Volume 21, Number 15 · October 3, 1974
The View from the Precipice
By Peter Brown
The Origins of Christian Art
by Michael Gough
Praeger, 216, 191 illus. pp., $5.95 (paper)
Handbook of the Byzantine Collection
Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC
J.J. Augustin Publishers, Locust Valley, N.Y., 125, 125 illus. pp., $4.00 (paper)
The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 312-1453 AD, Sources and Documents
by Cyril Mango
Prentice-Hall (History of Art Series), 192 pp., $4.95 (paper)
The Early Churches of Constantinople: Architecture and Liturgy
by Thomas F. Mathews
Pennsylvania State University, 272 pp., $19.50
The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai: The Church and Fortress of Justinian
by George H. Forsyth, by Kurt Weitzmann
University of Michigan, 236, 452 plates pp., $45.00
Treasures of Ireland: Irish Pagan and Early Christian Art
by A.T. Lucas
Viking, 200, 41 color plates, 134 illus. pp., $14.95
No field of history shows more clearly than does the history of religious art the utter indifference of the past to its own future. A visitor to the excavations beneath the Vatican can step, in a few yards, from the tasteful burial chambers of the Roman pagans to beneath a grill, where he looks up into the golden inscription around the dome of St. Peter's. The historian may wish to trace the evolution that linked the one to the other; but to the dead, who lay in their pagan tombs, the transformation was inconceivable. They had lived their lives with their backs turned on the future. Even if these vaults had contained early Christians, the unimaginable quality of the future would have been no less.
Review, 3121 words
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