Volume 49, Number 14 · September 26, 2002
The Last Humanist
By Clifford Geertz
A Preference for the Primitive: Episodes in the History of Western Taste and Art
by E.H. Gombrich
Phaidon, 324 pp, $59.95
When Ernst Gombrich, the most celebrated art historian of our time, died last year at the age of ninety-two it seemed as though not just an individual career but a whole movement of thought and sensibility had come to an end. He was the last of the great Central European humanists who sought to realize the dream, first set forth by Jakob Burckhardt in the 1860s, of a Kulturwis-senschaft: a comprehensive, 'scientific' study of Western high culture that was at the same time a defense of that culture against the terrible simplifiers of modern barbar- ism. Ernst Robert Curtius, Erich Auerbach, and Leo Spitzer in literature, Ernst Cassirer, Karl Pop- per, and Paul Oskar Kristeller in philosophy, and Erwin Panofsky, along with Gombrich, in art history, most of them refugees from Germany and Austria to Britain and the United States in the late Thirties and early Forties, produced a series of formidable works, synoptic, self-confident, and astonishingly learned, that sought to reclaim the heritage of European scholarship after the fascist catastrophe and reestablish it in the, as they saw it, thin and directionless postwar world. The words with which Curtius, who stayed behind in Bonn quietly writing his way through the horror, prefaced his grand, unbending study of Latin literature in the Middle Ages—begun in 1928, finished in 1948—could have served as motto for them all: 'This book does not content itself with scientific purposes; it attests to a concern for maintaining Western civilization.'[1]
Review, 3643 words
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