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. Ugliness, however, has always been present as the foil to beauty—Beauty and the Beast has taken many forms. 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.”
Like beauty, therefore, ugliness is a relative concept.
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. Marx wrote:
I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness—its deterrent power—is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honored, and hence its possessor.… 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?
As for this last point, it is not always true—many people with money have bought only stupid people—but that’s another story. So, over the centuries, there have been many texts on the relativity of ugliness, and of beauty. In the thirteenth century, Jacques de Vitry wrote: “Probably the cyclopes, who have only one eye, marvel at those who have two, as we … 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 … 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.” When Darwin wrote that feelings of contempt and repulsion were expressed in identical ways in most parts of the world—“Extreme disgust is expressed by movements round the mouth identical with those preparatory to the act of vomiting”—he added that, in Tierra del Fuego, a native reached out to feel the “cold preserved meat which I was eating at our bivouac, and plainly showed utter disgust at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty.”
Are there universal ways in which people react to beauty? No, because beauty is detachment, absence of passion. Ugliness, by contrast, is passion. Let’s try to understand this point, in light of others’ earlier observations that there cannot be an aesthetic judgment of ugliness. In other words, an aesthetic judgment implies detachment. I can consider a thing to be beautiful even without feeling I must possess it. I silence my passions. It seems, however, that ugliness does imply a passion—namely, disgust or repulsion. So how can there be an aesthetic judgment of ugliness if there is no possibility of detachment?
Probably there is ugliness in art and ugliness in life. There is a judgment of ugliness as a non-correspondence to the ideal of beauty, for example, when we say that a painting of a vase of flowers is ugly. Who painted it? Hitler. We are talking about a work by the young Hitler. While instead there is a passionate reaction to what we consider to be unpleasant, repellent, horrible, disgusting, grotesque, horrendous, revolting, repugnant, frightening, abject, monstrous, horrid, hair-raising, foul, terrible, terrifying, nightmarish, ungainly, deformed, disfigured, simian, bestial … (in the thesaurus there are more synonyms for ugly than for beautiful).
Contrary to Plato, who said that the representation of ugliness should be avoided, from Aristotle onwards it has been admitted in all periods that even the ugliness in life can be beautifully portrayed, and that it actually serves to make beauty stand out or to support a certain moral theory. And, as Saint Bonaventure said, “imago diabolo est pulchra, si bene repraesentat foeditatem diaboli”—the image of the devil is beautiful if it is a good representation of ugliness.
And so, art has given of its best in representing the ugliness of the devil. But the competition to portray ugliness well makes us suspect that, in reality, some have, however covertly, taken true pleasure in the horrendous, and not only in the various visions of hell. You cannot tell me that some hells were conceived only to terrify the faithful: they were also conceived to give us a hell of a kick. If we consider the various Triumphs of Death, with the beauty of the skeleton, or Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of Christ, we can see the horrifying as a source of pleasure. Friedrich Schiller wrote in his 1792 essay “On the Tragic Art”:
It is a phenomenon common to all men, that sad, frightful things, even the horrible, exercise over us an irresistible seduction, and that in the presence of a scene of desolation and of terror we feel at once repelled and attracted by two equal forces.… Any ghost story, however embellished by romantic circumstances, is greedily devoured by us, and the more readily in proportion as the story is calculated to make our hair stand on end.… See what a crowd accompanies a criminal to the scene of his punishment!
Consider all the countless descriptions of executions—for which there was no real call other than the enjoyment of describing an execution, because otherwise it would have sufficed to say “the guilty man was put to death.” See the Annals of Niketas Choniates for this description of the torments inflicted upon Andronikos, who was deposed as basileus of Byzantium at the beginning of the thirteenth century:
Bound in this fashion he was paraded before Emperor Isaakios. He was slapped in the face, kicked on the buttocks, his beard was torn out, his teeth pulled out, his head shorn of hair; he was made the common sport of all those who gathered; he was even battered by women who struck him in the mouth with theirs fists, especially by all those whose husbands were put to death or blinded by Andronikos. Afterwards, his right hand cut off by an ax, he was cast again in the same prison without food and drink, tended by no one.
Several days later, one of his eyes was gouged out, and, seated upon a mangy camel, he was paraded through the agora.… Some struck him on the head with clubs, others befouled his nostrils with cow-dung, and still others, using sponges, poured excretions from the bellies of oxen and men over his eyes.… There were those who pierced his ribs with spits.
