Adrian Stokes (1902-1972) was a British painter
and writer whose books on art have been allowed to go out of print
despite their impact on Modernist culture and ongoing acclaim for
their beauty and intellectual acuity. This new edition of The
Quattro Cento and Stones of Rimini presents the original
texts of 1932 and 1934 and furnishes them with introductions by
David Carrier and Stephen Kite that will help readers grasp the
structure and significance of what have become Stokes's most widely
cited and influential books.
Written as parts of an incomplete trilogy, The
Quattro Cento and Stones of Rimini mark a crossroads
in the transition from late Victorian to Modernist conceptions of
art, especially sculpture and architecture. Stokes continued, even
extended, John Ruskin's and Walter Pater's belief that art is essential
to the individual's proper psychological development but wove their
teaching into a new aesthetic shaped by his experience of psychoanalysis
with Melanie Klein and recent innovations in literature, dance,
and the visual arts.
Few writers have been able to invoke the material
presence of works of art in the way Stokes does in The Quattro
Cento and Stones of Rimini. They combine travel writing
with acts of looking spun out so as to reinterpret the imposing
legacy of the Italian Renaissance through an aesthetic of the direct
carving of stone, which has parallels in the sculpture of Brancusi,
Henry Moore, and Barbara Hepworth but was for Stokes the discovery
of artists in fifteenth-century Italy. To his way of thinking, there
then arose a realization that the materials of art "were the actual
objects of inspiration, the stocks for the deepest fantasies." During
the Renaissance, Stokes maintained, stone accordingly "blossomed"
into sculpture and buildings, such as the Tempio Malatestiano, that
throw "inner ferment outward into definite act and thought."
This new edition of Stokes's pivotal books will
be of interest to those concerned with art criticism, aesthetics,
psychoanalysis and art, and the art and architecture of the Renaissance
and Modern periods.
