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"The Story of Art is one of the most famous and popular books on art ever published. For 45 years it has remained unrivalled as an introduction to the whole subject, from the earliest cave paintings to the experimental art of today. Readers of all ages and backgrounds throughout the world have found in Professor Gombrich a true master, who combines knowledge and wisdom with a unique gift for communicating directly his own deep love of the works of art he describes." "The Story of Art owes its lasting popularity to the directness and simplicity of the writing, and also the author's skill in presenting a clear narrative. He describes his aim as 'to bring some intelligible order into the wealth of names, periods and styles which crowd the pages of more ambitious works', and using his insight into the psychology of the visual arts, he makes us see the history of art as 'a continuous weaving and changing of traditions in which each work refers to the past and points to the future', 'a living chain that still links our own time with the Pyramid age'. In its new format, the 16th edition of this classic work is set to continue its triumphant progress for future generations and to remain the first choice for all newcomers to art."--Jacket.… (more)
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The inclusions and exclusions of certain artists are, of course, always arbitrary. However, Gombrich’s choices do not deviate too much from a standard art history text. What particularly drew me to the book was what I perceived to be its inordinate focus on medieval and especially Renaissance art. Of the twenty-eight chapters included in the book, about five mostly focus on Western medieval images (6 and 8-11). Another six chapters (13-18) focus on the art of the Western Renaissance. Most surveys of art history to which I had been previously exposed paid scant attention to medieval art and they sometimes did not give the Renaissance the space that I felt it deserved. There is no doubt the medieval and Renaissance art Gombrich’s pet periods here (and, admittedly, they’re mine, too.)
What makes it so special is that, instead of spending the first chapter in an abstract exercise of thinking about what “Art” is, he forces you over and over again to take the art on its own terms. While discussing the various visual perspectives painted by the artist of “The Garden of Nebamun,” he says: “To us reliefs and wall-paintings provide an extraordinarily vivid picture of life as it was lived in Egypt thousands of years ago. And yet, looking at them for the first time, one may find them rather bewildering. The reason is that the Egyptian painters had a very different way from ours of representing real life. Perhaps this is connected with the different purpose their paintings had to serve. What mattered most was not prettiness but completeness. It was the artists’ task to preserve everything as clearly and permanently as possible. So they did not set out to sketch nature as it appeared to them from any fortuitous angle” (p. 60). It is the occasional insight like this that makes the book most worthwhile for a neophyte. After all, how many of us have measured something we saw by the standards of our particular narrow time and place? He really drives home the point that thinking about art seriously means thinking about other perspectives (both literally and figuratively), other preoccupations, and other aesthetic modus operandi. This is a lesson that should be lost on none of us, about art, or about anything else.
I was sad that he didn't mirror the