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Yale Publications in the History of Art
Roman Sculpture
Roman sculpture was an integral part of Roman life, and the Romans placed statues and reliefs in their fora, basilicas, temples, and public baths, as well as in their houses, villas, gardens, and tombs. In this beautifully illustrated book―the first in almost a century devoted solely to Roman sculpture―Diana E. E. Kleiner discusses all the major public and private monuments in Rome, as well as many less well known monuments in the capital and elsewhere in the empire. She examines art commissioned by the imperial elite and by private patrons, including freedmen and slaves, and she also highlights monuments honoring women and children. Kleiner demonstrates that the social, ethnic, and geographical diversity of Roman patronage led to an art that was eclectic and characterized by varying styles, often tied to the social status of the patron. She also examines the interrelations between works produced for different kinds of patrons.
Kleiner begins with a long thematic introduction that describes Rome and its empire, characterizes patrons from the capital and the provinces, discusses the position of the artist in Roman society and the materials he used, and presents a history of the study of Roman art. The remaining chapters constitute a chronological examination of Roman sculpture from the foundation of Rome in 753 B.C. to the transfer of the capital to Constantinople in A.D. 330. In each period the monuments are divided by type, for example, portraiture, state relief sculpture, the art of freedmen, and provincial art. Throughout, Kleiner treats Roman sculpture in its cultural, political, and social contexts and, wherever possible, as an element of the architectural complex in which it was set.
Published with the assistance of the Getty Grant Program
Kleiner begins with a long thematic introduction that describes Rome and its empire, characterizes patrons from the capital and the provinces, discusses the position of the artist in Roman society and the materials he used, and presents a history of the study of Roman art. The remaining chapters constitute a chronological examination of Roman sculpture from the foundation of Rome in 753 B.C. to the transfer of the capital to Constantinople in A.D. 330. In each period the monuments are divided by type, for example, portraiture, state relief sculpture, the art of freedmen, and provincial art. Throughout, Kleiner treats Roman sculpture in its cultural, political, and social contexts and, wherever possible, as an element of the architectural complex in which it was set.
Published with the assistance of the Getty Grant Program
- GenresArtNonfiction
489 pages, Paperback
First published September 28, 1992
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June 28, 2024
I would like to give this work a stronger commendation than I can do. It is described on its cover as “Magisterial” and it is magisterial in size and in the extent of its coverage. It is also magisterial in the range and quality of its photographs.
Further, I learnt a great deal about Roman sculpture from reading it. It seems, however, to be one of those books that was never intended to be read through from cover, but to be used as an encyclopaedic reference work, to be delved into for specific information. There are ten chapters after the introduction, The Art of the Republic; The Age of Augustus and the Birth of Imperial Art; Art Under the Julio-Claudians; The Civil War of 68-69, the Flavian Dynasty, and Nerva; Art Under Trajan and Hadrian; Antonine Art: the Beginning of Late Antiquity; the Severan Dynasty; the Third Century: A Century of Civil War; the Tetrarchy; The Constantinian Period. Then there is a handy glossary of Latin and Greek terms, and a reasonable index. Each chapter is followed by its bibliography, and these show an impressive amount of preparatory research or, for the curious reader, valuable resources to pursue for further information. Reflective of the nature of scholarship in this area, a lot of these sources are in Italian or German.
One of the elements I found a little irritating was that each chapter concludes with a summary, academic thesis-style; since the text of the chapters is articulate and lucid, this seemed quite unnecessary and, while it might be seen as required style in academia, here it just added to the bulk of an already bulky book. On the other hand, I appreciated that each chapter began with a précis of the history of its period, focusing on the imperial families and on military engagements. I can imagine that for a reader with a strong knowledge of the history of the Roman Republic and Empire – which would probably be the majority of such a specialist book’s readership – this element would be unnecessary and, indeed, redundant. However, I found it a useful top-up for a fading memory.
I was surprised that Kleiner refers to the legendary early “kings” of Rome as though they are real historical individuals, dealing with them in the same way as she does the later, known, emperors. The distinction needs to be made between myth and reality.
Kleiner notes that the Etruscans produced 3-D art work in either bronze or terra cotta, and the early Romans added Greek marble to the list of materials. Then, just before the start of the Common Era, they discovered their own marble source at Carrara. This enabled Octavius to boast subsequently that he had transformed Rome from a city of brick to one of marble.
