A Study On Umberto Eco's Criticism Of Visual Arts

Umberto Eco is a famous Italian philosopher,historian,esthetician,literary critic who made a great contribution in various fields like aesthetics,semiotics,hermeneutics and writing.His theoretical doctrine has attracted many scholars at home and abroad.In general,research about his achievements at home and abroad is mainly focused on semiotics,hermeneutics and novel creation.In some researches,his works are placed in the analysis of the time environment in Italy.Also there are some study of Eco's ideology and aesthetic system.The main focus of this paper is Eco's visual art criticism.Visual art criticism is an important component of Eco's literary ideology.In early research,Eco mainly combined the visual art criticism with the semiotic thinking.The Visual arts symbol theory,film semiotic analysis,architectural semiotic analysis have all been involved.Later,Eco's research turned toward hermeneutics and novel writing,while ignoring the issue of visual arts.However,when he wrote The History of Beauty and The History of Uglines,Eco once again talked about the importance of works of art,especially visual arts,for us to grasp beauty,ugliness and the social historical and cultural view of an era.This paper provides a new research idea,that is,based on a detailed study of the works of Eco,combing the theoretical sources and developments of his literary thoughts,especially his semiotics and hermeneutics,to discover the theoretical roots of Eco' s art criticism,and then form an overall grasp(view)of Eco's visual art criticism by analyzing it from the two dimensions of semiotics and history based on Eco's works.This paper is divided into four parts:The introduction talks about the significance and research status of Eco's visual art criticism,as well as the purpose,methods and innovations of this paper.The first chapter combs the creation of Eco's criticism of visual art.At the same time,the paper studies the importance of form,Symbolic interpretation,openness,and culture in Eco's thinking which shows the"Three element symbol system" in various aspects.According to those,the paper studies the semiotics and history in Eco's visual art criticism.The Chapter two analyzes Eco's visual art criticism from the perspective of semiotics,grasps the theoretical connotation of Eco's cultural semiotics,and analyze the "Three element symbol system".On the one hand,the paper clarifies the way that Eco demonstrated the process of meaning generation by coding and symbols,clarifying the importance of "Interpretant".On the other hand,the paper analyzes Eco's film and architectural visual arts criticism practice from the perspective of cultural semiotics,to reveal the relationship between Eco's visual art criticism and his semiotics,and focus the significance of culture.From this chapter,this paper concludes that Eco's visual art criticism bases on his cultural semiotics.The third chapter analyzes Eco's visual art criticism from the perspective of historical dimension,mainly based on the history of beauty and the history of ugliness,to review the concepts of beauty and ugliness that have been summed up by Eco with paintings and sculptures,and focuses on the interpretation of the beauty and ugliness in social history.The epilogue includes two parts to summarize and evaluates the visual art criticism of Eco.The first part is to clarify the coherence of the perspective of semiotics and history,and both perspectives base on "Three element symbol system".The second part is to evaluate the significance of Eco's visual art criticism.It is not only a historical positioning for Eco in the visual arts criticism,but also a clear vision of effects of Eco's visual art criticism for contemporary vision art criticism.In short,this article seeks to collect and collate the related works and materials of Eco's visual arts,sort out the main viewpoints of Eco's visual art criticism,and at the same time take Eco's visual art criticism into consideration in his overall literary thoughts.It is expected to have a new reference for the study of Eco's literary thought.