Volume 34, Number 11 · June 25, 1987

Back from Oblivion

By Ernst Gombrich

Past and Present in Art and Taste: Selected Essays

by Francis Haskell

Yale University Press, 255 pp., $35.00

There must be almost as many varieties of art history as there are art historians. Some are concerned with style, others with subject matter, with social conditions, or with intellectual history. Every one of these specialists will find something to read with profit and interest in Francis Haskell's splendid new volume of essays. The iconologist will be grateful for the chapter on 'The Apotheosis of Newton in Art,' for that on 'The Manufacture of the Past in Nineteenth-Century Painting,' and for its sequel on 'The Old Masters in Nineteenth-Century French Painting.' The historian of ideas will be especially grateful for the essay, 'Gibbon and the History of Art,' with its convincing suggestion that the first history of medieval art, Seroux d'Agincourt's Histoire de l'art par les monumens, depuis sa décadence au IV^{e siècle jusqu'à son renouvellement au XVe, was inspired or stimulated by Gibbon's Decline and Fall. The connoisseur of style will find much food for thought in Chapter 11, 'A Martyr of Attributionism: Morris Moore and the Louvre Apollo and Marsyas,' while the social historian will do well to ponder the evidence presented in the papers on 'Art and the Language of Politics' and on 'Enemies of Modern Art.'}

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Review, 2776 words

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