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All that Glitters Is Not Gold
Helen Hills
Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics
of Marble from Antiquity to the Enlightenment,
by Fabio Barry, New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2020, 438pp., 215 col. and 117 b. &
w. illus., hardback, £50
In Sparkling Company: Reflections on Glass in the
18th-Century British World, edited by Christopher
L. Maxwell, Corning, NY: Corning Museum of
Glass, 304pp. 191 col. illus., $65
Both these books are part of a renewed concern
with materials and materiality, sweeping across the
humanities over the last ten years or so, ultimately
inspired by new materiality pioneered by Gilles
Deleuze, but only recently taken up by mainstream
art history (which continues to disavow its Deleuzian
indebtedness). ‘Materiality’ is not simply given; it is
a critique of the notion of mere matter conceived as
passive and inert, and it is more than ‘materials plus
technique’ even when these are recognized correctly
as being constantly changing. Rather, it refers to
potentialities within the material, the qualities,
resonances and capacities of materials that are released,
burnished, rediscovered, let slip, and reinvented
through their working, including through their critical
working in art, architecture and rethinking.
Barry’s book is hugely ambitious; Maxwell’s far
more modest in both range and tone. Barry’s book
grapples with marble, and attempts to engage with
what he calls ‘painting in stone’ over almost five
millennia from the fourth millennium BCE to the
early eighteenth century. The latter brings together an
array of scholars to breathe new life into glass studies.
It should prompt further reflection and investigation of
glass in eighteenth-century Britain and beyond amongst
scholars and graduate students; and its open tone and
uncategorical claims invite just that.
Maxwell’s book was prompted by his noticing the
‘frequent absence’ of glassware in studies in eighteenth-
century ‘material culture’ (11). It is as if scholars have
looked through glass for too long without thinking
about its effects, he observes. Beyond specialist studies
of drinking vessels, mirrors, and lighting, few have

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addressed the cultural significance of glass beyond
technique and specialist studies. Struck by the common
usage and interchangeability of terms polite and polished,
Maxwell investigates technological developments in
plate glass production for windows and mirrors and
its ‘transformative effect on architecture, interiors,
and sociability’ (11). He attributes a good deal to the
invention and production of lead glass in the 1670s, a
glass which possessed clarity and brilliance, like prized
rock crystal. Through this lens, eighteenth-century
Britain emerges as particularly glassy.
Glass was enmeshed with the entrancement of
light and lighting. Light was pricey and prestigious:
illuminating a table or a room for just one night could
burn up several weeks’ wages of a glassworker. Glass
was brilliant in its effects, especially when enamelled,
gilded, engraved and cut to chase light, soaring and
glinting in glamorous fashion. Cut lead glass and the
facet-cut diamond outshone the competition. Maxwell
tends to view developments through an outmoded
chronologizing of successive styles: ‘As the heavy
Baroque style gave way to lighter, more elaborate
design movements, delicate “air twists’ replaced the
substantial baluster stems of earlier decades’ (17).
However, the ideas arrayed here prompt one to consider
the light-twisting shapes of rococo in relation to lead
glass making. Technique and form must be thought
together as active productive processes if the promise of
materiality is to be grasped.
Maxwell offers illuminating analyses of Arthur
Devis’ portraits of the middling classes, stiff and
anodyne, void of animation outside or in. Yet these very
qualities, he argues, were deemed desirable depictions
of self-mastery and politeness. Complaisance was the
manifestation of a polished surface of apparently
effortless civility (plate 1). ‘Virtue and learning, like gold,
have their intrinsic value: but if they are not polished,
they certainly lose a great deal of their lustre, and even
polished brass will pass upon more people than rough
gold’, remarked Lord Chesterfield to his son (cited, 41).
A superficial age, rather like our own, it seems, and
likewise one in which selfishness and cruelty were
readily made serviceable with a veneer of polish. No
roughness or irregularity was betrayed in the facial
expression and bearing of the Athertons or their ilk
(an estimated 3 per cent of the population), or in their
silks, silver, bronze, lacquered furniture, and plate glass
gleaming in their fashionable sash windows. Possession
of self and material possessions were artfully connected:
‘Politeness was an artificial and performative state’ (39).
