The best books that combine beauty and ugliness

I regularly teach a first-year seminar that takes students in the fall from Homer to Dante and in the spring from Machiavelli to Trethewey. When I ask them what their favorite modern work is, they invariably name Dorian Gray, a beautifully written and witty novel, with moral ugliness at the center. 

What intrigues my students (and me) is not simply the tension between physical beauty and moral ugliness but also the work’s complexity. Is it moral or not? How are we to interpret the preface, the ending, the relation of the two?

When I was interviewing for a position at Notre Dame, the campus museum had an exhibit of illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, which reinforced to me the fascination of Dante. 

When I began teaching the work a few years later, my students were engrossed by its riveting portrayals of moral ugliness. They were also amazed that Dante places even popes in hell. The work has so inspired my students that one of them submitted her final paper in terza rima, the form Dante uses, and another reflected on where precisely in hell she might belong.

This beautifully translated bilingual edition contains extensive, helpful commentary.

I was overwhelmed as I stood before Grünewald’s 16th-century Crucifixion in Colburg, France. At almost nine feet tall, the powerful Crucifixion was at the time the largest ever painted in Europe. 

Blood flows from Christ’s side and head, which hangs low into the breast. Some of the thorns have broken off and are projected into the flesh, which is marked with pustules, sores, and lesions. The wounds are visible, the ribs protrude, and the skin and lip colors evoke death. The nails have become instruments of torture. 

Hayum’s comprehensive historical investigations underscore the healing mission of Grünewald’s Crucifixion: ugliness can be empathetic; ill patients could identify with Christ’s suffering and pray for healing and redemption.

George Grosz was the first great artist I encountered whose works were both strikingly powerful and deeply ugly. Grosz portrayed the ugliness of the Germans during the period before Hitler’s ascent.

His works are intentionally disordered. Yet the combination of ugly content and dissonant form work together, such that on a higher level, form and content are in harmony.

Grosz painted intemperance, gluttony, lust, and unbridled power as the driving forces of society. He was a master at showing us the ugliness of the ugly. The book offers an excellent combination of images and text, with an appropriate focus on the Weimar years.

Ugliness can be playful. When students encounter Arcimboldo for the first time, they find him enchanting. 

The artist layers images of objects, mainly from nature, such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, tree roots, and sea creatures, but also other objects, such as books, onto the canvas so as to create the bizarre semblance of a portrait or the creative rendition of a theme. The Viennese court painter dissolves boundaries between portraiture, still life, and landscape as well as between nature and humanity. 

This book offers a comprehensive understanding of Arcimboldo, from his youth in Lombardy, with the influence of Leonardo’s works, to his nature studies in Vienna.