The vast majority of the works treated in this book are made of marble, either as reliefs on arches and sarcophagi, or as statues and busts. Kleiner reasonably points out, though, that anything sculpted in any metal, bronze, silver or gold, was likely to have been melted down and reused in the intervening years. She also makes the point that almost the only artworks still in their original positions are Trajan’s Column and the Arch of Titus. Furthermore, fragments or sections of earlier pieces have commonly been re-used in different works, often in Late Antiquity. She contends that it is “likely that the fragments from monuments of Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius were not haphazardly incorporated into the Arch of Constantine. They were carefully selected because their inclusion underscored the new emperor’s attempt to associate himself not with his immediate predecessors but instead with those whose vision he believed he shared,” and “Late Antique preference for spolia was simply the natural outcome of a long Roman experiment with eclecticism. /What might be called the Late Antique spolia phenomenon must also be attributed to the decline of the number of artists working in Rome at monumental scale.” And when a head was sculpted, it was common for copies to be made by “pointing”, whereby a surface point is plotted on a original and then transferred to the same point on a copy, rather like a 3-D pantograph.
While most of the work covered in the book was public art commissioned either by the subject, himself an emperor or senator or military hero, or by a patron seeking to accumulate credits, aristocratic lower beings also liked to show off their own heritage with a domestic display of busts of their forebears. Interestingly, it was illegal for freedmen to have similar displays in their homes.
However, the other use of relief sculpture was in homage to the dead, either with a sarcophagus or with a tomb. And freedmen quite commonly commissioned such works and, according to Kleiner, in fact made significant artistic innovations in them, these subsequently being duplicated by the aristocracy. She makes the amusing point, though, that in the often-published baker’s wife’s tomb near Porta Maggiore, the husband’s pious tribute to the wife is rather eclipsed by his proud representation of his own professional achievements. The other important consequence of these structures is that they have provided much valuable information about the lives of the freedman class, a class which is neglected in both contemporary writing and official documents.
During the late Republican era, a sculptural style, now known as “veristic” sought a representation which showed a face with complete accuracy, including every blemish and wrinkle. This was, apparently, because such features were associated with age and thus reflected experience and wisdom. Kleiner is somewhat dismissive of the style. “The detailed, almost cartographic rendition of the human face, however, sometimes became an end in itself, and the endless array of wrinkled faces was sometimes less individualistic than indistinguishable.” Personally, I disagree; examples both included in this book (there are some beautiful portraits of Julius Caesar and of Pompey) and not included, really seem to convey the essence of their subjects, and to do so individualistically and evocatively.
However, when Octavius Augustus got going, he decided that a reversion to idealized portraiture, referencing Greek gods was closer to what he wanted to convey. And, of course, he became emperor as a relatively young man. So, a lot of what came later was, in terms of human nature, repetitive and boring. And there was not much work to do by the artists who were called upon to remodel the head of the damnatio memoriae . It is fortunate that the artists of emperors’ heads on coins seem to have been more committed to accurate portrayal. It is interesting that, a lot of the time, coin portraits have been used to identify anonymous sculptures.
The important element now became a sort of documentary reportage of military campaigns, especially on the multitude of triumphal arches both in Rome and in the provinces. Augustus was something of a Renaissance man and supported all the arts. But they had to serve his purpose. So he had Julius Caesar proclaimed divine, then minted a coin with himself on the obverse and Caesar on the reverse, showing all that he was the son of a god. He did not go so far as to claim godhood for himself but did make his association with the beautiful Apollo prominent (regarding which, Kleiner amusingly quotes Suetonius’s description of the old Augustus who: “had only partial vision. His teeth were small, few and decayed; his hair, yellowish and rather curly, his eyebrows met over his nose”).
Two important artistic innovations occurred over the centuries in these triumphal friezes. First, was a device used by battle-field painters of expanding the scene by imagining a bird’s-eye view; secondly there was a gradual introduction of what Kleiner terms “hierarchy of scale”, such that the important people are made larger than the less important. Kleiner does not mention that this device had been used in much earlier times by, amongst others, the Mesopotamians. There is something of a hint that egotism supplanted nationalism in these structures. Augustus had his defeat of Marc Antony at Actium represented, and Constantine, several centuries later, displayed his defeat of Maxentius. In both cases, personal civil wars were shown as if they were national triumphs against foreign races.