Marcia Pointon explores the artifice of glass in
eighteenth-century portraits and conversation pieces
to discuss what allusive, elusive and disturbing objects
mirrors are, especially in the work of artists such as
Johan Zoffany. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell’s essay
on glass in fashion traces the flow of glass from the
morning toilette to chic shopfronts and the fashionable
body aglimmer with glass beads woven into waistcoats,
glass paste stones set in stomachers, sequins and
beads on buckles and swords. Men and women were
equally bespangled. Glass was not simply a cheaper
alternative to gemstones. It was pricey and could be
shaped and coloured in unique ways to dazzling effects.
Useful, if uninspired, essays recount how glass also
enabled scientific instruments, including telescopes,
microscopes, and barometers, all the new paraphernalia
for measuring and counting. But the emergent glamour
of this new technology is not identified or skewered.
And nor is the way that newly invented opera glasses
allowed the leisured classes to peer at each other in new
ways to parade nosiness and lust as elegant lustre. Glass
became a marker of politeness, of being at ease with
refined objects and refined people.
Social classes in eighteenth-century Britain were
anxious to distinguish themselves from those above
and below them, and glass played a crucial role in that
shiny slidiness. As Shaftesbury declared in 1711, ‘the
Accomplishment of Breeding is to learn whatever is
decent in Company, or beautiful in Arts’ (cited, 41).
In short, the aesthetic realm was one way for social
ranks to distinguish themselves from others, including
sneering at the tastes of those who were beneath them.
Charismatic ideology, the role of hexis and embodiment
in reproducing elites, in exclusionary social dynamics,
in cultural capital and social symbolic forms of violence
are intimately allied to the polite glossy surface. Smooth
gleaming surfaces, reflecting or refracting light, were
seen as artfully simple and clean, part of the cult of the
polished, at variance with the ‘vulgarity’ of ‘excess’,
ornament and colour. All this has massive social and
political ramifications in terms of the production of
social class, racializing discourses, and gender; and
the essays here could usefully have engaged more with
existing scholarship on these topics.
The subtitle of the volume, ‘Reflections on Glass in
the 18th-Century British World’, affirms that the ‘world’
1 Jean-Étienne Liotard, Portrait of John, Lord Mountstuart,
later 4th Earl and 1st Marquess of Bute, 1763. Pastel on vellum,
114.9×90.2cm. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Photo: J. Paul Getty Museum.

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indeed belonged to the British, as they liked to claim, but
is also a point of view that should be robustly challenged.
Indeed, some of the essays expose how international
and hybridic that ‘British world’ already was. Kerry
Sinanan’s chapter on slavery and glass is important as it
addresses the entwining of glass, slavery and whiteness

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in the eighteenth century. Glass beads were one of the
main items of exchange along the Bight of Benin in West
Africa, then known as ‘the Slave coast’. It was enslavers
who promoted the tales of ‘inhumane’ Africans grasping
worthless trinkets in exchange for fellow Africans in
order to justify their own trade. It was not simply that
the middling classes were consuming goods produced
by enslaved people, but that the existence of slavery itself
informed the debate on the relation between rarefied
objects of culture and the ruthless world of commercial
transaction. Tropes of reflection, clarity and purity were
integral to the construction of ‘race’. ‘The pellucid,
crystal diction of glass articulated the consumption of
purity itself. Hence glass worked to intertwine purity
and modernity with the product of whiteness’ (76).
Glass was deeply enmeshed with international
trade and colonialism. At times, however, in Maxwell’s
volume, the eighteenth century is viewed through
overly polished spectacles: it was a time, we are told,
of ‘political stability, an invigorated and empowered
aristocracy, a diversifying economy and a growing
urbanism’ (41). Yet this depends upon whose point of
view one adopts. It was the golden century of the slave
trade, of unprecedented corruption, gambling and
economic swindling made respectable, epitomized
in the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, of
enclosure and dispossession of landless labourers and
the vicious Black Acts that punished by death the poor
for mere threat against property, for disguising oneself
or ‘blacking’ one’s face in a chase. It is crucial that we
learn about the role of glass in relation to all that.
Meanwhile Fabio Barry’s book investigates marble
retrospectively as a ‘a premodern concept of matter and
premodern motions of geology’, its part in cosmological
philosophies and its colours, images and patternings.
