Includes bibliographical references (p. 441-446) and indexes.

I. Ugliness in the classical world -- 1. A world dominated by beauty? -- 2. The Greek world and horror -- II. Passion, death, martyrdom -- 1. The "pancalistic" view of the universe -- 2. The suffering of Christ -- 3. Martyrs, hermits, penitents -- 4. The triumph of death -- III. The apocalypse, hell, and the devil -- 1. A universe of horrors -- 2. Hell -- 3. The metamorphoses of the devil -- IV. Monsters and portents -- 1. Prodigies and monsters -- 2. An aesthetic of the immeasurable -- 3. The moralization of monsters -- 4. The Mirabilia -- 5. The fate of monsters -- V. The ugly, the comic, and the obscene -- 1. Priapus -- 2. Satires on the peasantry and carnival festivities -- 3. Renaissance and liberation -- 4. Caricature -- VI. The ugliness of woman from antiquity to the baroque period -- 1. The anti-female tradition -- 2. Mannerism and the baroque -- VII. The devil in the modern world -- 1. From rebellious Satan to poor Mephistopheles -- 2. The demonstration of the enemy -- VIII. Witchcraft, satanism, sadism -- 1. Witches -- 2. Satanism, sadism, and the taste for cruelty -- IX. Physica curiosa -- 1. Lunar births and disembowelled corpses -- 2. Physiognomy -- X. Romanticism and the redemption of ugliness -- 1. The philosophies of ugliness -- 2. The ugly and the damned -- 3. The ugly and the unhappy -- 4. The unhappy and the ill -- XI. The uncanny -- XII. Iron towers and ivory towers -- 1. Industrial ugliness -- 2. Decadentism and the licentiousness and the ugly -- XIII. The avant-garde and the triumph of ugliness -- XIV. The ugliness of others, kitsch, and camp -- 1. The ugliness of others -- 2. Kitsch -- 3. Camp -- XV. Ugliness today.

In a companion volume to his "History of Beauty," the renowned philosopher and cultural critic analyzes our attraction to the gruesome, horrific, and repellant in visual culture and the arts, drawing on abundant examples of painting and sculpture, ranging from antiquity to the works of Bosch, Goya, and others.