The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Art and The Beginnings of Architecture by S.GiedionReview by: Douglas FraserThe Art Bulletin, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Dec., 1965), pp. 536-537Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3048322 .

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536 THE ART BULLETIN

tin, the author's interest is extended to the writers of "cuadros satiricos de tipos y costumbres," a great vari- ety of anonymous literary productions, such esoteric items as the Arte de las putas, and to publications such as El Censor and the Diario de Madrid. This careful (and very entertaining) survey is most rewarding. All of Edith Helman's findings are interesting and, in a few instances, they bring what one is tempted to de- scribe as a definitive solution to a given problem of Goya scholarship. At random, one can mention the analysis of Capricho 18 (Y se le quema la casa) whose meaning is clarified by the numerous cases of fires due to drunkenness in mat-shops, mentioned in contem- porary writings; that of Capricho 53 (Que pico de oro!) convincingly related to sermones gerundios; and that of the group of caprichos, involving duendes and duendecitos, whose true intent becomes understandable when one learns that during the second half of the eighteenth century, the term duende was often used to describe a fraile (friar). These are merely samples of the contributions which must be ascribed to Edith Helman's superb competence in the field of Spanish literature.

Goya, Saturn and Melancholy and Trasmundo de Goya have a common quality in a comparatively open, loose-jointed plan which allows the authors to meander, at an unhurried pace, from one group of complex sub- jects to another. Such a plan brings in a note of in- formality and provides a functional coordination to a rather heterogeneous bulk of material. In view of the generous scope of the two studies-in both cases in- volving works from the early as well as from the late portions of Goya's career--one is somewhat disap- pointed to note that the authors, who succeeded in casting so much light upon so many mysterious regions of the artist's production, avoided the group of Los Disparates, one of the most conspicuously mystifying of his cycles. This omission is particularly noticeable. The reviewer's comment expresses a degree of frustration and, in no sense, a criticism-an exhaustive study of Goya was not the goal of the two authors, and they limited themselves to the problems which they were prepared, or willing to present at this particular time.

Both books offer inclusive, well-organized bibliog- raphies as well as other useful tools for the students of Goya. Goya, Saturn and Melancholy includes an ex- cellent chronological list (works of Goya mentioned in the book) and an abundant and well-reproduced il- lustrative material; while Trasmundo de Goya makes available, besides other things, a complete set of Capri- chos reproductions (very convenient in spite of their minute size) and the most welcome texts of three ver- sions of the "explicaci6n" (bearing a direct or indirect authority of Goya) of the same series of aquatints

(Prado, Ayala, and Biblioteca Nacional). Folke Nord- strom's book has a very extensive system of footnotes which he uses, with a great precision, to acknowledge practically every one of his sources and borrowings. Unfortunately, the format adopted by Edith Helman does not allow her to do the same. On occasion, her acknowledgments are rather sporadic, and it becomes difficult to discern the author's contributions from those of other scholars.3

Obviously the task is far from being completed: the art of Goya, like the art of all the other great men, will always inspire the efforts of scholars; however, Goya, Saturn and Melancholy and Trasmundo de Goya, each one in its own manner, constitute two high- ly valuable additions to the ever growing list of stud- ies devoted to the great Spaniard.

GEORGE LEVITINE

University of Maryland

3. The present reviewer must confess a personal involve- ment in this aspect of Professor Helman's book, for she men- tions him in the text on one occasion (emblematic sources of Capricho 19) but fails to give him any recognition on an- other (relation of the legend of Capricho 43 to Horace's Ars poetica). The situation is difficult to understand since the two articles which include the reviewer's discussion of this prob-

lem are listed in Edith Helman's bibliography ("Literary Sources of Goya's Capricho 43," ART BULLETIN, XXXVII, 1955, PP. 56-59; and "Some Emblematic Sources of Goya," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxII, 1959, p. i22-it is to be noted that the latter article also contains a discussion of the emblematic sources of Capricho 19, which, alone, is given credit in Trasmundo de Goya).

REVIEWS-IN-BRIEF S. GIEDION, The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of

Art and The Beginnings of Architecture (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 1957, Bol- lingen Series xxxv. 6, I and II), New York, Pan- theon Books, 1962, 1964, 2 vols. Pp. xli, 1171; 678 figs.; 38 color pls. $25.oo.