In accordance with taxonomies and philosophies
radically different from current dominant Western
notions, he includes discussions of glass and gems in
the Ancient Near East and Egypt. Barry has spent a
good deal of time and energy travelling the world and
looking at marble and its uses. This book is his attempt
to stitch it altogether. But there are curious tensions
in the fact that conceptually ‘the premodern’ figures
against an unavowed and unexplored ‘modern’ (even
‘modernism’, which creeps back in unnervingly in the
final pages of the book) – indeed, the whole book is
oriented towards Western Europe – while the analysis
swoops unhesitatingly from macro to micro, leading
to pronouncements like this: ‘Indeed, attempts to
reproduce the saturated hues and radiance of precious
gems were long made in Mesopotamia, Syro-Palestine,
Egypt and Aegean – and this praxis was the origin of
alchemy’ (7), as if the real significance of phenomenal
invention in the Middle East is to be found in alchemy.
At times the book’s scope is justified chronologically
– on the basis of periodization, often collapsed into style
– and at other times thematically. Barry both claims that
the ‘geography of the narrative here is circumscribed
by the historic evolution of marble architecture, which
is primarily a Western phenomenon’ (2) and that ‘[f]
or most of the period under review marble architecture
simply didn’t exist elsewhere’ (2). The book is broadly
chronological, though spattered with asides drawing
parallels with modern architecture (of the sort that
work better in a lecture than on the page) that reveal the
haunting of the book by the modernish ghost.
Chapters tend to start with potted histories of
political events, reigns and battles, as if their relevance
to the artworks investigated is self-explanatory. Islamic
architecture is barely discussed; pietre dure in Florence
and intarsia of Naples and Palermo are ignored:
‘However exciting and mind bogglingly skilful these
spectacles of artistry are, they are neither geologically
allusive nor project the sort of innate painting that
this book investigates’ (2). A closer look might have
persuaded him otherwise; the veins of the marble
deployed to represent Jonah’s ship in Santa Caterina in
Palermo is one example. But there is a different agenda
here, one which depends on ‘quality’ (as opposed to
the merely skilful artistry of those southern artisans)
and the discerning art historian’s eye for what is really a
pretty familiar canon.
Barry tells us that he wanted to restore the history of
art to artists away from current concern with patronage:
‘Patrons paid for their pleasures, but they generally left
artistic decisions at the discretion of their practitioners’
(3). Quite apart from the problem of evidence for such
sweeping claims, such a Romantic view is too hasty.
Artists have never been a natural breed set apart from
the circles for whom they worked. They were trained,
educated, and selected. Only some artists were trusted
by patrons in the Renaissance and beyond. One needs
to ask on what grounds that trust was earned and
permitted, rather than to assume that artists were ‘free’
to do what they wished. In the curious ad hoc admixture
of idealism and would-be new materialism that is the
hallmark of this book, we swerve to a very different
sort of claim: ‘a more distributive agency was at work
in creating artworks, whether buildings or paintings,
than the imposition of the artist’s will on some passive

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material’, in a process he describes as ‘a courtship’
(3). Yet scholarship that has addressed that ‘courtship’
in thoughtful and significant ways (e.g. Tim Ingold,
Andrew Benjamin, Katie Lloyd Thomas) is overlooked.
Barry’s account depends on a progressivist
and linear conception of history that verges on the
teleological: ‘Any marble architecture still lay far in the
future’ (12), he writes of the Ancient Near East; and ‘one
must await the Middle Assyrian period for the invention
of a glazed brickwall that will […] truly resplend’ (16), as
if centuries of human endeavour are magically resolved
in individual artworks. Periodization operates like a
series of tunnels on a railway line: ‘Once we enter the
Early Modern period, marble architecture ceases to be a
European phenomenon’ (2). Much of the discussion of
the ‘Classical and Hellenistic world’ is treated in terms
of ‘style’ and we gallop through ‘The Masonry Style’, the
‘First Style’ and are treated to teleological claims such as
‘The back chamber of the Tomb of the saties, Vulci […]
is a precocious example in the Zone Style (where only
paint and scored lines imitate masonry, not relief as in
the “Masonry” style’ (92). Why is this epoch treated in
these idealist nineteenth-century terms? And what sort
of art history is it that reduces a chamber to an ‘example’
of a ‘style’ and ends up with claims like this: ‘In the very
years in which Vitruvius wrote, the Second Style was
itself giving way to the “Third Style”’ (96). Styles come
and go, in Wölfflinian fashion, but the significance of
this is not analysed with Wölfflinian brilliance. Did
Vitruvius notice this event out of his window? What is
the relationship between these two claims?
