The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Chapter 9. The Mystery of Megaliths. Few simple monuments have tantalized historians of science and art more than Stonehenge. A delightful short path into the doubts and debates is Glyn Daniel’s Megaliths in History (1972). These can be further explored in R.J.C. Atkinson’s conjectural reconstruction in Stonehenge (1960); in Gerald Hawkins, Stonehenge Decoded (1966) and Beyond Stonehenge 0973). An excellent introduction to the possible technology of constructing Stonehenge is by R.H.G. Thomson in Charles Singer and others, eds., A History of Technology (5 vols., 1967), at Vol. 1, pp. 490ff. For modern modes of dating, including dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating: Colin Renfrew, Before Civilization: The Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe (1973). For the wider vistas, see Glyn Daniel, The Idea of Prehistory (1971); and the stimulating essays of Grahame Clark, especially Prehistoric England (1974). Prehistory, because of the fragmentary nature of the evidence, has been a happy hunting ground for dogmatic historians. One of the most stimulating and influential of these is the Australian V. Gordon Childe (1892–1957), whose Dawn of European Civilization (1925, 6th ed., 1967) and What Happened in History (1946), a Penguin book, open scores of new questions.

  Chapter 10. Castles of Eternity. Starting our study of the arts of architecture with deep antiquity reminds us of how dependent the arts are on technology, explored in the illuminating chapter by Seton Lloyd, “Building in Brick and Stone,” in Singer, A History of Technology, Vol. 1. The best layman’s introduction to the Pyramids is the Penguin paperback, I.E.S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt (1972). For the background of the culture and politics there is still no better avenue than James H. Breasted’s History of Egypt (1905, 1967), followed by John A. Wilson, The Culture of Ancient Egypt (1951). An appealing path into ancient Egypt that gives us our bearings among its ancient neighbors is Henri Frankfort et al., The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (1946; reprinted as Penguin paperback (Before Philosophy, 1949). No one is a more enticing or eloquent guide than Frankfort, for example in his Kingship and the Gods (1948), The Birth of Civilization in the Near East (1956), and Ancient Egyptian Religion (1948). For some of the intimacies of that time, see Alan H. Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs (1961), The Attitude of the Ancient Egyptians to Death and the Dead (1935); Gardiner and Kurt Sethe, eds., Egyptian Letters to the Dead (1928); Jon Manchip White, Everyday Life in Ancient Egypt (1973).

  The most tantalizing sphinx of antiquity has been the Great Pyramid itself. The dimensions of the puzzle are suggested by Peter Tomkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramid (1978), and Kurt Mendelssohn, The Riddle of the Pyramids (1974). To help us understand the problems, we should begin with O. Neugebauer’s concise and readable The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (2d ed., 1969), supplemented by Somers Clarke and R. Engelbach, Ancient Egyptian Masonry, the Building Craft (1930). The Battle of the Standards, which long resounded in the most respectable scientific circles in Britain, became an effort to assert the divine mission of Britain to establish the British “inch” as the proper unit of earthly measure. Its icon was supposedly (and cryptically) embodied in the Great Pyramid. The speculations of an English mathematician traveler John Greaves (1607–1652) entangled the pious Sir Isaac Newton in this controversy. The measurements of Napoleon’s archaeologists in 1798 provided new data for the debate, English literati were enticed to apply the English inch to Noah’s Ark, the Temple of Solomon, and the height of Goliath, and enlisted the eminent John Herschel to support the British inch as “very far more accurate than the boasted metrical system of our French neighbour.” These conclusions were published in a bizarre volume by John Taylor, The Great Pyramid (1864). The acrimony, the extravagance, and the passion of this debate appear in the climactic volume by Piazzi Smyth, who with his wife visited and measured the Great Pyramid in 1864 and produced The Great Pyramid: Its Secrets and Mysteries Revealed (4th and much enlarged edition, reprinted in 1974).

  The history of Egyptology is itself fraught with mysteries and strange turns. Follow some of them in Glyn Daniel’s Origin and Growth of Archaeology (1971). The Battle of the Standards enticed to Egypt the founder of a modern science of Egyptology who revolutionized the techniques of archaeology. William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) at the age of twenty-four published his epoch-making Inductive Metrology, or the Recovery of Ancient Measures from the Monuments (1877), and surveyed the Great Pyramid, followed by his survey of Stonehenge (1880). His survey produced “the ugly little fact which killed the beautiful theory,” and only a few fanatics refused to admit the irrelevance of the Great Pyramid to the divinity of the British Inch. All students of history will be stimulated by Petrie’s Seventy Years in Archaeology (1932) and The Revolutions of Civilisation (1972) and should be sobered by his observation that “civilisation is an intermittent phenomenon.”

