The doubtful eye of the beholder

In this historic moment of struggle between freedom and tyranny, with the destinies of entire nations hanging in the balance, the question of what ‘beauty’ is might seem a frivolous one, best put off until happier times. Until, that is, one remembers that now is always a historic moment, that the destinies of nations are always hanging in the balance. Given this, the contemplation of beauty seems like a perfectly reasonable way to pass an afternoon.

Umberto Eco has kindly laid it all out for us in On Beauty, an illustrated sourcebook of ideas about the nature of Beauty (that’s his capital ‘B’) throughout the ages. Proceeding deliberately from theme to theme, Eco offers at each stage not only his own observations but also direct quotations from contemporary theorists and critics. As he warns us in advance, his philosophical approach is frankly relativistic — ‘This book starts from the principle that Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country’ — and therefore it is unsurprising that the voyage on which he takes us follows many diverse and interwoven paths.

The book’s subtitle, ‘A History of a Western Idea’, allows Eco to start with the Greeks and to track forward through European history to our own time — a focus that neatly avoids the issues that might be raised by a simultaneous examination of Chinese or Mayan ideas of Beauty. For the ancient Greeks, Beauty was never an independent attribute of an object, but was instead closely associated with qualities like justice or symmetry. Plato saw it as an intellectual idea that could only be apprehended by philosophers, while Pythagoras’s investigations into geometry and ratios inaugurated ‘an aesthetico-mathematical view of the universe’ and of Beauty.