The theme of this work, as the author's subtitle tells us, is the universal problem of constancy and change in art. As in his previous books, Giedion marshals a vast army of facts, theories and illustrative materials in aid of his hypotheses. This time he ranges over the fields of prehistoric, Egyptian and Sumerian art, find- ing in this long time span innumerable instances both of modification and of continuity in style, technique, and iconography. While the author's method is familiar enough to art historians, the novelty of his approach lies first in its scope, cutting as it does across traditional temporal and spatial barriers, and secondly in the at- tention paid to constancy or recurrence as well as to innovation.

Giedion's point of departure for his analysis of early art is essentially Levy-Bruhl's conception of primitive mentality as prelogical. Thus Giedion interprets the frequency of animal imagery in Paleolithic art as an expression of feelings of inferiority on the part of Stone Age man and of an unwillingness or inability to set himself apart from other creatures of the natural order. But whereas the image of the human body was gen- erally neglected in prehistoric times, these artists re- vealed their attitudes primarily through the representa- tion of animals and symbols. The former were admired and valued as food supply, while symbols--hand-signs,

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BOOK REVIEWS 537

circular hollows, sexual images, perhaps even geometric designs-were usually links with protection and fertil- ity. All this Giedion spells out in great detail.

In the more anthropomorphic styles of the early high cultures, the author develops the theme of constancy and change still further. Fertility charms of the Venus of Willendorf type evolve into Neolithic earth-mother idols and thence into the anthropomorphic Goddess images. This process is paralleled in the aesthetic sphere by the shift from outline or contour drawing to island relief and on to sculpture-in-the-round, and from the non-axially governed art of the caves to later space conceptions dominated by the vertical dimension. Archi- tecture, brought into being by this revolution, was necessarily at its beginnings one of plastic solids set in a limitless space.

Throughout the more than one thousand pages of text, Giedion stresses the interconnectedness of aesthet- ic, social and psychological phenomena. The absence, in prehistoric art, of monumental sculpture-in-the- round, he believes, expresses a conception of the world as one inseparable whole. Changes in Egyptian sculp- tural technique and space conception are for Giedion intimately bound up with modifications in the social or- der. Yet running contrary to this and of equal impor- tance is the tendency toward stability, survival, con- tinuity. For all the wandering, as he puts it in speaking of the Egyptian world-view, there is always an eternal return. Animal imagery, so significant in the Paleolith- ic age, continues to have meaning in Egypt even down to the Saite period; hollowed-out (or interior) space manipulation dominates architectural thinking from late antiquity until the nineteenth century.

So vast and detailed a synthesis as Giedion's beggars comment in a short review. The author has covered an enormous amount of ground, both physically and in- tellectually, in the course of writing his book. Like all syntheses, it suffers from a certain autistic quality: the "truth" emerges from the data with astonishing, and at times tedious, regularity. But this is a small price to

pay for what is surely a monument to man and a work that has precisely the characteristics of constancy and change that so engage its author's interest.

DOUGLAS FRASER Columbia University

EVA STROMMENGER, 5000 Years of the Art of Meso- potamia, translated by Christina Haglund, photo- graphs by Max Hirmer, New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1964. Pp. 46 + 205; 280 plates of photographs; 44 color pls.; 70 plans and other drawings. $30.00.

This book should be an essential addition to every college library as the best pictorial record of Mesopo- tamian art. The text comprises informative, precise notes on the plates. The terminology and chronology used in the introductory essay on the art of western Asia, however, are controversial. The reviewer favors the terminology of Henri Frankfort in The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient (Pelican History of Art, 2nd rev. ed., 1958) and the chronology for the early periods used by herself and Donald P. Han- sen in Chronologies in Old World Archaeology, R. W. Ehrich, ed. (University of Chicago Press, in press).

Recent works on the history and civilization of Mes- opotamia which might serve as background reading for the present book are A. Leo Oppenheim, Mesopo- tamia, Portrait of a Dead Civilization (University of Chicago Press, 1964) and Fischer Weltgeschichte, Die Altorientalischen Reiche I: Vom Paliiolithikum bis zur Mitte des 2. Jahrtausends (with chapters by Elena Cassin, Jean Bott6ro, D. O. Edzard, Adam Falken- stein, and Jean Vercoutter), Frankfort on the Main, Fischer, 1965. The latter work is to appear soon in an English translation.

EDITH PORADA

Columbia University

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