A fun first-date ice-breaker: when did we get modern? There are a lot of promising candidates. The double-barelled industrial and political revolutions (late 1700s). Descartes' discovery or invention of the cogito (1641). Columbus making landfall in the Caribbean (1492). The Black Death, which by killing a third of Europe helpfully tilted the labour/lord ratio in favour of the peasants, quickening a nascent commercialism (1346-1353). All of these dates fall within the time period—1300 to 1830—covered by this historical survey, so reading it is a useful opportunity to puzzle over this question.

But this is a survey of art and culture, not a general history, and the author is very keen to insist that developments in art can't be directly correlated with economic-political trends. Instead, in the opening chapter, he argues that changes in art can be explained by (1) the search for new and different forms of beauty, and (2) a generalizable rise-and-decline pattern where one trend (like the Renaissance) develops, reaches its paradigmatic form, then withers and gives way to another.

These are pretty thin explanations, but for a casual reader like me a book like this also has a less theoretical purpose, which is just guiding you through a tasting menu of a truly massive amount of material, everything from Dante to Goethe, Sumer is Icumen In to Ode to Joy. One review says nearly "500 artists, authors and composers" are mentioned, and I believe it. The opening and closing sections of each chapter deliver some very useful top-level descriptions of each trend, and the author is also good at tracking influences and how movements develop unevenly across countries, with different emphases (French romanticism linking to political liberalism, German romanticism to reaction; first the Netherlands, then Italy taking the lead in music; etc).

That said, a lot of the chapters are essentially a chain of artists described in succession, and if you're not already familiar with them, the summaries tend to blur or get tiring. You hear that one painter excels with colour, another with the human form; one writer is the most elegant in his language but is deficient in drama, another is a master of subtle narrative effects but had unconvincing characters, and so on. This is enlivened, however, by occasional quotes or characterizations that spark interest in the work reviewed, like a list of the favourite literary metaphors of the Rococo movement (lilies; roses; tears like pearls, wine, or milk; blood drops like rubies; ecstasies; flaming hearts; wounds; the grave) or the one-line description of the Baroque architecture's visual democraticism ("Its sumptuous and copious vision was for all men").

The pages flow and flow, with the clatter of history heard in the background, and though you don't learn when we became modern there's something pleasant about reading a book that touches the High Middle Ages and the 1848 Revolutions on either end, trying to force these two incommensurable worlds together with your eyes into one 3D object.

From the Renaissance to romanticism

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