Despite its dependence on style, periodization, and
the recognition of great works of art by great artists,
Barry’s book engages in a good deal of rhetorical sword
play, as if cutting away tiresome ideas and notions of
the less intrepid scholars congesting the field. Barry
eschews ‘well-worn ideas’ (2) and contests the ‘familiar
arguments’ that the use and display of a great range
of marbles demonstrated imperial reach and power,
as ‘too reductive’: ‘upper echelons participated in a
broad range of auto-representation that cannot be
generalized into the anodyne concept of “power”,
which is a legacy of Marxist critique’ (2). Such claims
are too hasty in passing over the necessity of analysing
power in more nuanced ways to interrogate precisely
why and how visual representation participated in the
emergence of new social groups and ideas and in the
persistent dominance of old ones. Barry confuses weak
art-historical interpretation with defunct methodology.
He claims to oppose patronal interpretations of art
because ‘they totally ignore the role of architects and
artists’ (3). To artists ‘marble was neither only a precious
commodity nor some raw material to be consumed’
(3). Of course not; but artists were not alone in this:
marble was not simply a commodity or raw material for
discerning patrons or viewers either. Power, whether
viewed through a Marxist lens or not, needs to be
analysed in relation to the claims and fears presaged
in marble work with an eye to the costs and gains of
power’s ends.
While weak on theory, Barry is good on connective
associations. He allows marble to be more than solid
mineral, and architecture to be more than literal
building. He is quick to seize on radiance and lightness,
on godly dazzle, on the thrilling way in which stone
can seem to radiate or enclose light, as if it were alive
(plate 2). And he is at his happiest in writing of the Greeks
and the Italians. Indeed, in many ways this book could
be described as a long history of the Greek marble
temple, though heavily camouflaged.
Barry’s book boasts rich illustrations, many in
colour, including sumptuous architectural photography
(many of the best photos are Barry’s own), while the
diagrams and illustrations of individual stone are
scratchy and awkward. This discrepancy accords
with the split nature of the book. There is a smaller,
more poetic – more Parian – book inside struggling
to get out of this hefty, would-be-exhaustive and less
than luminous carapace. Sweeping chronological and
geographical ‘coverage’ and potted histories sit in
tension with more interesting, often almost anecdotal,
observations and flashes of interpretation.
Barry is in love with ‘the poetic’ and drops would-be
poetic turns of phrase into what is generally a ‘gee-
whizz’ tone. He makes much of poetry even when it
upends his own project. Poetry, he informs us, is ‘the
hard currency of the imagination that echoes the poetics
of artistic creation across media, unburdened by the
contingencies of history’ (4). This attempt to situate
poetry and the imagination and artmaking outside of
historical contingency is doubly clumsy in a book that
relies heavily on linear periodization and chronology. In
fact, poetry and art are embedded in the historical, as is
the imagination, as this book at its best itself shows.
Throughout Barry’s book, much depends
on implication and suggestion, rather than clear
argumentation. Juxtapositions and similarities do a
good deal of lifting. There is a tendency to play fast and
loose with apparent similarities (visual or conceptual),
claiming connections without due explanation,

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particularly in reference to cultures with which Barry
is less familiar. Grandiose claims insinuate causal
links, but much remains unclear. In the discussion of
Kassite cosmology, for instance, Barry observes that ‘a
passage written by the Roman philosopher Seneca many
centuries later unexpectedly mirrors the Kassite version’
(12), but fails to shed light on this apparent coincidence.
Likewise, ‘the Parthian king Vardanes (40/45 AD) gave
judgement in Babylon below a dome clad in lapis lazuli
enriched with twinkling gilded images of gods’ and
‘exactly the same arrangement’ occurred ‘in the throne
room of the Sassanian king Kosrow II (r.590–628)’
and ‘it has also been suggested that had they been
able to procure enough lapis, the Medici would have
reproduced the scheme’ at S. Lorenzo (12). But there the
thread is left dangling. How does he know they were
‘exactly’ the same? What is the status of these similarities
or supposed identicalities? Does he believe they are
causally connected or not? What are the implications of
this? One is left more baffled than tantalized.
Barry is too quick to coalesce painting in and
on stone with almost anything that catches his eye,
including fresco. He sees fresco as a technique ‘devised
precisely in order to synthesize colored stone’ (81). A
little later fresco is described as ‘a means of synthesizing
nature rather than simply coloring plaster, materializing
stone by reconstituting it from its basic elements’ (83).