But not even after having hung him up by his feet did the idiotic mob leave the martyred Andronikos or spare his flesh. Having torn off his shirt, they butchered his genital organs. One villain sank a long sword into his guts through his mouth, others used both hands to hold their swords aloft, and bring them down at his backside, competing over who could make the deepest cut and boasting over the best-dealt blows.
Some centuries later, in the early 1950s, Mickey Spillane, the poet of McCarthyism and master of the hard-boiled novel, tells us how private eye Mike Hammer kills communist spies in One Lonely Night:
They heard my scream and the awful roar of the gun and the slugs tearing into bone and guts and it was the last they heard. They went down as they tried to run and felt their insides tear out and spray against the walls.
I saw the general’s head splinter into shiny wet fragments and splatter over the floor. The guy from the subway tried to stop the bullets with his hands and dissolved into a nightmare of blue holes.
There was only the guy in the pork-pie hat who made a crazy try for a gun in his pocket. I aimed the tommy gun for the first time and took his arm off at the shoulder. It dropped on the floor next to him and I let him have a good look at it. He couldn’t believe it happened. I proved it by shooting him in the belly. They were all so damned clever!
They were all so damned dead!
But let’s take a step back. The Greeks, by identifying beauty with goodness—kalòs kai agathòs—identified physical ugliness with moral ugliness. In the Iliad, Thersites, “the ugliest man who had come to Ilium, twisted, lame in one foot, his shoulders curved over his chest, his pointed head covered with wispy hair,” was bad. So were the sirens, who were disgusting, birdlike creatures and nothing like the sirens portrayed later by the European Decadents, who cast them as beautiful women. The harpies, who were equally ugly, were bad—and they continued to be so in Dante’s forest of the suicides. The Minotaur was hideous, too, as were the Medusa, the Gorgon, and the cyclops Polyphemus.
But, after Plato’s time, Greek culture found itself faced with a problem: how was it that Socrates, who had such a great soul, was so ugly? And why was Aesop an eyesore? According to The Aesop Romance of the Hellenic period, the fabulist was “a slave … of loathsome aspect, worthless as a servant, potbellied, misshapen of head, snub-nosed, swarthy, dwarfish, bandy-legged, short-armed, squint-eyed, liver-lipped—a portentous monstrosity.” What’s more, “he was dumb and could not talk.” A good thing he could write well.
For Christianity, apparently, everything is beautiful; in fact, Christian cosmology and theology expatiates on the beauty of the universe, so that even monsters and ugliness fall within the cosmic order, acting like chiaroscuro in a painting to make the light stand out. Countless pages have been written about this, by Saint Augustine above all. But it was Hegel who pointed out that it was only with Christianity that ugliness came into the history of art, because “Christ scourged, with the crown of thorns, carrying his cross to the place of execution, nailed to the cross, passing away in the agony of a torturing and slow death—this cannot be portrayed in the forms of Greek beauty.” Christ can only appear ugly because he is suffering. And likewise, according to Hegel, “the enemies are presented to us as inwardly evil because they place themselves in opposition to God, condemn him, mock him, torture him, crucify him, and the idea of inner evil and enmity to God brings with it on the external side, ugliness, crudity, barbarity, rage, and distortion of their outward appearance.” Nietzsche, extreme as usual, offered his own view: “The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.”
Above all, in this ugly world, the penitential humility of the body takes on a particular value. In case you thought this was limited to medieval penances, here is a seventeenth-century text in which Father Segneri reports on the penances and painful self-inflicted torments of Saint Ignatius of Loyola:
wearing a garment of sackcloth over a rough hair-shirt, binding around his loins a girdle composed of prickly nettles, sharp thorns, or points of iron; fasting on bread and water every day, except Sundays, and then allowing himself no other indulgence than a dish of bitter herbs mingled with earth or ashes; passing sometimes whole days, three, six, or even eight at a time, without partaking of any food at all; scourging himself five times a day, and always to blood; cruelly beating his bare breast with a heavy stone.… Seven hours daily he spent in profound contemplation; his tears were unceasing, his mortifications continuous.
This was the unbroken tenor of the life he led in the cave of Manresa, which he did not moderate despite the tedious and painful infirmities that soon resulted—the “languors, swoons, paroxysms of pain, attacks of devility, and even dangerous fevers” that would eventually prove fatal.
