Let me start by first saying that I got a lot out of this work, and found the subject fascinating. I admire Mr. Eco for his pedagogy and effort in the advancement of the field of semiotics. That said...

Umberto Eco reminds me of the neurosurgeon who's invited to dinner at the plumbers' union. He can't seem to lower himself to the level of his audience, and despite the fact that he has much to offer succeeds in conveying only a portion of it to his listeners. This is assuming his intended audience is the general public and not a tiny niche of linguists. The subject of this book is interesting, but is unfortunately largely lost in arcane vernacular. It needs an additional level of translation.

Obviously it is difficult to communicate clearly in an specialized field without the use of specialized vocabulary. Any professional can leave the average person stone cold with a bunch of techno-babble, but in the end there has been no real communication. The trick is to educate strangers to the field while elucidating the finer points of same.

Often hindering this process is the mindset among intellectuals that the student should raise himself to the level of the professor. This idea is horribly flawed and lurking behind the sentiment is often self-aggrandizement on the part of the academic. Stephen Hawkings, probabably the most gifted physicist alive, admits that his first book was a debacle and resolved to change that. His subsequent works, which soared to the top of non-fiction lists world-wide, were in layman's language. And he did not "dumb down" the subject. "The measure of a man's greatness is the way he treats little men", said Andrew Carnegie.

Umberto Eco's best efforts are probably contained in this rather labyrinthine and meandering effort to codify Thomistic philosophy. Thomism doesn't have a philosophy of the "aesthetic,' a notion wholly alien to the medieval mind. So Eco has to kind of create such a notion from a plethora of Thomas' writings. Fortunately, Eco does stay on track, even if he creates and follows tangents widely, by staying focused on the contribution ART (vis-a-vis "aesthetics") offers to modern sensibility.

Frankly, if one wants a better understanding of Medieval attitudes toward art, Emile Male's "Gothic" is incomparable. Male's work is a tour d'force and a "must" for anyone seriously interested in medieval art.

Even Jacques Maritain's "Art and Scholasticism" does a better job of presenting Thomistic views on art and beauty. The same can be said of Josef Pieper, who has written many books on art and the scholastic mind.

Eco, who made a name for inviting deconstruction into the Italian worldview, is better skilled at directing his attentions to that field than the medieval notions, concepts, and theories of art and beauty. If one wants a more concolidated assessment of the "philosophical" underpinnings of scholasticism's attitude toward art, simply read Aristotle. The scholastic view isn't much different, except that it is differently deployed in a manner consistent with Male's "Gothic."

This book bored me.

Despite the caliber of information contained within this illogically organized compendium, the copyediting in this work was atrocious. And the errors, extremely distracting. Not worth the paper it's printed on comes to mind...