![]() ![]() From Ulysses to Hamlet to Inspector Gadget - not to mention the crucifixion itself: the simple story of a seditious Nazarene getting the Guantanamo treatment has been repeated trillion-fold over the last two thousand years. It seems we can never get enough of watching these dudes as they ponder, question, get into trouble, and go back home - or die, or both. To this day, nearly every popular story, high or low, can be summarized as the story of some man on a quest for his personal sense of ethics. As many after him have pointed out, however, it’s not so certain the eighteenth century’s break from said 10,000-year tradition was as dramatic as Gombrich suggested - or that it happened at all. It is “curious,” he muses, how rarely pre–eighteenth century artists strayed from the narrow limits of those blockbuster leitmotifs. In the chapter “A Break in Tradition,” Gombrich explains that, before the Enlightenment, even artists who took to secular topics were confined to a few select, best-selling themes: Greek mythology, accounts of Roman bravery, and allegorical tales demonstrating established truths through traditional personifications. Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art, perhaps the ultimate blockbuster of canonical art history, traces the aesthetic evolution of humankind from the caves of Lascaux to postmodern architecture in Manhattan.
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