Volume 39, Number 1 & 2 · January 16, 1992
Idolizing
By John Boardman
The Cycladic Spirit: Masterpieces from the Nicholas P. Goulandris Collection
by Colin Renfrew, Introduction by Christos Doumas, photographs by John Bigelow Taylor
Abrams/Nicholas P. Goulandris Foundation, Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, 207 pp., $49.50
The Cycladic Spirit is a handsome, thoroughly self-indulgent book by a serious archaeologist responding in an art-historical sort of way to the products of a culture that has to be judged from the barest of evidence: in the author's words the book is 'an elegy for a lost world.' There is archaeology here too, the 'background material,' but the most space and thought are devoted to the Greek marble Cycladic idols of the third millennium BC now so well represented in sale rooms and private collections and, sometimes less visibly, in public museums.
Review, 1635 words
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