The other innovation brought about by Constantine was the addition of children, youths and women to sculpture, often in family groupings. Kleiner explains this in terms of his being philosophically reverent of families, particularly aristocratic families, fearing the elite class was in danger of disappearing.
Constantine’s predilection for idealized portrait sculpture had periods of subsequent fashionability, but also of neglect over the years; the first emperor to follow a different path was Claudius who acceded late in life and had himself portrayed with all the facial features of age (“sagging jowls, furrows, creases”), although on a muscular Jovian torso. Given that Claudius had been described by his mother as a “monster”, assumed to be mentally deficient despite in fact being able enough to write several books, it is interesting that he chose to flaunt the unattractive truth about his face.
Meanwhile, there was further development in the style of relief-carving: “more voluminous, plastically rendered togas”; “hair is also fuller, looser and more deeply undercut…some of the figures have slight beards, which adds a new texture to their faces.”
In the present context of recriminations over colonial exploitation in the last few centuries, it is interesting to note that when Vespasian and Titus and Trajan returned from their various campaigns, their triumphal marches through the streets of Rome proudly displayed the booty plundered from Dacia, Parthia and Jerusalem. The wealth they pilfered was then used for building projects such as Trajan’s Column and the Arch of Titus, significant treasures of the Roman Empire. Amusingly, the (naked, pagan) gods atop some of their pillars were subsequently removed by the Vatican and replaced by figures of popes.
Trajan’s adopted son, Hadrian was not an enthusiast for war and sought to close, rather than extend, the Empire’s borders. Hadrian also returned to a more veristic portrait style, although the peaceful emperor was often depicted with full armour, often stamping upon a Dacian’s head. Hadrian became the first Roman emperor to sport a beard, setting the trend for subsequent Roman men.
While several emperors established palatial private villas, perhaps the most famous being Diocletian’s at Split, Hadrian’s at Tivoli shows much about the man. An inveterate traveller as emperor, he created replicas at Tivoli of many of the buildings he had admired while travelling. Many of the features are evocative of Egypt, where Antinous drowned in the Nile, the most conspicuous being a canal feature, but also a series of sculptures showing Antinous when deified.
One area that I had never focused on before this book brought it to my attention is the almost caricatured form of numismatic portraits during the Tetrarchy. I was fascinated by the pictures of Diocletian and Maxentius coins, particularly the latter.
One of my quibbles with E.E. Kleiner is with her propensity for presuming she can see subjects’ personalities or emotions in their facial features. I have no objection to her writing that “the eyes themselves are large and curve downward at the corner, giving Decius a mournful expression.”
However, when she writes that “In this portrait, Commodus is depicted with his long, oval face, arched brows, and half-closed eyes, large nose, small mouth, and arrogant expression”, she is drifting into a level of interpretation that I would regard as subjective. Then, her claim that “The horrors of war were profoundly felt by Marcus Aurelius, an introspective man deeply imbued with the tenets of Stoic philosophy. It is certainly the emperor’s bent toward self-examination that led him to commission state portraits of himself that described not only his physical appearance but also his internal turmoil about the state of the Roman empire I consider specious. And her insistence that for the multitude of pre-Tetrarchan emperors “It is actually anxiety and introspection that are the hallmarks of third-century portraiture…brooding intensity of their subjects and the reflective mood of the times”, and that, in a statue of Caracalla, “The spontaneous twist of the head accentuates the power and energy of its subject, but the transitory pose also captures the essence of a cruel and suspicious man who glances over his shoulder as if to catch would-be assassins off guard” I consider to be, simply, an entirely unsubstantiated personal interpretation, and to be essentially irrelevant as a result.
While Kleiner’s work is highly authoritative, there were a few elements that irritated me one way or another. The ends of men’s hair styles almost always curl slightly. Kleiner always and rather tediously denotes this as “comma-shaped”. When hair on a sculpture is shown by incising into the scalp, she refers to this as “negative carving”, which she contrasts with what she refers to as “positive carving”, the conventional more three-dimensional carving of locks of hair. It seems to me that “positive” and “negative” are unhelpful terms to select; while they are two different approaches, they are both “negative”: both involve cutting into the starting surface.
