ALTHOUGH Frankfurt-am-Main was included in a Baedeker guide as long
ago as 1829, this is the first time the city has been accorded a slim " Baedeker " all to itself. Frankfurt is such an individual place, with its local pride, its dialect, its sausages, its imperial and liberal traditions, its school of artists and its memories of Goethe, that the honour is well merited—and comes at an appropriate time, when the city is resuming something of its old life after the disastrouS damage sustained during the 1939-1945 war. The- number of buildings then totally lost was 11,500 • another 30,000 were more or less badly damaged. The old town suffered most, the famous ROmer, the Rathaus and the Goethehaus all being completely destroyed. The isolated Eschenheimer Turrn, dating from 1426, the last of the towers of the ancient fortified city, was spared ; and so— even more miraculously—was the distinctive tower of the cathedral, which dates from the same period. As soon as the war was over, the city set about the reconstruction of Goethe's birthplace, which has been meti- culously put together again with as much of the old material as possible and was re- opened in 1951 ; the furniture and other contents had fortunately survived the war. The reconstructed Paulskirche was ready in time for the centenary of the National Assembly of 1848, which met there. This excellent little " Baedeker " is full of many other examples of the courage and determin- ation with which Frankfurters are planning a new city that will preserve as much as possible of the remains and the spirit of the old. The book also includes information about Bad Homburg, Kronberg and many other places in the neighbourhood. D. H.
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY Pass has published a second edition (35s.), illustrated by 64 plates, of Sir Kenneth Clark's excellent lectures on Leonardo da Vinci, delivered at Yale in 1936, and sub-titled : " An Account of his Development,as an Artist." In a new introductory note Sir Kenneth emphasises the dangers of the distinction he drew at the outset of his first lecture between Leonardo's art and his thought, and stress-es the blow dealt to Leonardo's belief in mathematics by his discovery of the principle of universal flux. - Sir Kenneth develops this argument, and considers the interweaving of fact and fantasy in Leo- nardo's mind, in an article in the. May issue of History Today (2s. 6d.).
Previous page
