From Eco to Portinari: A Dedication Copy of Eco’s “Il problema estetico in San Tommaso”
Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 - 19 February 2016) would have turned 90 years old this January. The intellectual superstar and great bibliophile passed away a few years ago, but we were lucky enough to have him talk at the opening of our Manhattan gallery in 2013 and his memory continues to remain close to our hearts. To commemorate this anniversary, we are therefore offering a wonderful first edition dedication copy of Eco’s very first book, Il problema estetico in San Tommaso, published in Turin by Edizioni di Filosofia in 1956.
Watch the remarks given by Umberto Eco, Arturo Pregliasco, Vincent Buonanno and Filippo Rotundo at the opening of PRPH Books in 2013.
Two years ago we celebrated the 40th anniversary of Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), Eco’s first novel and a world-wide bestseller now counting among the small number of books to have sold over 50 millions copies worldwide. This brilliant “book within a book” is at once a detective thriller set in a fictional medieval Benedictine monastery and a thought-provoking defense of semiotics (that is, the study of signs) through theological, philosophical, and historical investigations into the nature of truth. It was the first of seven novels that saw Eco ingeniously unite popular fiction with his academic interests to create the sort of metatextual, analytical narrative that is the basis for his international renown.
Umberto Eco (1932-2016). Il nome della rosa. Milano, Bompiani, 1980.
A first edition copy (not for sale) of Eco’s masterpiece, dedicated to Umberto’s father Arturo Pregliasco.
Our own Umberto – Umberto Pregliasco – met Eco when the Piedmontese was at work on that first masterpiece and would often visit the Pregliasco bookshop in Turin. He had done the same in his student days in the 1950s, timidly looking for second-hand books in Umberto’s grandfather’s store by the University of Turin. Eco was, indeed, a great lover of books and went on to amass a great collection, no doubt motivated, at least in part, by his curiosity about truth and thought. He used to say: “I am fascinated by the human propensity for deviating thought. So I collect books about subjects in which I don’t believe, like kabbalah, alchemy, magic, invented languages. I am interested in fakes, in falsity. I don’t have Galileo, but I have Ptolemy, because he was wrong”.
While most of Eco’s novels would require many years of dedicated research, The Name of the Rose benefitted greatly from those early university days spent studying medieval philosophy and aesthetics at the University of Turin. Eco earned his Laurea degree in philosophy there in 1954 with a thesis on the aesthetic theories of the influential medieval philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), written under the supervision of historian and philosopher Luigi Pareyson (1918-1981). In 1956, two years after graduating, Eco published an extended version of his thesis as Il problema estetico in San Tommaso, a special copy of which we present here, still housed in its original publisher’s wrappers.
In addition to elucidating Aquinas’s theories on the relationship between beauty, goodness, and being, Eco discusses the early intellectual’s thoughts on aesthetic perception and the “formal criteria” of the beautiful, as well as his views on the arts, humanity, and God. With a thorough grounding in Aquinas’s 13th-century cultural context, Eco also provides rich insight into medieval thought and comparisons to aesthetic perspectives held by leading medieval thinkers, and he even goes on to discuss Aquinas’s influence on such Modernist giants as Pound, Eliot and Joyce. Not only did this fundamental work provide the basis for Eco’s celebrated first novel, but it also laid the foundation for his second publication, the academic monograph Sviluppo dell'estetica medieval (The Development of Medieval Aesthetics). Eco returned to Il problema estetico in San Tommaso in 1970, when he published a revised edition, and the work was finally translated into English as The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas in 1988.
The present copy of Eco’s thesis is particularly precious: a dedication copy gifted by the author to the writer and literary historian Folco Portinari (25 January 1926 - 11 January 2019), it marks an early turning point in Eco’s career specifically but also for Italian culture in general. Both Eco and Portinari were pioneers of television when, in the 1950s, they were part of the so-called “corsari”, a group of young intellectuals recruited to modernize the state broadcasting station Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) at the dawn of Italy’s first public television service. This experience collaborating on cultural, political, and entertainment programing helped stimulate Eco’s interest in new media, leading to such essays as “The Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno”, first published in Pirelli magazine and subsequently collected in his Diario minimo of 1963. He would continue to engage with popular culture and politics throughout his career, including in his weekly columns published in L’Espresso, Italy’s leading news magazine.
The gastronome Portinari, meanwhile, who was responsible for bringing Luigi Veronelli to Italian television screens, would go on to become famous for writing the extraordinary Slow Food Manifesto, a groundbreaking text that revolutionized food culture around the world when it was published by Il Gambero Rosso in 1987. Like Eco, Portinari’s interests were broad, and he was also a university professor and scholar of nineteenth-century Italian literature. Eco’s dedication on the title-page, dated Milan 1957, suggests that at the time of the gift Portinari was writing Parini e la poetica dell’oggetto, an essay on the central value of the concept of objecthood and its semantic extension in the prose of Giuseppe Parini, which would be published in in the periodical Paragone in December 1958:
E’ speranza da bambini
l’auspicar che lasci un solco
questo libro nel buon Folco
mentre scrive del Parini
As Eco’s poetic dedication to Portinari makes clear, this special volume represents above all an early moment shared by the two great intellectuals, then relatively unknown and on the precipice of new ideas about culture — past, present, and future — which they would, in each their own ways, go on to help us all explore.
A complete description of this copy will be included in our forthcoming catalogue, Italian Books III. To request more information in the meantime, please contact us here.
How to cite this information
PRPH BOOKS, "From Eco to Portinari: A Dedication Copy of Eco’s 'Il problema estetico in San Tommaso'", 12 January 2022, https://www.prphbooks.com/blog/eco. Accessed [date].This post is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.