Occasionally, she repeats phrases from one section in another section. And occasionally, her text is confusing; in relation to Constantine’s mother, Helen, she states “The date of her death is as uncertain as that of her birth. The location is also disputed. She appears to have died at Constantinople or Rome between 329 and 337”. Shortly afterwards, she is unequivocal: “When Helena died in 329, she was buried there because a family tomb had yet to be constructed in Constantinople.”
These are pretty minor quibbles, however. This is, all considered, a worthy reference book on the subject.
Further, I learnt a great deal about Roman sculpture from reading it. It seems, however, to be one of those books that was never intended to be read through from cover, but to be used as an encyclopaedic reference work, to be delved into for specific information. There are ten chapters after the introduction, The Art of the Republic; The Age of Augustus and the Birth of Imperial Art; Art Under the Julio-Claudians; The Civil War of 68-69, the Flavian Dynasty, and Nerva; Art Under Trajan and Hadrian; Antonine Art: the Beginning of Late Antiquity; the Severan Dynasty; the Third Century: A Century of Civil War; the Tetrarchy; The Constantinian Period. Then there is a handy glossary of Latin and Greek terms, and a reasonable index. Each chapter is followed by its bibliography, and these show an impressive amount of preparatory research or, for the curious reader, valuable resources to pursue for further information. Reflective of the nature of scholarship in this area, a lot of these sources are in Italian or German.
One of the elements I found a little irritating was that each chapter concludes with a summary, academic thesis-style; since the text of the chapters is articulate and lucid, this seemed quite unnecessary and, while it might be seen as required style in academia, here it just added to the bulk of an already bulky book. On the other hand, I appreciated that each chapter began with a précis of the history of its period, focusing on the imperial families and on military engagements. I can imagine that for a reader with a strong knowledge of the history of the Roman Republic and Empire – which would probably be the majority of such a specialist book’s readership – this element would be unnecessary and, indeed, redundant. However, I found it a useful top-up for a fading memory.
I was surprised that Kleiner refers to the legendary early “kings” of Rome as though they are real historical individuals, dealing with them in the same way as she does the later, known, emperors. The distinction needs to be made between myth and reality.
Kleiner notes that the Etruscans produced 3-D art work in either bronze or terra cotta, and the early Romans added Greek marble to the list of materials. Then, just before the start of the Common Era, they discovered their own marble source at Carrara. This enabled Octavius to boast subsequently that he had transformed Rome from a city of brick to one of marble.
The vast majority of the works treated in this book are made of marble, either as reliefs on arches and sarcophagi, or as statues and busts. Kleiner reasonably points out, though, that anything sculpted in any metal, bronze, silver or gold, was likely to have been melted down and reused in the intervening years. She also makes the point that almost the only artworks still in their original positions are Trajan’s Column and the Arch of Titus. Furthermore, fragments or sections of earlier pieces have commonly been re-used in different works, often in Late Antiquity. She contends that it is “likely that the fragments from monuments of Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius were not haphazardly incorporated into the Arch of Constantine. They were carefully selected because their inclusion underscored the new emperor’s attempt to associate himself not with his immediate predecessors but instead with those whose vision he believed he shared,” and “Late Antique preference for spolia was simply the natural outcome of a long Roman experiment with eclecticism. /What might be called the Late Antique spolia phenomenon must also be attributed to the decline of the number of artists working in Rome at monumental scale.” And when a head was sculpted, it was common for copies to be made by “pointing”, whereby a surface point is plotted on a original and then transferred to the same point on a copy, rather like a 3-D pantograph.
While most of the work covered in the book was public art commissioned either by the subject, himself an emperor or senator or military hero, or by a patron seeking to accumulate credits, aristocratic lower beings also liked to show off their own heritage with a domestic display of busts of their forebears. Interestingly, it was illegal for freedmen to have similar displays in their homes.
However, the other use of relief sculpture was in homage to the dead, either with a sarcophagus or with a tomb. And freedmen quite commonly commissioned such works and, according to Kleiner, in fact made significant artistic innovations in them, these subsequently being duplicated by the aristocracy. She makes the amusing point, though, that in the often-published baker’s wife’s tomb near Porta Maggiore, the husband’s pious tribute to the wife is rather eclipsed by his proud representation of his own professional achievements. The other important consequence of these structures is that they have provided much valuable information about the lives of the freedman class, a class which is neglected in both contemporary writing and official documents.