  Chapter 11. Temples of Community. For the vast literature on classical culture, convenient reference guides on the background of Greek and Roman architecture are The Oxford Classical Dictionary (2d ed., 1970) and John Boardman et al., eds., The Oxford History of the Classical World (1986) with authoritative up-to-date essays and bibliographies. A focused introduction is D. C. Robertson, Greek and Roman Architecture (2d ed., 1983).

  On ancient Greek thought: see the references above for Part I, especially W.K.C. Guthrie’s readable History of Greek Philosophy (2 vols., 1965) and The Greeks and their Gods (1955); M. I. Finley’s lively The Ancient Greeks (1963). A concise, well-illustrated handbook is the volume in the Pelican History of Arts: A. W. Lawrence, Greek Architecture (4th ed., revised by R. A. Tomlinson, 1983). On the building professions and their tasks: the chapter in Spiro Kostof, ed., The Architect (1986); Rhys Carpenter, The Architects of the Parthenon (1970); R. E. Wycherley, How the Greeks Built Cities (2d ed., 1967). And on the technology: Singer, A History of Technology, Vol. 2. For enticing questions on the relations of ancient Greek architecture to the land and the gods: Rhys Carpenter, Discontinuity in Greek Civilization (1966), and especially Vincent Scully’s eloquent and elegant The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture (rev. ed., 1979), with copious photographs of the temples and their environs, and his suggestive Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade (1991).

  Chapter 12. Orders for Survival. An admirable introduction to Vitruvius, his life and work, with bibliography is found in The Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Vol. 15, Supp. I. The standard biography in English is Alexander McKay, Vitruvius, Architect and Engineer: Buildings and Building Techniques in Augustan Rome (1978). The De Architectura is available in a Dover paperback: Vitruvius Pollio, The Ten Books on Architecture (trans. Morris Hickey Morgan, 1960). For the architect’s role in his time, see the chapter in Spiro Kostof, ed., The Architect (1986). For the American afterlife, see Talbot Hamlin, Greek Revival Architecture in America (1944).

  Chapter 13. Artificial Stone: A Roman Revolution; Chapter 14. Dome of the World. For Rome, a brief introductory essay is Mortimer Wheeler, Roman Art and Architecture (1981). William L. MacDonald leads us into all Roman culture in his brilliant Architecture of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1, An Introductory Study (rev. ed., 1982), Vol. 2, An Urban Appraisal (1986). And we should keep beside us Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. On the technology, Singer, A History of Technology, Vol. 2, pp. 404ff., gives us the elements, well illustrated. In more detail in the Penguin book Axel Boethius and J. B. Ward-Perkins, Etruscan and Roman Architecture (1970), and Axel Boethius, The Golden House of Nero (1960). On the baths, see Jerome Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome (Henry T. Rowell, ed., 1947); and the still-useful Samuel Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire (1899). Eleanor Clark’s evocative description of Tivoli in Rome and a Villa (1952) provides a seductive point of departure, along with Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (1954) for all visitors to Rome. Then: William L. MacDonald, The Pantheon: Design, Meaning, and Progeny (1976), a Penguin book; Stewart Perowne, Hadrian (1976). Procopius’s On the Buildings is found in the translation (1953–61) of his complete works by H. R. Dewing, and The Se
cret History (trans. G. A. Williamson, 1966) is handily available in a Penguin book.

  Chapter 15. The Great Church. The Great Church is surveyed in a detailed study by Emerson Rowland Swift, Hagia Sophia (1940). For biography, besides Procopius we have Robert Browning, Justinian and Theodora (1971). Again, a chapter in Kostof, The Architect (1986), helps us understand the roles of patron, architect, and craftsmen. For the wider background, in addition to the ever-illuminating Gibbon, we have the welcome introduction by Steven Runciman, Byzantine Style and Civilization (1987) in Penguin Books, and on the city as a focus of civilization, Glanville Downey, Constantinople in the Age of Justinian (1960).

