Contents: 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.