On Beauty

Dazzlingly erudite and sumptuously illustrated, ON BEAUTY is a remarkable new work from one of the world’s most renowned writers and thinkers.

ON BEAUTY is neither a history of art, nor a history of aesthetics, but rather Umberto Eco draws on the histories of both these disciplines to define the ideas of beauty that have informed sensibilities from the classical world to modern times.

ON BEAUTY has been conceived for a vast and diverse readership: taking in painting, sculpture, architecture, film, photography, the decorative arts, novels and poems, it offers a rich and intelligent panorama of this huge subject. It traces the philosophy of aesthetics through history and examines some of the many treatises that have sought to define it.

ON BEAUTY is Umberto Eco at his most captivating and eclectic: we read not only of Botticelli and Michelangelo but of how the fashion of the 1960s draws on ancient Egyptian dress, and how Roman and eighteenth-century hairstyles have much in common. It makes the familiar new, and sheds a brilliant new light on the unfamiliar. Conceived and largely written by Umberto Eco, ON BEAUTY is an indispensable book.