  Other great stone monuments of antiquity had their own kind of afterlife. Edward Gibbon would find the inspiration for his great history as he “sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol.” Others too found inspiration in the fragments, shadows, and moss-filled cracks of ancient ruins. The chaste, sharp-edged column was “classical” but the broken column would be romantic, inspiring not only melancholy but even wild imaginings. The high priest of these imaginings, who made his own creations of them was Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), trained as an architect, who fulfilled himself making an art of the ruins of ancient architects. There is no better invitation than Marguerite Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays (1985), and the elegant lecture of Peter Murray, Piranesi and the Grandeur of Ancient Rome (1971). The substantial biography, A. Hyatt Mayor, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1952), can be supplemented by the critical study of his prisons and views of Rome by Arthur M. Hind (1967) and the catalog of his etchings by Andrew Robison, Piranesi, Early Architectural Fantasies (1986).

  Chapter 16. A Road Not Taken: The Japanese Triumph of Wood. How and why Japan did not provide the raw material for Piranesi’s kind of romantic musing is the story of the unique role Japanese architects assigned to wood. Useful reference works in English: the Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan (9 vols., 1983) with perceptive brief articles; Arthur Drexler, The Architecture of Japan (1955). Documents are translated in Sources of Japanese Tradition, in the Introduction to Oriental Civilizations series (de Bary, ed.). Ise Prototype of Japanese Architecture (1965), by Kenzo Tange and Noboru Kawazoe, provides historical and technical background, copiously illustrated. For the wider background: Bruno Taut, Houses and People of Japan (1937); Richard M. Dorson, Folk Legends of Japan (1962). For intimate eyewitness glimpses of the relation between architecture and everyday life we are fortunate to have handy Dover and Tuttle paperback reprints of Edward S. Morse, Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings (1885, 1961, 1984). The works of an eminent living architect, Yoshinobu Ashihara, remind us of the continuing distinctiveness of Japanese ways: The Hidden Order: Toyko Through the Twentieth Century (1989; 1992) Kodansha paperback; Exterior Design in Architecture (rev. ed., 1981); The Aesthetic Townscape (1983). The piquant essay of a brilliant novelist on all the Japanese arts should not be missed: Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (1984). And for perspective: Marius B. Jansen, ed., Changing Japanese Attitudes Toward Modernization (1985).

  Part IV: The Magic of Images

  Chapter 17. The Awe of Images. The caves of Altamira, Lascaux, and les Trois Frères are scenes of one of the great mystery stories in our history of creators. The works of those nameless artists can be seen in a sumptuous volume of text and drawings by Abbé Henri Breuil himself: Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art (1952), from the French Center for Prehistoric Studies in Montignac. And see the biography of him by A. H. Broderick, Father of Prehistory (1963). For a charming illustrated account re-created from interviews with the boy discoverers themselves: Hans Baumann, The Caves of the Great Hunters (1954). For a wider view the basic book is the readable first volume in the UNESCO-sponsored “History of Mankind”: Jacquetta Hawkes and Leonard Woolley, Prehistory and the Beginnings of Civilization (1963) or Jacquetta Hawkes, ed., The World of the Past (1963). On the progress of the study of prehistory: Geoffrey Bibby, The Testimony of the Spade (1956); Glyn Daniel, The Origins and Growth of Archaeology (1971). For a scholarly portrait of the cave painters in their landscape: Grahame Clark, The Stone Age Hunters (1967), Aspects of Prehistory (1974).

  Chapter 18. Human Hieroglyphs. The unique charm and grandeur of ancient Egyptian sculpture can be glimpsed in the few objects in our great museums, notably in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The history is well illustrated in the compendious Kurt Lange and Max Hirmer, Egypt: Architecture-Sculpture-Painting in three thousand years (1968). For more detail: William Stevenson Smith, A History of Egyptian Sculpture and Painting in the Old Kingdom (1978); Cyril Aldred, Old Kingdom Art in Ancient Egypt (1949), Middle Kingdom Art … (1950), New Kingdom Art … (1951). For background, see references for Chapter 10 above, especially Henri Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion (1948), Kingship and the Gods (1948). For the shocking story of the fate of the great monuments: Brian M. Fagan, The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archaeologists in Egypt (1975).

