Traditional Woodblock Prints of Taiwan by the Council for Cultural Planning and Development, Republic of China (review)

and perspicacious cultural life. A Student Roster is far more than a gossip’s delight and supplies a sense of who was listening to the faculty, who had made the pilgrimage to this otherwise-unlikely place, and allows us to see the results of that education over time. A complete Index further cross-references all of the above. Here, for the first time, we possess the plan of a decisive moment in recent intellectual and artistic history, when place and personality merged gloriously. THEORY OF ART IN THE ENCYCLOPEDIE by Amy Cohen Simowitz. UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, MI, U.S.A., 1983. 130 pp. Trade, $37.95. ISBN: 0-8357-1433-0. Reviewed by Elmer H. Duncan, Department of Philosophy, Baylor University, Waco, TX 76798, U.S.A. How does one summarize an encyclopedia ? Or summarize a summary of an encyclopedia? The task is daunting, but A.C. Simowitz has made a valuable attempt. The Encycloptdie, produced by a group of French scholars(which included Diderot, d’Alembert, Marmontel, Rousseau and even Voltaire) in the 1750s, still stands, after 200 years, as an incredible intellectual achievement. What is not noted often enough is the very large number of articles in the Encycloptdie devoted to the fine arts. First, Simowitz notes that it was extremely unusual to group the arts together in this way in the mid-eighteenth century. Further, the writers also dealt with the arts in an unusual way. In his Essays on the Intellectual Powers (1785), Thomas Reid discussed the fine arts in relation to human intellectual powers-this was the usual procedure. But the encyclopedists took their lead from the Abbt. du Bos, who in his Reflexions Critiques sur la poesie e?sur lapeinture (1719) related the arts to pleasure. The encyclopedists also followed du Bos’s empirical method. In their many articles,the writers of the Encycloptdie were both conservative and innovative. They followed the normal practice of praising the imitation of nature, but they also stressed originality. As indicated above, they followed du Bos in emphasizingpleasure, but, as Simowitz writes, “In the work of imagination ... feeling comes before reason, though reason is present in a secondary role” (p. The text of this book covers a scant 73 pages. The book also has an index. The 73). notes are valuable, featuring translations of the many quotations from articles in the Encycloptdie cited in the text. There are also two appendices which will be found extremely useful. The first supplies background on some of the lesser-known contributors to the EncyclopidieBlondel , Castillon,Condillac,Dumarsais, Sulzer, et al. The second appendix lists, by volume, a large number of the articles on the arts by each author and selected relevant articles for each of the 17 volumes of theEncycloptdie plus the four supplementary volumes. It is difficult to avoid typographical and spelling errors in a volume of this kind, but Simowitz seems to have done a careful job of proofreading. In a note on p. 87, she gives the date of 1770 for the work by du Bos “which”, she adds, “they often quote”, presumably referring to the encyclopedists working in the 1750s. But such slips are rare. All in all, the author has managed to pack intoa slim volume a great deal of valuable information. TRADITIONALWOODBLOCK PRINTS OF TAIWAN by the Council for Cultural Planning and Development, Republic of China. Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C., 1985. 302 pp., illus. Paper. Reviewed by Sean O’Driscoll, Irish International Arts Centre, Castle Matrix, Co. Limerick. Ireland. This companion volume to the catalogue of the International Print Biennial, although emphasizing the Taiwan tradition of woodblock printing, is probably the best available fully illustrated textbook on the Chinese art of carving wood blocks for printing. Although the oldest surviving woodblock print in the world was printed in China during the Tang Dynasty(A.D. 868),the antecedents of this Chinese art can be traced back to the oracle-bone script of the Shang Dynasty (17th to 11th centuries B.C.). However, carved seals probably should be regarded as the immediate precursors of the actual printing technique. This Special Exhibition of Traditional Woodblock Prints begins with surviving woodblock...