Of course, the Middle Ages abounded with monsters, but it is our sensibility that leads us to see medieval monsters, as I noted regarding beauty, as ugly. They are strange, made with only one foot and with a mouth on their chest, well outside the norm. They are portenta, but were created that way by God to be the vehicle of supernatural meanings. Every monster comes with its own spiritual meaning. In this sense, medieval people did not see them as ugly—if anything, they saw them as interesting, fabled creatures. They saw them the way our children now see dinosaurs, which they know by heart so well that they can tell the difference between a tyrannosaurus and a stegosaurus with ease. They saw them as traveling companions. Even the dragons of the Middle Ages were viewed with this fond curiosity, because they were faithful emblems. They had a place on Noah’s ark, albeit with a deck to themselves—but still, together with animals who were not monstrous, all saved by Noah himself.
Scientific interest in real teratology made headway between the sixteenth and seventeenth century, when people began to get interested in curious or monstrous births and freaks of nature; collectors sought their skeletons or evidence inscribed on them, and even their bodies preserved in alcohol.
It was in this climate that physiognomy had caught on. This was a field of study in which, through analogies between the human and the animal face, the outcome being almost always ugliness (except for a few cases such as the lion man and a few others), people tried to understand the character of an individual through analogies with the animal world. But within a few centuries, from physiognomy we come to Cesare Lombroso, the anthropologist behind L’Uomo Delinquente (The Criminal Man), in which we find the following passage:
Who can know to what point scrofula, arrested development, and rickets may have influenced the cause or the modification of criminal tendencies? We have found 11 hunchbacks out of 832 criminals, almost all thieves or rapists. Virgilio found 3 rickets sufferers and 1 with arrested development of the skeleton out of 266 convicts examined by him, and 6 stutterers, 1 with a hare lip, 5 with strabismus, 45 with scrofula, and 24 with caries. According to him, 143 out of 266 of them carried traces of degenerative physical conditions. Vidocq observed that all the great murderers he had chanced to deal with were bowlegged.… In all criminals, especially thieves and murderers, the development of the genitals is extremely precocious and especially in female thieves, in whom we found a tendency to prostitution as early as six to eight years.
But long before Lombroso, the physiognomy of the enemy—be he mystical or political or religious—was developed over the centuries. In some Protestant cartoons, for example, the Pope was portrayed as the Antichrist. And in various texts of the early centuries—I will quote the Testamentum Domini, an apocryphal “Testimony of Our Lord” of the fourth to fifth century—the Antichrist has striking features: “his head as a fiery flame, his right eye shot with blood, his left blue-black, and he hath two pupils. His eyelashes are white and his lower lip is large; but his right thigh slender, his feet broad, his great toe is bruised and flat. This is the sickle of desolation.” For Hildegard of Bingen (in the twelfth century) the son of perdition had “a black and monstrous head. It had fiery eyes, and ears like an ass’s, and nostrils and mouth like a lion’s; it opened wide its jowls and terribly clashed its horrible iron-colored teeth.” Racial enemies were also ugly, like the Saracens in Sicilian puppet theatre, and the poor were ugly, too. And out of them all, even though the sculptures have provided nothing truly satisfying, I can offer you the portrait of Franti, from the 1886 children’s novel Cuore (Heart) by Edmondo De Amicis: “I detest that fellow. He is wicked.… There is something beneath that low forehead, in those turbid eyes, which he keeps nearly concealed under the visor of his small cap of waxed cloth … his paper, books, and copy-books are all crushed, torn, dirty, his ruler is jagged, his pens gnawed, his nails bitten, his clothes covered with stains and rents which he has got in his brawls.”
Finally there is the racial enemy. Think of the black Americans as portrayed by fascist propaganda during World War II. Here is the description of the negro from the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1798:
Round cheeks, high cheekbones, a forehead somewhat elevated, a short, broad, flat nose, thick lips, small ears, ugliness, and irregularity of shape characterize their external appearance.… Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy race: idleness, treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauchery, nastiness and intemperance are said to have extinguished the principles of natural law, and to have reproofs of conscience.
And, naturally, in a later, presumably more mature society, here is the Jew:
Those spying, mendaciously pale eyes … that edgy smile … those chops so reminiscent: of a hyena … And then all of a sudden there’s that heavy, leaden, moronic look … the negro blood flowing within. The corners of the nose and mouth forever twitching anxiously, twisted, furrowed, defensive, and then erupting in hatred and disgust. For you! For you, the abject, accursed animal of the enemy race, to be destroyed. Their noses, the “toucan’s beak” of the swindler, of the traitorous, of the treacherous … for all the sleazy schemes, all the betrayals, the nose that hangs down over the mouth, their hideous slots, that rotten banana, their croissant, the foul smirk of the kike, the curving snout that sucks: the Vampire.…
Cursed damned souls! Drop dead then, you inconceivable animal!
