he will reply that it is his toad wife, with her big round eyes protruding from her little head, her broad, flat throat, her brown back.Question the devil: he’ll tell you that beauty is a pair of horns, four claws, and a tail.” judge the black Ethiopians ugly, but among them the blackest is considered the most beautiful.” A few centuries later, Voltaire wrote: “Ask a toad what beauty is. In the 13th century, Jacques de Vitry wrote: “Probably the cyclopes, who have only one eye, marvel at those who have two, as we. So, over the centuries, there have been many texts on the relativity of ugliness, and of beauty. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has power over the clever not more clever than the clever?Īs for this last point, it is not always true-many people with money have bought only stupid people-but that’s another story. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid but money is honored, and hence its possessor. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness-its deterrent power-is nullified by money. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Ugliness was defined very well by Marx in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 as something that was only meaningful in the absence of money or, as we might understand his words, of power. Like beauty, therefore, ugliness is a relative concept. This is to say, once you set a criterion for beauty, a corresponding criterion for ugliness always seems to present itself pretty much automatically: “Only beauty orders symmetry,” Iamblichus tells us in Life of Pythagoras, and “conversely, ugliness disorders symmetry.” Thomas Aquinas teaches that three qualities are required for beauty-first among them wholeness or perfection- so that incomplete things, precisely because they are incomplete, “are ugly.” William of Auvergne adds: “We would call a man with three eyes or one eye ugly.” Ugliness, however, has always been present as the foil to beauty-Beauty and the Beast has taken many forms.

Whereas in almost every century philosophers and artists have written down their ideas on beauty, important texts on the concept of ugliness amount to only a handful, one being Karl Rosenkrantz’s 1853 Aesthetic of Ugliness.

Umberto eco on beauty