RIDDER, A. de, and W. DEONNA,
Art in Greece.
Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1968. Reissued. 375p. ill. Bound wrps. This penetrating study show the place taken by art in the practical life of the Greeks throughout their history. Deonna writes as an archaeologist and student of Hellenic history, not as an art-critic. He throws a vivid light on the influences exercised on art by the composite racial origin of the Greek nation, an on the meaning of the two opposite tendencies of Ionianism and the Dorian spirit – tendencies reconciled only in the measured Atticism which held the balance between the early Oriental exuberance and feminine grace of the one and the primitively severe, almost mathematical, schematism of the other, between Dorian anthropomorphism and Ionian pan-naturalism. He shows how the art of Hellenistic Greece is the outcome of renewed Oriental contacts following on the exhaustion caused by the Peloponnesian wars, when Dorian discipline and Dorian virility were extinguished and a warweary Atticism grew old and lived only on memories of a glorious past. (Publisher's information).
€ 26.50
(Antiquarian)