On Ugliness

Ugliness has never meant one fixed thing, and this book follows how people have understood it across the centuries. Umberto Eco treats the idea as something that changes with each era, asking what a given culture has called ugly and why.

He looks for the concept in many forms, including painting, sculpture, literature, architecture and photography. Each chapter shows how ideas about the unpleasant, the grotesque and the deformed shifted over time, and how the shifts reflected broader cultural values.

The volume is heavily illustrated, and it works as a companion to Eco's earlier study of beauty. Eco was a semiotician and novelist, best known for The Name of the Rose, and his analytical habits shape this survey.