Times Literary Supplement, December 20, 2002
Book Description
Few writers have been able to invoke the material presence of works of art in the way Stokes does in The Quattro Cento and Stones of Rimini They combine travel writing with acts of looking spun out so as to reinterpret the imposing legacy of the Italian Renaissance through an aesthetic of the direct carving of stone, which has parallels in the sculpture of Brancusi, Henry Moore, and Barbara Hepworth but was for Stokes the discovery of artists in fifteenth-century Italy. To his way of thinking, there then arose a realization that the materials of art "were the actual objects of inspiration, the stocks for the deepest fantasies." During the Renaissance, Stokes maintained, stone accordingly "blossomed" into sculpture and buildings, such as the Tempio Malatestiano, that throw "inner ferment outward into definite act and thought."
This new edition of Stokes’s pivotal books will be of interest to those concerned with art criticism, aesthetics, psychoanalysis and art, and the art and architecture of the Renaissance and Modern periods.