  Chapter 19. The Athletic Ideal. In addition to the references at Chapters 4 and 12 above, see Alfred Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth (5th ed., 1931). Then begin with the illuminating details and illustrations in Gisela M. A. Richter, The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks (4th ed., 1970), Kouroi: Archaic Greek Youths (1960). Other illustrated views: Rhys Carpenter, Greek Sculpture, A Critical Review (1960); George M. Hanfmann, Classical Sculpture (1967); A. W. Lawrence, Greek and Roman Sculpture (1972). For sources and documents: J. J. Pollitt, The Art of Greece 1400–31 B. c. (1965). For the athletic background: E. Norman Gardiner, Athletics of the Ancient World (1930), Olympia: Its History and Remains (1973); H. A. Harris, Greek Athletes and Athletics (1966). Some lively perspectives: J. J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art (1974); Kenneth Clark, The Nude (1959). The Odes of Pindar reach us in an elegant translation by C. M. Bowra, a Penguin book (1985).

  Chapter 20. For Family, Empire—and History. In addition to the references for Chapters 14 and 15 above, relevant illustrated articles are found in The Encyclopedia of World Art. For background topics: John Boardman et al., eds., The Oxford History of the Classical World and The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Readable focused studies include: George M. Hanfmann, Roman Art: A Modern Survey of the Art of Imperial Rome (1965); A. W. Lawrence, Greek and Roman Sculpture (1972); J. J. Pollitt, The Art of Rome c.753 B.C.–A.D. 337: Sources and Documents (1966).

  Chapter 21. The Healing Image. This critical moment for the history of Western art is not sufficiently noted in histories of Western culture. The reference notes for Chapters 6, 7, and 15 above provide background, supplemented by some excellent articles on figures and topics in the Iconoclastic controversy in Mircea Eliade, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion (16 vols., 1987), in Joseph Strayer, ed., The Dictionary of the Middle Ages (1982–89), and the relevant chapters in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. The best introduction to the theological issues is Jaroslav Pelikan, Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons (1990), with his Christian Tradition, Vol. 2. For details, documents, and interpretive essays, see the Dumbarton Oaks Papers: Gerhart B. Ladner (1953), Ernst Kitzinger (1954), A. A. Vasiliev (1956). For the social context: Gerhart B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform … in the Age of the Fathers (1967); Romilly Jenkins, Byzantium: The Imperial Centuries (1966); and the vivid Steven Runciman, Byzantine Style and Civilization (1987).

  Chapter 22. “Satan’s Handiwork.” For background essays, see The Encyclopedia of Religion and, for particular artists, The Encyclopedia of World Art. And for the broader Muslim context: Gustave von Grunebaum, Medieval Islam (2d ed., 1971); Thomas W. Arnold and Alfred Guillaume, eds., The Legacy of Islam (1931). On the arts: Thomas W. Arnold, Painting in Islam … the place of pictorial art in Muslim culture (1965); Annemarie Schimmel, Calligraphy and Islamic Culture (1984); Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art (1973); Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982), Chapter X, “Cultural Life.”

  Part V: The Immortal Word

  Chapter 23. Dionysus the Twice-Born; Chapter 24. The Bir
th of the Spectator: From Ritual to Drama; Chapter 25. The Mirror of Comedy. For the background in ancient Greek culture, see references for Chapters 04, 11, and 19, and Mircea Eliade, History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 2 (1982); W.K.C. Guthrie, The Greeks and Their Gods (1955); Lewis R. Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (1909); E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (1951). On Dionysus and his festivals: Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis (1962); illuminating works by Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens (1946), The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (1953), Dithyramb Tragedy and Comedy (2d ed., 1962), and A. E. Haigh, ed., The Attic Theatre (3d ed., 1969).

  Ancient Greek literature has elicited eloquent critics as well as emulators, like the friends and enemies satirized in Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books (1704). An appealing account of the ancient Greeks’ view of culture is Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (3 vols., 1973–86). Modern critics have made Greek drama a standard for their judgments of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Shaw. Readable surveys of the place of ancient Greek drama in literary history: Margarete Bieber, The History of Greek and Roman Theater (1939); Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (1923); Allardyce Nicoll, The Development of the Theatre (5th ed., 1966). An excellent introduction is H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy (1955); then C. M. Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy (1944); Gilbert Murray, Euripides and His Age (1913), Aristophanes (1933; 1964); Victor Ehrenberg, The People of Aristophanes (3d ed., 1962), which puts the characters in their time.