The Quattro Cento and Stones of Rimini

“‘Poeta che mi guida’: I can think of no better words, the words of Dante about Virgil, to describe Stokes as a critic of the arts.” —Richard Wollheim, Image in Form

“The republishing of these books is much to be welcomed. In them, Stokes examines fifteenth-century Italian sculpture and architecture from a point of view that has a particular resonance today. He achieved an unusual and compelling integration of art historical, art critical and aesthetic analysis. He also thought more deeply and wrote more eloquently about the aesthetics of sculpture and about the relation between sculpture and the architecture than any other writer on art of his time.” —Alex Potts, University of Michigan

“Adrian Stokes's thought runs counter to all the orthodoxies of the present. He believed in Art. It was the antithesis of mass culture. He believed that it was our fate to see the inner life, our emotions good and bad, mirrored in the outside world; and that in very complex ways art symbolized that mirroring. The only thing that distinguished art from other useless activities was Form. He used that word in a way that was his alone. Art was present to him all at once, not qualified in an important way by precedence or chronology. Insisting on Art’s outwardness, his starting point was material: the sculptor’s stone or clay, the painter's color and canvas. He assumed that the viewer would summon to the contemplation of art, body-memories of hard and soft, texture and light, holes and solids, near and far, as well as the fantasies that attend those memories. The power of art was reparative. It projected wholeness.

Stokes wrote about these things with the passion of a great teacher and with the imaginative insight of a poet. His was a unique voice.” —Andrew Forge, Yale University

“This welcome reissue prints both texts and photographs in as generous as a format as the originals, with illuminating introductory essays by Stephen Bann, David Carrier and Stephen Kite.

This reprint offers a world of insight that most contemporary writing about art still keeps at a distance.” —Martin Golding, Times Literary Supplement

“This is an important work in the history of ideas, and essential reading for any student of Adrian Stokes. A very rewarding book.” —Patrick Hutchings, Senior Fellow, Department of Philosophy, Australian Art Review

“Yet the greatest accolade that can be given to this new paperback edition and the scholars who contributed introductions to it is the fact that the intention is that of getting Stokes’s writings read. And this handsome edition, which retains the original illustrations, does precisely that.” —Gabriele Neher, The Art Book

“Recollected in tranquillity, Renaissance sculpture shines more brightly because Adrian Stokes polished the stone.” —Michael Ann Holly, Art Bulletin