Volume 32, Number 8 · May 9, 1985
Breaking Away
By Stuart Hampshire
The Innocent Eye
by Roger Shattuck
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 362 pp., $18.95
During the last century a distinct break in European sensibility affected all the arts and led to a new post-Romantic version of the cult of originality. The artists, poets, and writers who created this new vision were called avant-garde. But where did the ideas of the avant-garde come from? Could it be from a conceptual change within the physical sciences? Roger Shattuck, arguing that it was at least in part, quotes a sentence from Leonardo's manuscripts that appears in Paul Valéry's first essay on Leonardo, written in 1894:
Review, 2723 words
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