It’s difficult to imagine what the authors could have done to improve this marvelous guide.
A sweeping, accessible historical survey of artistic iconography.
Visual art has always been pervaded by symbolic imagery, much of which would have been recognizable to historically contemporary viewers. But the same embedded meaning is largely unfamiliar to today’s audience, which is a barricade to more meaningful appreciation, according to authors Angel Rafael Colón and Patricia Ann Colón (co-authors: Tincture of Time: A Concise History of Medicine, 2013): “Most iconographic symbols, however, now appear arcane, unfathomable, begging for explication.” Only in the 19th century did iconology emerge as a formal field of study, but in such a prohibitively academic form, it’s of little use to the layperson. The authors cover the span of visual artistic production up until the 19th century, prior to the emergence of more abstract, less representational efforts. The first chapter covers Christian iconography; the majority of art between the 10th and 15th centuries displayed devotional themes. Chapter 2 talks about Western art in the Renaissance period, when mythology and allegory began to replace (or enact in a new setting) Christian themes; much of this art was saved from destruction by Arab scholars. The authors continue the theme of gradual secularization by examining the Dutch golden age, a period liberated from the need to depict Christian images in the wake of the Reformation. A fascinatingly morbid chapter explores the iconography associated with death and includes a particularly grim but gripping look at funereal depictions of deceased children. Finally, the Colóns include a discussion of what they call “iconographic erratics,” those pieces of art that defy conventional classification, like Francisco Goya’s El Tres de Mayo and Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The flawlessly clear writing is often charmingly lighthearted though just as consistently characterized by scholarly scrupulousness. The scope is dazzlingly broad, yet the treatment of any particular motif or artistic product never feels unsatisfyingly abridged. Also, the work abounds with hundreds of gorgeous photographs of art, meticulously parsed into their symbolic components and then carefully decoded.
It’s difficult to imagine what the authors could have done to improve this marvelous guide.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-80704-0
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Ingram
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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