Volume 3, Number 2 · September 10, 1964
Classical Tourism
By Kenneth Clark
The Classical Tradition in Western Art
by Benjamin Rowland Jr.
Harvard, 379, 145 plates (229 illus.) pp., $12.95
During the last sixty years many young students of art history must have dreamt of writing a great book on the continuity of the classical tradition. It is an epic theme: the miraculous discovery in Greece, the long attenuation under the Roman Empire, the near destruction of the seventh century, the artificial respiration of Charlemagne, and the fascinating, unpredictable forms in which the tradition survived into the early middle ages. At this point the student's ambition may have begun to flag, for the thought of carrying on from S. Trophime to the Farnesina, and then from Poussin and Bernini to Winckelmann and Canova, is altogether too daunting. So the student relinquishes his vast design, and explores one of the many delectable by-ways which branch off the main subject and often prove arduous and complicated enough to occupy him for a lifetime, as Fritz Saxl (to mention one of the greatest) was occupied by Zodiacal signs and calendars. For the subject as a whole is a killer, a minotaur which cost Aby Warburg his reason, and occupied thirty years of Berenson's life with only the slenderest results. 'Lovely and venerable monster what belt could encompass thee, what blade were long enough to pierce thy heart?'
Review, 965 words
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