Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages by Umberto Eco (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 181 reason that it provides the best arguments available to date against nuclear deterrence, but ultimately the arguments fail because the author takes as an apodictic premise what is actually a prudential judgment that no nuclear weapons could ever be used in a moral and ethical way. Professor Kenny is not only an Absolutist, but also a Determinist. The present reviewers are neither. University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign-Urbana, Illinois Public Affairs Officer ROBERT BARRY, O.P. MATTHEW M. MURPHY United States At·ms Control and Disarmament Agency Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. By UMBERTO Eco. Translated by Hugh Bredin. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986. Pp. 131. $12.95. This is not a new work. As Umberto Eco himself states in the Preface of this book, the text was written in 1958 and published in 1959 as a single chapter of a four volume handbook on the history of aesthetics, written by various authors (Momenti e problemi di storia dell' estetica, Milano, Marzorati, 1959, vol. 1: 'Dall'antichita classica al barocco, pp. 115-230). No doubt it was due to the recent popularity in Europe and America of Mr. Eco's novel, The Name of the Rose (which subsequently inspired the film of the same title) that Yale University Press saw fit to translate and reissue this seminal work of the author. He wrote it when he was 26 years old and serving in the Italian army. Hugh Bredin, a senior lecturer in scholastic philosophy at Queen's University, Belfast, has simplified in the translation what the author claims was the "tortured syntax" of his impressionable youth. Nevertheless, one suspects that the style and context of this slim volume will appeal primarily to philosophers and not art historians, despite its ubiquitous presence in art bookstores and museum giftshops. The scope of Mr. Eco's work enables the reader to gain an overview of aesthetic problems which developed in Europe in the period between the sixth to the :fifteenth centuries, when the classical tradition inherited by the medieval world no longer provided adequate solutions. A thousand years of artistic and philosophical history are barely penetrated in so few pages, but Mr. Eco forthrightly proceeds to catalogue ideas and thinkers in chapters devoted to such topics as Transcendental Beauty, Symbol and Allegory, and the Aesthetics of Proportion and Light. As 18~ BOOK REVIEWS was evident in The Name of the Rose, the author has an encyclopedic knowledge of both classical and medieval sources (he gently chides Maritain for his ignorance of one of Bonaventure's definitions of beauty, p. 24). As professor of semiotics his understanding of words and images is impressive (he takes a whole page to explain the visual applications of Vitruvius's use of the word euritmia, pp. 65-66). But after repeated eitings of relevant quotations from various medieval works-some in outright conflict with one another-the reader has no satisfying sense of what was the "medieval " view of art and beauty. Rather a mosaic of interesting and diverse facts emerges in the thematic structure of the book which cuts across chronological, geographical, and cultural boundaries . Thus, for instance, one learns in the chapter on the Aesthetics of Light that St. Augustine preferred equilateral to scalene triangles, Hugh of St. Victor considered green to be the most beautiful of colors, the Limbourg brothers in painting miniatures had no use for sfiirnatura just as Chretien de Troyes had no use for it in literature, and the Christian image of God as Light traced its pedigree to the Semitic Baal and the Egyptian Ra with heavy doses of Plato and Arab pantheism thrown in as contributing influences. This dizzying effect of so much intelligent trivia, forcibly pieced together in an effort to arrive at a persuasive conclusion , backfires and ultimately works ag:iinst Art and Beaiity in the Middle Ages in much the same way that the plot in The Name of the Rose suffered from a surfeit of scholastic argumentation. Mr. Eco, in an attempt to bedazzle his readers with facts, merely blinds them to the point. Other authors have written about art in the Middle Ages, and they were successful...