For Barry, Minoan wall-painting takes place ‘not on the
wall but in it’ (83): ‘While Minoan frescoes will become
mimetic insofar as they describe birds, trees, bulls,
flowers, people, and so on, the image is always immanent
in the media’ (83). By this logic any use of pigment taken
from the earth, including watercolour, is already painting
in stone. Worse, describing frescoes on Santorini made
in the years between a violent earthquake and
the volcanic eruption that would eventually
bury the town, the painters could not have been
more aware of the chthonic force of nature in
action. They striped the mountains they painted
with bands of [coloured] paint, which could
respectively stand for clay, pumice, and ash,
even the ultimately fertile lava flows that the
real eruptions intimate. (84)
The claim appears to be that painters foresaw a volcanic
eruption or that the future volcanic eruption was
somehow immanent in their floral paintings. This is
writing to draw attention to itself rather than to shed
light on what these artists made of nature or how they
differentiated aspects of it.
Elsewhere a form of casual humanitarianism
informs over-ambitious claims:
From time immemorial, the idea that some
supreme deity dwelled in a cave or stone
house in the sky, or even that the whole sky
was mineral, has been a widespread belief
throughout East Asia, India, Australia, Nigeria
and even [my italics] among the Navajo and
indigenous peoples of California. (12)
Leaving aside the disdain for evidence or argument,
on closer inspection this apparently casual
humanitarianism (we’re all the same after all) is
something else less liberal. What is the ‘even’ doing in
the last clause, if the generative assumption was not
really rather those exotic distant people are all the same? This sort
of claim may serve to wake up sleepy undergraduates in
a lecture theatre, but it should not be acceptable to a self-
respecting press.
Barry is useful on the Roman distinction between
albus and candidus, between brilliant white and palour
and points out that ‘lux’ is to ‘lumen’ as ‘candidus is to
albus’ (44). But then, as so often, useful insight rapidly
becomes implausible claim, fuelled by bravura:
The Romans never stopped being aware of
the potential associations of the brilliant toga.
Even in Christ’s transfiguration, his seamless
robes are described as ‘shining, excessively
white [candidus], like snow, whiter than any
fuller on earth could make them’ (Mark 9:3).
Fra Angelico’s white-on-white version of the
event is one of the best representations of this
transcendent moment. (43)
Hence we slide seamlessly from Romans to Christians,
and all cloaked figures are deemed to be wearing togas.
Correlation is not causation. But in Barry’s book
visual similarities are regularly relied on to claim
causality. While artists ‘in the medieval world’ (151)
certainly did use zig zags and embedded chevrons
to imitate marble, it is a stretch to suggest that the
gloriously bold chevrons on Durham Cathedral nave
columns are necessarily an imitation of marble: ‘It
is equally possible that the rigorous geometries of
2 Girolamo Rainaldi and others, Altar, Cappella Paolina, Santa
Maria Maggiore, Rome, 1611–13. Photo: Yale University Press.

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Durham’s columns were the inevitable [my italics]
product of simulating the symmetry that had become
so distinctive of “book-matched” marble revetment
from the sixth century on’ (153); or that ‘the longer that
zigzags and the like remained in use as notation for
polychrome marble, the longer they continued to figure
the medium’s miraculous image-making veining’ (153).
Far too much is shoved together here. The rigorous
geometries which precisely evade the image-making
accidents of veining are forced here to stand in for the
chance effects they avoid. Correlation is not causality,
much less argument. Broad visual similarities do not
necessarily mean that artworks are related or that
one was imitating the other. One wants more careful
reasoning here, sharper argumentation, and less allusive
and grandiose gesture.
But Barry’s book is infatuated with the devices
of power and success. In rhetoric the strength of
buildings, empire and rule are often coalesced.
Vitruvius certainly associated certain ideals of building
with stable government and society. And Barry pads
dutifully behind. Writing of anathyrosis (false joints)
and ashlar masonry in Ancient Rome, he boasts, ‘Men
of substance were not superficial’ (69). Yet this is at
odds with the very practice under consideration here
in which apparent joints were superficial and false:
‘The fine joining of stones also proved that no alien
bond was essential to the wall’s stability, that mortar
was superfluous (though in reality cramps and ties
were hidden). It was the honesty of the seam that
proved the integrity of the construct’ (69). Rather, it
seems that, then as now, men of substance were adept
at illusion and deceit and that their seams were as
dishonest as their political constructions. Indeed, part
of their success was precisely due to that superficial
dissembling. One wants to hear about the structures
that ordinary everyday people dwelled in, the better to
grasp the monumental claims of these rapacious rulers,
but Barry has no interest in anything like that. There
is a nod to the erasure of facture and the alienation
of labour, but the politics of conflict rarely get a look
in in this overwhelmingly celebratory account. Even
where Roman architecture is identified as an ‘agenda
of triumphalism’, the question of what it means today
to continue to admire the tools, strategies and effects of
empire building as aesthetic products is not posed or
explored.