Whose description is this? Hitler’s? No, this is the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline in his 1937 pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre. Then comes another text, which advises that Jews cannot be either actors or musicians:
We can conceive no representation of an antique or modern stage-character by a Jew, be it as hero or lover, without feeling instinctively the incongruity of such a notion.…
By far more weighty, nay, of quite decisive weight for our inquiry, is the effect the Jew produces on us through his speech.…
The first thing that strikes our ear as quite outlandish and unpleasant, in the Jew’s production of the voice-sounds, is a creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle.… How exceptionally weighty is this circumstance, particularly for explaining the impression made on us by the music-works of modern Jews.…
… and on any natural hypothesis, we might hold the Jew adapted for every sphere of art, excepting that whose basis lies in Song.
Who’s this? Céline again? No, it’s Richard Wagner in his Judaism in Music (1850). On the other hand, ugliness is deep rooted, it is in the blood. Consider this:
Our racism must be that of flesh and muscle … otherwise we’ll end up playing the game of the half-breeds and the Jews, of the Jews who, as they have been able to do in too many cases, change their name and merge with us, so they can—even more easily and without even the need for costly and laborious procedures—feign a change of heart.… There is only one proof with which it is possible to halt interbreeding and Judaism: the proof of blood.
Who’s this? Still Wagner? No, it’s Giorgio Almirante [founder and leader of Italy’s major postwar neofascist party], speaking out against the little lost sheep of ideological pseudo-racism.
At a certain point in the course of history—leaving aside ugliness in the comic and the obscene, which runs through all periods, the rustic epics and so on—mannerism marks a move toward a greater attention to more interesting things, and texts begin to appear that reveal understanding and sympathy for ugliness. Just think of Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Then, too, there is praise for fine silver hair in the poetry of Joachim du Bellay, praise for flaccid breasts in Marot, praise for lame women in Montaigne, and the exploration of old age in Leonardesque caricature, which at a certain point almost makes us think of Michelangelo, who describes himself as an old man, saying: “spent, faded eyes, teeth like the keys of an instrument.… My face is a fright.”
Alongside understanding through compassion, we find an engrossment in the decomposition of once beautiful bodies, which has nothing to do with the educational benefit that medieval representations of hell and its torments intended to provide. This is corruption for corruption’s sake, without moral teachings. The German lyric poet, Andreas Gryphius, wrote in the seventeenth century “On the Skeleton of Filosette Exhumed”:
Horrid sight! Where is the golden hair,
The snowy brow, the splendor of the cheeks,
Her cheeks suffused with blood and lilies?
Her pinkish red mouth, and where are her teeth?
Where did the stars end, where are the eyes
With which love plays? Now black serpents
Coil around the gaping mouth, the nose
Once whiter than ivory is now gone.
Who with sound heart and without horror
Observes the desert of the ears, the caverns of the eyes,
Who may not shudder at this brow?
Also in the seventeenth century we find the ugliness of Cyrano de Bergerac, whom Edmond Rostand would later give to us not with a long nose but one like a beak. Moreover, we know the actual Cyrano de Bergerac was not a generous man, because he had exploited his father; and he did not love Roxane because he was homosexual and a syphilitic. This takes nothing away from the fact that he was a poet. But this is not the Cyrano of the tradition, who confides in his friend Le Bret:
Look me in the face, and tell me what hope
This protuberance of mine might permit me!
I don’t fool myself, not me. At times I, too, chance
To soften on a serene night
And, if I enter some garden, breathing in May
With my poor wretch of a nose, beneath a silvery beam
I see some woman strolling arm in arm
With a gallant, and my heart leaps in my breast,
And I think, alas, that I too would like
To stroll with a woman in the moonlight.
And I get carried away, and forget myself …
When suddenly I see the shadow of my profile on the wall!
As time went by, there arose the decadent sense of the beauty of illness, from Violetta Valéry, who dies of consumption, to the various dying Ophelias, with poetic pieces such as Barbey d’Aurevilly’s description of Léa. Then we come to the fellow who was made ugly by wickedness and bad by ugliness. Hear the lament of the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: “Believe me, Frankenstein, I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity; but am I not alone, miserably alone? You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow creatures.… They spurn and hate me.”
