Western art rears its ugly head

TURNING BACK THE CLOCK

Umberto Eco
Harvill Secker, £17.99

ON UGLINESS
Umberto Eco (ed)
Harvill Secker, £30

HISTORY, according to Umberto Eco, has recently begun to go into reverse. One manifestation is the way the map of Europe has fractured, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, into something resembling the situation before 1914. Simultaneously we have seen the rise of various forms of fundamentalism and a resurgence of superstition. With the collapse of old ideologies, even older ones have returned to haunt us.

This is put forward as the overarching theme of Turning Back The Clock, though to call the book a collection of essays is a little too grand, since nearly all of the pieces in it were written as Italian newspaper articles. So there is little here that one could call revelatory, though as with all good newspaper think-pieces, the reader experiences a kind of intellectual massage which leaves one feeling better at the end, even if one is not entirely sure why.

More substantial is On Ugliness, a sequel to Eco's earlier On Beauty, following its same format of combining images from the history of Western art with extracts from authors down the ages, along with commentary by Eco. Here the big idea is that ugliness is not simply the opposite of beauty; rather it is a concept in its own right. This, Eco acknowledges, is not new; but the forms of ugliness he proposes stretch the word to its limit.

"Let's imagine we find ourselves in a familiar room, with a nice lamp sitting on the table: suddenly, the lamp floats upwards into mid-air." This, says Eco, is an example of "that form of ugliness we shall call situational". Most of us would call the situation plain weird.

Encyclopaedism is the book's strength, making it ideal for thumbing and browsing, though as a straight-through read it is less satisfying. The problem is that its three-fold division into extracts, images and commentary is not always well integrated. Many of the pictures get no commentary at all: we are left to decide for ourselves whether Bernardo Strozzi's 1630 painting Vanitas makes a mockery of its subject - an old woman before a mirror - or shows pity for her. Eco's text instead name-checks the extracted authors, many of whom are delightfully obscure and arcane - though I was disappointed to be told that Teofilo Folengo, a forerunner of Rabelais, could not be included because his work "really must be read in its macaronic Latin".

If only we could all be as clever as Umberto Eco; this is the desire he massages into us. In the final essay of Turning Back The Clock, he explains how he copes with the thought that one day his mighty brain must become dust. He imagines he lives in a world of idiots, not worth staying in. Who knows, perhaps Bernardo Strozzi was trying to say something about that in his painting. "Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity."