo, of the second century B.C., to the Venus of Giorgione (1509), of Tiziano (1538) of Velasquez (1650) and of Manet (1863) just to mention some of them, comparing them with contemporary beauties such as Monica Bellucci (1997), There is also a comparative table of the d Adonis, that finishes with Schwarzeneger, which is not meant to start a polemic. After that we can see the dressed Venuses and dressed Adonises, the transformation of the Virgin Mary's images, of Jesus's and of the European Kings' and Queens'. Moreover, it is a work to be used to learn that human beauty depends on the concept that certain cultural elites have mantained in certain ages.
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