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Acknowledgements
John Onians
Description: Classical Art and the Cultures of Greece and Rome
Classical Art and the Cultures of Greece and Rome
Acknowledgements
Author
John Onians
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 1999 by John Onians
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00031.002
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15989
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Acknowledgements
The origins of this book go back forty years to a summer afternoon when a curious schoolboy asked his father why exactly he had put him, like his older sister and brother, on the path to a Classical education. The argument started by that question continued until my father’s death, though I had realised much earlier that his Origins of European Thought contained some compelling answers.
At Cambridge Jocelyn Toynbee, R. M. Cook and others introduced me to Classical archaeology, and David Oates provided a measure of the Greeks’ achievement by pointing out the areas in which they never rivalled their Near Eastern predecessors. In London new perspectives were gained from Anthony Blunt, who admitted me to the Courtauld Institute to study the methods of art history in the hope that one day they might be used to subvert the then-current approaches to Greek and Roman art, and above all from E. H. Gombrich, who, at the Warburg Institute, introduced me to the ‘Classical tradition’ and, more significantly, made me conscious of the plasticity – and rigidity – of the human mind. Later much was learned from my colleagues and students at the University of East Anglia, as well as from the art in the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection. Also important were the contacts I made as a visiting teacher at the University of California, Los Angeles, Mount Holyoke College, Northern Arizona University, Oberlin College, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and the Institute for Art History in the National Museum, Delhi. Conversations with fellow scholars during periods spent at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington, the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica, and the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, generated new hypotheses and tested some to breaking. Discussions, begun in Washington, with Martin Powers on the cultures of early China were essential for putting those of Greece and Rome in context. No debates have been more fruitful than those with friends who were also specialists in Antiquity, especially Richard Gordon and Martin Henig. None has been more enjoyable, or more fundamental, than those with my wife, Elisabeth de Bièvre.
My indebtedness to the authors of the secondary literature on the Classical world is enormous, but it is to those who made that world, especially to the ancient craftsmen of the texts, paintings, sculptures, buildings and all the other objects that are its surviving witnesses, that I owe the most. The opportunity to travel the length and breadth of the lands that shaped and were shaped by the Greeks and the Romans, visiting sites and museums, and to relate what I saw to a similar experience of the material remains and landscape settings of comparable ancient civilisations in North Africa, the Near East, Asia and the Americas, was a privilege offered by the late twentieth century which I gratefully accepted as allowing me more confidently to reassess the Classical world in a global framework.
The initial suggestion that I attempt a fresh interpretation of Classical art and culture came from John Fleming and Hugh Honour who, in 1966, commissioned me to write the volume on Hellenistic and Roman Art in their Penguin Style and Civilization series, expanding the brief in 1976 to cover the whole of Classical art. This book is the belated response to their challenging invitation. It is also my answer, addressed now to the generation of my own daughter and son, to the question I long ago asked my father.
Finally, I thank Yale University Press, and especially Gillian Malpass, the volume’s editor and designer, and Delia Gaze, its copy editor, for giving it such satisfying form and finish.
Acknowledgements
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