During the late Republican era, a sculptural style, now known as “veristic” sought a representation which showed a face with complete accuracy, including every blemish and wrinkle. This was, apparently, because such features were associated with age and thus reflected experience and wisdom. Kleiner is somewhat dismissive of the style. “The detailed, almost cartographic rendition of the human face, however, sometimes became an end in itself, and the endless array of wrinkled faces was sometimes less individualistic than indistinguishable.” Personally, I disagree; examples both included in this book (there are some beautiful portraits of Julius Caesar and of Pompey) and not included, really seem to convey the essence of their subjects, and to do so individualistically and evocatively.
However, when Octavius Augustus got going, he decided that a reversion to idealized portraiture, referencing Greek gods was closer to what he wanted to convey. And, of course, he became emperor as a relatively young man. So, a lot of what came later was, in terms of human nature, repetitive and boring. And there was not much work to do by the artists who were called upon to remodel the head of the damnatio memoriae . It is fortunate that the artists of emperors’ heads on coins seem to have been more committed to accurate portrayal. It is interesting that, a lot of the time, coin portraits have been used to identify anonymous sculptures.
The important element now became a sort of documentary reportage of military campaigns, especially on the multitude of triumphal arches both in Rome and in the provinces. Augustus was something of a Renaissance man and supported all the arts. But they had to serve his purpose. So he had Julius Caesar proclaimed divine, then minted a coin with himself on the obverse and Caesar on the reverse, showing all that he was the son of a god. He did not go so far as to claim godhood for himself but did make his association with the beautiful Apollo prominent (regarding which, Kleiner amusingly quotes Suetonius’s description of the old Augustus who: “had only partial vision. His teeth were small, few and decayed; his hair, yellowish and rather curly, his eyebrows met over his nose”).
Two important artistic innovations occurred over the centuries in these triumphal friezes. First, was a device used by battle-field painters of expanding the scene by imagining a bird’s-eye view; secondly there was a gradual introduction of what Kleiner terms “hierarchy of scale”, such that the important people are made larger than the less important. Kleiner does not mention that this device had been used in much earlier times by, amongst others, the Mesopotamians. There is something of a hint that egotism supplanted nationalism in these structures. Augustus had his defeat of Marc Antony at Actium represented, and Constantine, several centuries later, displayed his defeat of Maxentius. In both cases, personal civil wars were shown as if they were national triumphs against foreign races.
The other innovation brought about by Constantine was the addition of children, youths and women to sculpture, often in family groupings. Kleiner explains this in terms of his being philosophically reverent of families, particularly aristocratic families, fearing the elite class was in danger of disappearing.
Constantine’s predilection for idealized portrait sculpture had periods of subsequent fashionability, but also of neglect over the years; the first emperor to follow a different path was Claudius who acceded late in life and had himself portrayed with all the facial features of age (“sagging jowls, furrows, creases”), although on a muscular Jovian torso. Given that Claudius had been described by his mother as a “monster”, assumed to be mentally deficient despite in fact being able enough to write several books, it is interesting that he chose to flaunt the unattractive truth about his face.
Meanwhile, there was further development in the style of relief-carving: “more voluminous, plastically rendered togas”; “hair is also fuller, looser and more deeply undercut…some of the figures have slight beards, which adds a new texture to their faces.”
In the present context of recriminations over colonial exploitation in the last few centuries, it is interesting to note that when Vespasian and Titus and Trajan returned from their various campaigns, their triumphal marches through the streets of Rome proudly displayed the booty plundered from Dacia, Parthia and Jerusalem. The wealth they pilfered was then used for building projects such as Trajan’s Column and the Arch of Titus, significant treasures of the Roman Empire. Amusingly, the (naked, pagan) gods atop some of their pillars were subsequently removed by the Vatican and replaced by figures of popes.
Trajan’s adopted son, Hadrian was not an enthusiast for war and sought to close, rather than extend, the Empire’s borders. Hadrian also returned to a more veristic portrait style, although the peaceful emperor was often depicted with full armour, often stamping upon a Dacian’s head. Hadrian became the first Roman emperor to sport a beard, setting the trend for subsequent Roman men.
While several emperors established palatial private villas, perhaps the most famous being Diocletian’s at Split, Hadrian’s at Tivoli shows much about the man. An inveterate traveller as emperor, he created replicas at Tivoli of many of the buildings he had admired while travelling. Many of the features are evocative of Egypt, where Antinous drowned in the Nile, the most conspicuous being a canal feature, but also a series of sculptures showing Antinous when deified.
