Ideals & Idols

Description

This volume of key essays explores, with intellectual and emotional rigour, the nature of values and their place in the humanities.

As Ernst Gombrich writes in the preface, ‘There are moments in the life of an academic when he feels prompted to get up from his university chair and mount the pulpit … ‘

Ranging in subject matter from the philosophy of Hegel to wartime propaganda broadcasts, to the future of museums and the role of reason and feeling in the study of art, Professor Gombrich dynamically argues for the ideals of tolerance and pluralism and against the idols of determinism and relativism that would threaten all forms of the very culture that defines us as human beings.

Ernst Gombrich was one of the greatest and least conventional art historians of his age, achieving fame and distinction in three separate spheres: as a scholar, as a popularizer of art, and as a pioneer of the application of the psychology of perception to the study of art. His best-known book, The Story of Art – first published 50 years ago and now in its sixteenth edition – is one of the most influential books ever written about art. His books further include The Sense of Order (1979) and The Preference for the Primitive (2002), as well as a total of 11 volumes of collected essays and reviews.

Gombrich was born in Vienna in 1909 and died in London in November 2001. He came to London in 1936 to work at the Warburg Institute, where he eventually became Director from 1959 until his retirement in 1976. He won numerous international honours, including a knighthood, the Order of Merit and the Goethe, Hegel and Erasmus prizes.

Gifted with a powerful mind and prodigious memory, he was also an outstanding communicator, with a clear and forceful prose style. His works are models of good art-historical writing, and reflect his humanism and his deep and abiding concern with the standards and values of our cultural heritage.

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