The book starts better than it ends. Chapter nine
on relics, tabernacles and throne rooms includes some
potentially interesting observations on the imitation
of stone in Renaissance painting, though no sooner
is one point raised than we are rushed to the next
example. There is a haste here that renders the chapters
breathless; the text flits from one canonical highlight
to the next, often with an interesting remark to depart,
leaving a quotation hanging in the air portentously.
This goes on for chapter after chapter, without pause or
deeper exploration of single buildings or adornments.
The book ends its chronological journey in eighteenth-
century Bavaria as a ‘convenient juncture’: ‘the themes
of chthonic-celestial matter (an elemental bridgehead
between heaven and earth), the tropological density
of signifying stones, the image within the stone,
and “natural painting” all ceased to hold the pivotal
importance they had in preceding ages’ (331). And this
encapsulates the greatest weakness of the book: the
attempt to make a chronological-geographical account
coherent thematically. The book might have been less
conventional but altogether more incisive had each
chapter sunk its teeth deeper into less.
The last chapter plunges new depths. It consists
of flashing light at a few handpicked contemporary
artworks, including Stephen Cox’s altar (2005) at
Canterbury Cathedral with which Barry finishes his
book: ‘Cox’s altar is […] introspective, a secretive object
that quietly beckons in-reading and insight, and whose
minimalism and Modernist “truth to materials” strike
uncanny resonances with the medieval mason, and
thereby revive age-old claims to an innate and shared
natural order’ (338). What a curiously chronologizing
mystical muddle. Surely if the book has taught us
anything it is that there is no simple ‘truth’ to any
material, let alone marble.
Perhaps academic pressure to write a book is part
of the problem. Chapter eight, ‘Walking on Water’, and
chapter twelve, ‘From Gems to Cloud Architecture’,
are re-publications of wonderful journal articles, here
somewhat extended and with more images. While the
original articles were revelatory and compelling, here
they read as puffed out and associative. And although
almost thirty pages are devoted to Hagia Sophia,
nowhere is the subtlety and scholarly richness of Bissera
Pentcheva’s thoughtful engagement with Paul the
Silentiary’s shimmering ekphrasis remotely equalled.
Published by one of the most prestigious – and
probably the most conservative – of art history presses,
the book deserves to have received a stronger editorial
hand in pruning the many unsubstantiated assertions,
checking the footnotes (which too often refer only to
published images of objects mentioned in the text),

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switching ‘BC’ to ‘BCE’ throughout, and, above all,
attending to Barry’s overwrought prose:
Faux-masonry could therefore offer the most
urbane face of the domus, a domestic rampart
in the camouflage of the public realm, and a
particularly strident example is the townhouse
of Julius Polybius […] where channeled faux-
masonry papers a vestibulum that has swelled to
become almost an internal piazza. (93)
How can false masonry both be like paper and also
strident? And are we being invited to consider an
indoors piazza as the public realm in camouflage? What
does it all actually mean? But the truth is that the tedious
work of improving the text is not rewarded these days;
quite the contrary, as this book amply attests.
Barry’s book has received rave reviews from the
great and the good in the field. Yet although it contains
useful insights and observations and some stunning
photography, far too much depends on grandiose
claims, based often on little more than apparent
visual similarities, leavened with a good deal of self-
confident claim and rhetorical bombast. The book is
marred by a casual indifference to historical depth
and visual specificity. The unrestrained scattering of
Latin and Greek words and the earnest recitation of
poetry may serve as useful distraction and even pass
for erudition, but they are inadequate compensation
for casual inattention to historical and visual specificity
and nuance.
Unfortunately, there is a good deal at stake. The
discipline of art history practised like this is part of
the very mechanism of entrenchment of power and
privilege for which it habitually affects a tasteful disdain.
That this book should have received fawning reviews
is perhaps due to a sort of disciplinary politeness that
Maxwell’s eighteenth-century landed gentry would
have recognized, perhaps because the sloppy reasoning
registers as boldness, or maybe because associative
celebration of artworks is preferred to sharply engaged
intellectual work that provides political and social
challenge. Whatever it is, what this tells us about the
state of current art history is cause for concern.