A Concise History of Art I-II. [antikvár]

PREFACE Anyone trying to write a short history of art is liable to find his work being compared with Solomon Reinach's famous Apollo which served as a manual for several generations of students. At all events the task has become remarkably more complicated since the time when Reinach wrote his 'manual' in 1905. Since that date many civilizations have been more fully explored or even freshly discovered. The great Hellenist confined himself to the art of the West, and as his title Apollo suggests, his main purpose was to expound the 'Greek miracle' with all its antecedents and consequences. Reinach's work covered mainly the ancient Mediterranean and the Renaissance. But since then we have discovered another 'miracle' which might well be called the 'barbarian miracle', taking the word 'barbarian' in the same sense as the Greeks and Romans did. The primitive civilizations are now admired as they could not possibly have been fifty years ago, and since then we have also discovered the arts of the East. Moreover, we now recognize certain other values to be as fertile as the classicism to which Reinach devoted his researches, in particular the baroque which in his day was still ignored or condemned as a sign of decadence. The reader may be surprised to find certain variations in the way the different chapters of this book are planned. All those dealing with ancient civilizations or with pre-Columbian archaeology or the Far East, contain an historical introduction which appeared superfluous in the case of the Western civilizations, whose history is sufficiently well known. In the case of the Far East, it appeared advisable to add some account of the religions of the countries concerned, without which it would be hard to understand the artistic works of races whose outlook is so unlike our own.