The moment in which we become truly aware of the centrality of ugliness to the history of art comes with the beginning of the pre-Romantic sensibility of the sublime, in which the sublime is the grandeur of the horrendous, the storm and ruins. The one who perhaps expressed best this Romantic sentiment was Victor Hugo in his preface to Cromwell (1827): “Man, withdrawing within himself in presence of these imposing vicissitudes, began to take pity upon mankind, to reflect upon the bitter disillusionments of life.… Until then, the purely epic muse of the ancients had studied nature in only a single aspect, casting aside without pity almost everything in art which, in the world subjected to its imitation, had no relation to a certain type of beauty.”
Even more significant, regarding the representation of ugliness, is Hugo’s The Man who Laughs (1869):
Nature had been prodigal of her kindness to Gwynplaine. She had bestowed on him a mouth opening to his ears, ears folding over to his eyes, a shapeless nose to support the spectacles of the grimace maker, and a face that no one could look upon without laughing.
We have just said that nature had loaded Gwynplaine with her gifts. But was it nature? Had she not been assisted? …
According to all appearance, industrious manipulators of children had worked upon his face. It seemed evident that a mysterious and probably occult science … had chiselled his flesh … skilled in obtusions and ligatures, had enlarged the mouth, cut away the lips, laid bare the gums, distended the ears, cut the cartilages, displaced the eyelids and the cheeks, enlarged the zygomatic muscle, pressed the scars and cicatrices to a level, turned back the skin over the lesions whilst the face was thus stretched, from all which resulted that powerful and profound piece of sculpture, the mask, Gwynplaine.
It seems like the description of many gentlemen today. But precisely because he is so ugly, Gwynplaine triggers the erotic passion of such a corrupt and decadent woman as Lady Josiana—who, when she comes to know that, in reality, Gwynplaine is Lord Clancharlie, wants him to be her lover:
I love you not only because you are deformed, but because you are low.… A lover humiliated, cuffed, grotesque, hideous, exposed to jeers … has an extraordinary savor. Tis biting into the forbidden fruit of the abyss. An ignominious lover is exquisite. What tempts me is to have between my teeth the apple, not of paradise but of hell. I have that hunger and that thirst. I am that Eve—the Eve of the gulf.…
Gwynplaine, I am the throne, you are the stool. Let us place ourselves on a level.… You are not ugly, you are deformed. The ugly is petty, the deformed is grand. The ugly is the devil’s grimace behind the beautiful. The deformed is the opposite of the sublime.… You are Titan … I love you!
From the eighteenth century onward, there were the ugly and the damned, and only my natural modesty obliges me to edit out much of the description offered by the Marquis de Sade of his character Monsieur de Courval—the Président de Courval—in The 120 Days of Sodom:
worn by debauchery to a singular degree, he offered the eye not much more than a skeleton. He was tall, he was dry, thin, had two blue lusterless eyes, a livid and unwholesome mouth, a prominent chin, a long nose. Hairy as a satyr, flat-backed, with slack, drooping buttocks that rather resembled a pair of dirty rags flapping upon his upper thighs; the skin of those buttocks was, thanks to whipstrokes, so deadened and toughened that you could seize up a handful and knead it without his feeling a thing.
As far as the rest of his person is concerned, it was “just as filthy.” He was “a figure whose rather malodorous vicinity might not have succeeded in pleasing everyone.”
I cannot show you images of Bond villains because they have been prettified in the films, but in Ian Fleming’s novels the descriptions are far more precise: “It was as if Goldfinger had been put together with bits of other people’s bodies.” That is not how it is in the movies. In print, Rosa Klebb “looked like the oldest and ugliest whore in the world.” And as for Doctor No:
The head also was elongated and tapered from a round, completely bald skull down to a sharp chin so that the impression was of a reversed raindrop—or rather oildrop, for the skin was of a deep almost translucent yellow.…
There was something Dali-esque about the eyebrows, which were fine and black and sharply upswept as if they had been painted on as makeup for a conjurer. Below them, slanting jet black eyes stared out of the skull. They were without eyelashes. They looked like the mouths of two small revolvers, direct and unblinking and totally devoid of expression.
