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Modernism/modernity 10.3 (2003) 580-581



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The Quattro Cento and Stones of Rimini. Adrian Stokes. London: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2002. Pp. 668. $35.00 (paper).

The significance to Modernist studies of these early books by the most original and, "as yet, the least well known of the great English art writers" (1) is that they fill a gap in the genealogy of English aesthetics. On the one side of this gap stand Stokes's Edwardian and Victorian precursors, and on the other the succeeding generations of stars comprising Kenneth Clark (his conservative popularizer), John Berger and Peter Fuller. Stokes opposed both the formalism of the Bloomsbury critics on the left of the 1930s art establishment, and the Sitwells' aristocratic nostalgia for the Baroque on the right. Rediscovering early Italian Renaissance art for the Modernist era, he appealed over the head of these Edwardians to Ruskin and Pater. He reopened Ruskin and Pater's disputes over the respective merits of Gothic and Renaissance art, in visual competition with Pound's taste for medieval literature. Although Pound's early Cantos inspired Stokes's obsession with the Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini, Stokes used his Renaissance aesthetic to champion Nicholson, Hepworth and Moore against Pound's taste for the earlier generation of more abstract sculptors Gaudier-Brzeska, Brancusi and Epstein. Engaging also with the Modernist novels of Lawrence, Conrad and Woolf, Stokes emphatically sided with "life" against aestheticism in resisting the Bloomsbury tendency to separate morality from art, a resistance informed by F. H. Bradley's philosophy and then later by Freud's theories increasingly refracted through his analysis with Melanie Klein from 1929. Notwithstanding Stokes's openness to this range of insights, it is unwise to underestimate his art historical learning. Leigh Ashton, who purchased for the V & A the Agostino di Duccio relief that illustrates Carving in the distinction from Modelling for which Stones of Rimini is famous, wished only that so personal a book should not contain footnotes "except as a sop to anyone who might accuse you of not having read the books" when "it is so obvious that you have read them all . . . " 1 Yet Stokes performed a Modernist coup on previous Art Nouveau or Pre-Raphaelite interpretations of Agostino's reliefs.

These reflections arise from my recent book on Stokes's early career rather than from the stimulating essays that introduce this volume. 2 Their frank necessity is to direct this large paperback into the hands of younger travelers to Italy by presenting it as a new version of "a traditional form of art writing, the art lover's narrative of the grand tour" (3). While such readers [End Page 580] might have liked to have heard more about the humor and riotous sexuality of these works, the popularizing angle occludes Stokes's now unsavory but historically significant racial and phylogenetic theory of art history. The Grand Tour is nevertheless a good prism to bring to these works. Starting with Hazlitt (as I did in my PhD of 1981) Carrier evokes the English genre in which the approach to a place feeds appreciation of the art and architecture located there. In his foreword, Stephen Bann aptly elucidates the underlying principle as "one that involves adapting self-consciously to the accounts of predecessors who have already traced out part of the field" (xi), and agrees that Hazlitt is the earliest of these characteristic travelers. Actually, Hazlitt presented himself as an unintoxicated traveler; he restored the descriptive grain that Sterne's sentimental journey removed from Smollett's splenetic tour in their triple opposition to Addison's journey to the poets rather than the places of Italy. Nonetheless Addison's "Essays on the Pleasures of the Imagination" (1712) is arguably the real inaugurator of Stokes's tradition.

Stokes's relation to the contrasting sensibilities of travel is indeed fascinating. In terms of immediate precursors Bann minimizes Pound's influence, but the humanistic fantasies of the Cantos continued to mean more to Stokes than Osbert Sitwell's "discursions" on travel or J. A. Symonds' sporadically influential phrases. From the brilliant opening of The...

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