ON UGLINESS

This book is the follow up to the previous volume On Beauty. Apparentlybeauty and ugliness are concepts that imply each other, and by ugliness weusually mean the opposite of beauty, so all we need do is define the firstto understand the nature of the second. But the various manifestations ofugliness over the centuries are richer and more unpredictable than iscommonly thought. The anthological quotations and the extraordinary illustrations in thisbook lead us on a surprising journey among the nightmares, terrors, andloves of almost three thousand years, where acts of rejection go hand inhand with touching gestures of compassion, and the rejection of deformityis accompanied by decadent ecstasies over the most seductive violations ofall classical canons. Among demons, madmen, horrible enemies, and disquieting presences, amonghorrid abysses and deformities that verge on the sublime, among freaks andthe living dead, we discover a vast and often unsuspected iconographicvein. So much so that, on gradually encountering in these pages theugliness of nature, spiritual ugliness, asymmetry, disharmony,disfigurement, and the succession of things sordid, weak, vile, banal,random, arbitrary, coarse, repugnant, clumsy, horrendous, vacuous,nauseating, criminal, spectral, witchlike, satanic, repellent, disgusting,unpleasant, grotesque, abominable, odious, crude, foul, dirty, obscene,frightening, abject, monstrous, hair-raising, ugly, terrible, terrifying,revolting, repulsive, loathsome, fetid, ignoble, awkward, ghastly andindecent, the first foreign publisher to see this book exclaimed:‘How beautiful ugliness is!'