One area that I had never focused on before this book brought it to my attention is the almost caricatured form of numismatic portraits during the Tetrarchy. I was fascinated by the pictures of Diocletian and Maxentius coins, particularly the latter.
One of my quibbles with E.E. Kleiner is with her propensity for presuming she can see subjects’ personalities or emotions in their facial features. I have no objection to her writing that “the eyes themselves are large and curve downward at the corner, giving Decius a mournful expression.”
However, when she writes that “In this portrait, Commodus is depicted with his long, oval face, arched brows, and half-closed eyes, large nose, small mouth, and arrogant expression”, she is drifting into a level of interpretation that I would regard as subjective. Then, her claim that “The horrors of war were profoundly felt by Marcus Aurelius, an introspective man deeply imbued with the tenets of Stoic philosophy. It is certainly the emperor’s bent toward self-examination that led him to commission state portraits of himself that described not only his physical appearance but also his internal turmoil about the state of the Roman empire I consider specious. And her insistence that for the multitude of pre-Tetrarchan emperors “It is actually anxiety and introspection that are the hallmarks of third-century portraiture…brooding intensity of their subjects and the reflective mood of the times”, and that, in a statue of Caracalla, “The spontaneous twist of the head accentuates the power and energy of its subject, but the transitory pose also captures the essence of a cruel and suspicious man who glances over his shoulder as if to catch would-be assassins off guard” I consider to be, simply, an entirely unsubstantiated personal interpretation, and to be essentially irrelevant as a result.
While Kleiner’s work is highly authoritative, there were a few elements that irritated me one way or another. The ends of men’s hair styles almost always curl slightly. Kleiner always and rather tediously denotes this as “comma-shaped”. When hair on a sculpture is shown by incising into the scalp, she refers to this as “negative carving”, which she contrasts with what she refers to as “positive carving”, the conventional more three-dimensional carving of locks of hair. It seems to me that “positive” and “negative” are unhelpful terms to select; while they are two different approaches, they are both “negative”: both involve cutting into the starting surface.
Occasionally, she repeats phrases from one section in another section. And occasionally, her text is confusing; in relation to Constantine’s mother, Helen, she states “The date of her death is as uncertain as that of her birth. The location is also disputed. She appears to have died at Constantinople or Rome between 329 and 337”. Shortly afterwards, she is unequivocal: “When Helena died in 329, she was buried there because a family tomb had yet to be constructed in Constantinople.”
These are pretty minor quibbles, however. This is, all considered, a worthy reference book on the subject.
May 18, 2015
I read textbooks out loud to my youngest son, who is partially deaf but also an auditory learner. There are many things that I have read in that role that I would never have otherwise picked up and this is certainly one of those books.
We read it in connection with an art history course that he is taking. I discovered that there is really almost nothing that I know about art history in general and Roman art in particular. At first I thought that my problem stemmed from not going to class. Surely if I were to hear the professor I would understand it all better. But then there was an extra credit evening lecture to go to. Since my son has no more talent for art history than I, he knew he had to go and get those extra credit points. They could be the difference between passing and failing. I went to help take notes, and that is when I discovered that being in the lecture was not going to be the magic bullet for me. Oh dear. So what did I learn from reading this book? More than I would have guessed from where I started, but when I look for art books in the future, I am definitely going to do more than look at the pictures to see if there is some hope on this green earth that I could follow the story. Somewhere toward the end of the book I started to feel like I might be able to do better with my next art history book.
We read it in connection with an art history course that he is taking. I discovered that there is really almost nothing that I know about art history in general and Roman art in particular. At first I thought that my problem stemmed from not going to class. Surely if I were to hear the professor I would understand it all better. But then there was an extra credit evening lecture to go to. Since my son has no more talent for art history than I, he knew he had to go and get those extra credit points. They could be the difference between passing and failing. I went to help take notes, and that is when I discovered that being in the lecture was not going to be the magic bullet for me. Oh dear. So what did I learn from reading this book? More than I would have guessed from where I started, but when I look for art books in the future, I am definitely going to do more than look at the pictures to see if there is some hope on this green earth that I could follow the story. Somewhere toward the end of the book I started to feel like I might be able to do better with my next art history book.
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