Fleming goes on to write that Doctor No stepped closer and then stopped. “Forgive me for not shaking hands with you,” he said in a deep, flat, and even voice. “I am unable to.” As his sleeves slowly parted and opened, he explained: “I have no hands.” And last, consider Mr. Big:
It was a great football of a head, twice the normal size and very nearly round. The skin was grey-black, taut and shining like the face of a week-old corpse in the river. It was hairless, except for some grey-brown fluff above the ears. There were no eyebrows and no eyelashes and the eyes were extraordinarily far apart so that one could not focus on them both, but only on one at a time.
From the seventeenth century at least, and then with the first fabulists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, children’s early years were full of nightmares, from the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood and the terrifying Mangiafuoco in Pinocchio, to uncanny, mysterious woods. And the idea of the uncanny then led naturally in adult literature, so far still for children, to vampires, golems, and ghosts.
But with the advent of steam power and mechanization, our culture began to dwell on the ugliness of modern cities. The first and most famous text comes from Dickens (Hard Times, 1854):
Coketown was a triumph of fact.… It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.
There is an impressive abundance of descriptions portraying the ugliness of the industrialized world, starting with Dickens and extending to Don DeLillo and writers since. And it was in this very period, as a reaction to industrial ugliness, and by way of an escape into pure aestheticism, that a religion of beauty arose that was also a religion of the horrendous. Here is how Baudelaire begins his 1857 poem The Carcass:
Remember that object we saw, dear soul,
In the sweetness of a summer morn:
At a bend of the path a loathsome carrion
On a bed with pebbles strewn,
With legs raised like a lustful woman,
Burning and sweating poisons,
It spread open, nonchalant and scornful,
Its belly, ripe with exhalations.
The sun shone onto the rotting heap,
As if to bring it to the boil,
And tender a hundredfold to vast Nature
All that together she had joined.
And in Italy, “The Song of Hate” (1877) by Olindo Guerrini:
When you sleep forgotten
Beneath the rich soil
And the cross of God is planted
Upright over your coffin
When your rotting cheeks run
Into your loose teeth
And in your stinking, empty eye sockets
Worms are writhing
For you the sleep that for others is peace
Will be a new torment
And remorse will come cold and tenacious
To bite at your brain.
A keen and atrocious remorse
Will come to your grave
Despite God, and his cross,
To gnaw your bones.
.….….…
Oh, with what joy will I sink my claws
Into your shameless belly!
Squatting on your stinking belly,
I will sit for eternity.
Specter of vendetta and sin,
Terror from hell.
Praise for mourning shows up in the works of the avant-garde, where it is not important to compare, say, the Futurists with Picasso or the Surrealists with the practitioners of Arte Informale. A decision to go against classicism was made. This begins with the Songs of Maldoror, by Lautréamont (1868):
I am filthy. I am riddled with lice. Hogs, when they look at me, vomit. My skin is encrusted with the scabs and scales of leprosy, and covered with yellowish pus. I know neither the water of rivers nor the dew of clouds. An enormous mushroom with umbelliferous stalks is growing on my nape, as on a dunghill.
Then, too, there is The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912):
We make use, instead, of every ugly sound, every expressive cry from the violent life that surrounds us. We bravely create the “ugly” in literature.… Each day we must spit on the Altar of Art.
And Aldo Palazzeschi in his futuristic 1913 manifesto Il controdolore:
We have to teach our children to laugh, to laugh the most unrestrained, insolent laughter.… We will supply them with educational toys, humpbacked, blind, gangrenous, crippled, consumptive, syphilitic puppets, that mechanically cry, shout, complain, are afflicted with epilepsy, plague, cholera, hemorrhaging, hemorrhoids, the clap, insanity, puppets that faint, emit a death rattle, and die.… Consider the happiness you’ll feel on seeing dozens of little hunchbacks, dwarfs, cross-eyed, and lame children grow up around you, the divine explorers of joy.… We futurists want to cure the Latin races, especially our own, of conscious pain, conformist syphilis aggravated by chronic romanticism, and of the monstrous susceptibility and piteous sentimentalism that depress every Italian.… Teach children the maximum variety of jeers, grimaces, groans, lamentations and shrieks, substitute the use of perfumes with that of stinks.
Of course, the massified world could only oppose this provocation of the part on the avant-garde with kitsch—that is to say, the caricature of art. And so we have fabulous kitsch, sacred kitsch, or a fusion of kitsch and avant-garde, as in the fascist period.
