BOOKS OF THE DAY
Influence from the South
British Art and the Mediterranean. By F. Sail and R. Wittkower. (Oxford University Press. Three Guineas.)
THE subject of this book is the relationship between Britain and the countries of the Mediterranean basin in the field of the fine and applied arts over a period of about three thousand years. The volume does not constitute a general survey of British art, since a number of the styles most widely practised in this country, Gothic among them, were of non-Mediterranean origin. But its authors claim that " the history of the relation between Britain and Mediterranean art might almost be termed the most essential chapter of the history of British art in general," and throughout the greater part of the period surveyed the course of culture can be charted by the influence of Italy and Greece. The method of the book is as novel as its scope. Based on an exhibition organised by the Warburg Institute of London University in 1941, it consists of eighty-six self-contained sections. Each section is organised under a general heading—The Carolingian Renaissance and English Sculpture, Neo-Greek Architecture and so on—and comprises a double page with up to twelve small illustrations and some five hundred words of explanatory text. With each section the relationship of text to illustrations is so organised that each point made in the text is illustrated and each illustration is discussed. By this expedient the book successfully reduces a vast panorama to intelligible, concrete terms.
The imagination which has dictated the form of the book is sustained in the discussion of complicated style relationships. Where the general level of presentation is so high, it is invidious to choose individual sections for special praise. Mention must none the less be made of the admirable pages on the assimilation of classical forms in Celtic art, of the lucid and human accounts of the sources of figure representation in English eighth-century illumination and of the revival of classical mythology in mediaeval art, of the sections on St. Paul's and its place within the concept of Baroque architecture and on Bernini s sculptural influence in England, and of the brief discussion of the use of motifs from Michelangelo in the paintings of Reynolds and Blake and in the architecture of the Christ Church Library. Examples of the synthetic, vision which contributes so much to the book's success are to be seen in a paragraph in the section on Roman Britain tracing the stages by which the Britannia on the reverse of a coin of Antoninus Pius became the Britannia on the modern penny, and ad analysis of the influence exercised by a single painting, Titian's Charles V with a Dog, for a short time in Charles I's collection and now in Madrid, through an adaptation by Van Dyck, on Reynolds, Gainsborough and the portrait painters of the eighteenth century. On the other hand the authors fail to grasp the opportunity to trace the pedigree of the horse paintings of Stubbs back to its source at Mantua in Sala dei Cavalli of Giulio Romano.
Some weeks ago the death was announced of Professor Saxl, the
author of the first half of this book, and. it is satisfactory that the contribution made by the Warburg Institute under his direction to the study of English art should be commemorated elsewhere than in the pages of learned periodicals by a volume which will find its way to every school and library. And the memorial is the more complete in that its pages reflect so faithfully the breadth of view, the immense learning and the insatiable curiosity of the scholar by whom it was conceived. To. Professor Saxl's discerning genius, students in this country owe a debt that cannot be easily
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