Greek Sculpture and Painting
Tuts book is a reprint of the chapters on Greek art in the Cambridge Ancient History. It is of importance to archaeo- logical students, as it brings within reach, for the astonishingly moderate sum of half a guinea, a survey which covers the development side by side of Greek sculpture and painting.
Besides being strangely enough the only book of its kind in English, it is also one of the most brilliant productions of present-day scholarship. But an extremely sane and extremely entertaining summary of ten centuries of Greek art in the space of a hundred pages is not of interest to archaeologists alone. Those who have been slightly sickened by the exuberant rhapsodies which are the unfortu- nate failing of too many popular works on Greek art, will be glad to take the taste away with something more whole- some. And those who have not yet tasted the flavour of Professor Beazley's prose, have something to look forward to. The following is a passage from the chapter on late archaic painting :
" The chief interest of the vase-painter remains action. Nar- rative subjects—mythical and heroical—are as popular as ever, but pictures from everyday life become commoner than before, and there is a special love of athletic scenes with their straining muscles, intense movements, and countless postures ; for scenes of revelry, the komos,' where men rush, dance, quarrel, lust, vomit, shout and sing ; and for the counterpart of the komos in the ideal sphere—the thiasos, Dionysos with his satyrs and maenads. For all its variety, humour and unconcern, this art is not naturalistic : apart from some very old persons, crook-backed and borne-over, from a fat belly or so, a wrinkled brow, a bald head, a bad beard, or a blobby nose ; god and man, Greek and barbarian, athlete, drinker and amorist, have the same well-formed bodies and the same untainted vigour."
The chapters on ..Hellenistic sculpture and painting are by Professor Ashmole, who has contrived to make interesting and often attractive, what sometimes seems a rather dismal and shapeless period. The illustrations are good ; for objects not illustrated references are given wherever possible to a single publication, Winter's Kunstgeschichte in Bildern. Not the least valuable part of the book is the annotated biblio- graphy, which includes references to articles in periodicals.
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