Kitsch can be different things. Kitsch could be said to be an absence of taste: garden gnomes, glass snow globes with the Madonna of Oropa, but also good things in terrible taste as in Guido Gozzano’s “Grandmother Speranza’s Friend” of 1911:
Poll parrot stuffed and the bust of Napoleon, of Alfieri,
the flowery moldings (the very good things in terrible taste),
the dark fireplace, the collection of boxes without any candy,
the clusters of marble fruit standing under the bell jars’ protection,
the odd toy, the coconuts there, the box made of seashells, the warning of Pray or Remember adorning the keepsakes that lie everywhere,
the albums with painted archaic wildflowers, an engraving or two, the pale watercolors, the view of Venice done all in mosaic,
the miniatures there in profusion, a painting or two by d’Azeglio, daguerreotypes (just a bit yellow) with figures in dreamy confusion,
.….….…
The red damasked chairs, in the corner the cuckoo clock …
But there is also kitsch as the search for effect. In other words, if I portray a woman, that woman must make me feel like bedding her. The essence of kitsch consists in exchanging the ethical category with that of aesthetics.
As Hermann Broch explains, “kitsch wants to produce not the ‘good’ but the ‘beautiful.’ And if this means … describ[ing] the world not as it really is but as it is hoped and feared to be … still one must concede that no art can work without some effect.”
In show business, effect is an absolutely essential component, an aesthetic component, while there is one entire artistic genre, a specific bourgeois genre—namely, opera—in which that effect represents a fundamental element of construction.
But kitsch can be something that feigns the condition of art without actually attaining it. And if the term kitsch has a meaning it is not because it designates solely an art that aims to engender effects, because in many cases great art has also set itself this goal. In and of itself, kitsch is not a formally imbalanced work, because in that case it would merely be an ugly work. Nor does it characterize a work that uses stylistic features that have appeared in another context, because this can happen without lapsing into bad taste. In order to justify its function as a stimulator of effects, kitsch tries to pass itself off as art, but by doing little more than adopting and making a great show of the “look” of other works. In my opinion, a genuine model of kitsch is Giovanni Boldini, who constructed his portraits from the waist up according to the best rules of the creation of effect. The head and shoulders—in other words, the uncovered parts—obey all the canons of a refined naturalism. The lips of his women are full and moist, their flesh calls up tactile sensations, their gaze is sweet, provocative, sexy, dreamy. But as soon as he turns to painting clothing, Boldini abandons this “gastronomic” technique, outlines are no longer precise, fabrics dissolve in bright brush strokes, things become clots of color, objects melt in explosions of light. The lower part of Boldini’s paintings evoke an Impressionist culture; Boldini is now clearly working within the avant-garde, quoting from the repertoire of contemporary painting. In the upper part he is seeking the effect. His women are stylemic sirens. The face must satisfy the person commissioning the work, as far as the artist’s approach to the woman goes. But the work must be satisfying in terms of the painter’s approach to art.
While kitsch is so ambiguous, we also discover that what was kitsch in the past can become art in the present. Susan Sontag was reflecting on this when she worked out her theory of camp. Camp is not measured by the beauty of something but by its degree of artifice and stylization. The best example of this is Art Nouveau, insofar as it transforms light fixtures into flowering plants, living rooms into grottoes and vice versa, and cast-iron bars into orchid stems, as in Hector Guimard’s Paris Metro entrances. The camp canon includes some of the most disparate objects, from Tiffany lamps to Beardsley, from Swan Lake and the works of Bellini to Visconti’s Salomé, from certain fin-de-siècle postcards to King Kong, down to old Flash Gordon comics, women’s clothing of the 1920s, ostrich boas, and dresses with fringes and beads. The thing that camp taste cares for is “instant character,” the thing that really does not excite it is character development. This is why opera and ballet are held to be inexhaustible reserves of camp: because neither of these forms can do complete justice to human nature. Where there is character development, the element of camp diminishes. Among operas, for example, La Traviata, which has some small degree of character development, is less camp than Il Trovatore, which has none at all. When something is merely ugly, rather than camp, it is not because its ambitions are too mediocre. The artist has not attempted to do anything that is truly bizarre. “It’s too much, it’s too fantastic, it’s unbelievable.” This is an expression typical of camp enthusiasm. There is an element of camp in the series of great Italian films based on the heroic character Maciste, and architect Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in Barcelona is also camp, one man’s ambition to do alone something that would require the efforts of generations in order to be realized. Things are camp not when they become old, but when we are less involved in them, and we can enjoy watching the attempt fail instead of making use of the results. Camp taste rejects the distinction between beauty and ugliness typical of normal aesthetic judgment; it does not turn things on their head; it does not maintain that beauty is ugly or vice-versa; it restricts itself to offering art and life a different and complementary set of criteria for judgment. Just think of all the important works of art of the twentieth century, whose aim was not to create harmony, but to stretch the medium to the limit so as to tackle ever more violent and irresolvable themes. Camp maintains that good taste is not merely good taste. Actually, there is a sort of good taste in bad taste. Camp is beautiful because it is awful.
