NONFICTION - Nov. 30, 1986

ART AND BEAUTY IN THE MIDDLE AGES by Umberto Eco; translated by Hugh Bredin (Yale University: $12.95; 131 pp.). Originally published in 1959 as a contributed chapter to a handbook on the history of aesthetics, this slim volume by Umberto Eco is a model of what a historical survey should be. As he moves easily through the Middle Ages, Eco engages us in conversation with some of the most stimulating minds of the period. Yet not with minds, either. With people: Witelo, Hugh of St. Victor, Aquinas, Scotus and others, perhaps less distinguished but always interesting. The topic? The medieval view of aesthetics and art, its development and disintegration.

Eco’s aim is not to promote ancient answers to modern problems, but to help the reader enter into a world in which a rose window symbolized perfection, and everyone knew why the Queen of Sheba had a webbed foot. This was a world in which everything, from God to gargoyles, could be called beautiful. A world of proportion, of cosmic harmony, of primary colors, of light erupting through an open fretwork of stone.

A Victorian gothic fantasy? Hardly. Eco shows us the intellectualist failings of Scholastic aesthetics, its incapacity to see the artist as anything other than an artisan, its breakdown in the face of individualism. There is no fuzzy nostalgia here, but rather a clear and well-argued exposition.

Eco’s translator, Hugh Bredin, must be singled out for special praise. He has given us an eminently readable book, updating all the references and the annotated bibliography.

It is good to be reminded that behind the labyrinthine horrors of “The Name of the Rose,” there stands a scholarly author whose knowledge of the Middle Ages is as deep as it is compendious. Read this book, then go read a cathedral.