At this point, many ideas disappear from art, albeit not from life, because we do not know whether fascinating characters from outer space are ugly or beautiful, or whether the characters of Frank Frazetta are ugly or frightening. We do not know whether the “living dead”—to pay tribute to filmmaker George Romero—are merely horrible or, as he suggests, the bearers of a political message. Is splatter ugly or beautiful? Was Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit (1961) meant to be beautiful? On the internet you can find a series of “uglifications” of art masterpieces, one, we might say, more beautiful than the next. There is ugliness in art, too, but see how difficult it is to establish whether foul is fair or fair is foul, as the witches in Macbeth put it.
And in life? In life, the models would seem to be clear. The mass media, cinema, and television tell us who is beautiful and who is ugly, but then on the street we meet different, not beautiful, people and sometimes some of us marry them, or sleep with them—which some feminist authors tell us is one way to defy gender and sexual biases.
There is a short story which perhaps you will know, but it is worth highlighting its fundamental point. Here is Fredric Brown’s “Sentry”:
He was wet and muddy and hungry and cold, and he was fifty thousand light-years from home.
A strange blue sun gave light and the gravity, twice what he was used to, made every movement difficult.…
And now it was sacred ground because the aliens were there too. The aliens, the only other intelligent race in the Galaxy … cruel, hideous and repulsive monsters.…
He was wet and muddy and hungry and cold, and the day was raw with a high wind that hurt his eyes. But the aliens were trying to infiltrate and every sentry post was vital.
He stayed alert, gun ready. Fifty thousand light-years from home, fighting on a strange world and wondering if he’d ever live to see home again.
And then he saw one of them crawling toward him. He drew a bead and fired. The alien made that strange horrible sound they all make, then lay still.
He shuddered at the sound and sight of the alien lying there. One ought to be able to get used to them after a while, but he’d never been able to. Such repulsive creatures they were, with only two arms and two legs, ghastly white skins and no scales.
Brown’s sensibility brings us back to the initial theme of the relativity of ugliness. Perhaps all of us will appear horrible to the future colonizers of this planet.
But since our history of ugliness has taught us that the ugly should also be understood and justified, let me leave you with the portrait by Quentin Metsys of the Donna Grottesca, and as you look at it, an excerpt from a wonderful seventeenth-century text, The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton:
Love is blind, as they say.… Every lover admires his mistress, though she be very deformed of herself, ill-favored, wrinkled, pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tanned, tallow-faced, have a swollen Juggler’s platter-face, or a thin, lean, chitty-face, have clouds in her face, be crooked, dry, bald, goggle-eyed, bleary-eyed, or with staring eyes, she looks like a squis’d cat, hold her head still awry, heavy, dull, hollow-eyed, black or yellow about the eyes, or squint-eyed, sparrow-mouthed, Persian hook-nosed, have a sharp Fox nose, a red nose, China flat great nose, snub-nose with wide nostrils, a nose like a promontory, gubber-tushed, rotten teeth, black, uneven, brown teeth, beetle-browed, a Witch’s beard, her breath stink all over the room, her nose drop winter and summer, with a Bavarian poke under her chin, a sharp chin, lave eared, with a long crane’s neck, which stands awry too, with hanging breasts, “her dugs like two double jugs,” or else no dugs, in the other extreme … a vast virago, or an ugly Tit, a slug, a fat fustilugs, a truss, a long lean rawbone, a skeleton, a sneaker … and to thy judgment looks like a merd in a lanthorn, whom thou couldest not fancy for a world, but hatest, loathest, and wouldest have spit in her face, or blow thy nose in her bosom, the very antidote of love to another man, a dowdy, a slut, a scold, a nasty, rank, rammy, filthy, beastly quean, dishonest peradventure, obscene, base, beggarly, rude, foolish, untaught, peevish … if he love her once, he admires her for all this, he takes no notice of any such errors, or imperfections of body or mind.… he had rather have her than any woman in the world.
[La Milanesiana, 2006]