Dignity and Decadence: Victorian art and the classical inheritance. - Hardcover

Jenkyns, Richard

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9780002238434: Dignity and Decadence: Victorian art and the classical inheritance.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002238438 ISBN 13: 9780002238434

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 1991

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The author of this book argues that although we think of the Victorian era as the age of gothic, there is also a profound and persistant classical strain which runs through it, from the Greek revival in architecture at the beginning of the century to the neo-classical painters such as Lord Leighton in the late Victorian age. His discussion includes the way in which cultural influences take over from and overlay each other, and how styles become ripe, over-ripe and eventually decadent. He demonstrates that our view of the Victorian age as the age of gothic is indeed simplistic, and that the classical and the gothic were present everywhere. Richard Jenkyns is the author of "The Victorians and Ancient Greece".

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From the Back Cover:

The starting-point for Richard Jenkyns’s scintillating book is his contention that the Victorian age, which we think of as the great period of Gothic, was so shot through with the influence of the classical past that we should think instead of Victorian art and architecture as the continuing flow forward of two stylistic streams – the Gothic and the classical side by side.

Jenkyns addresses the fashionable question of why these two strains, thoroughly entangled, ripened and ripened as the century ended, until dignity was corrupted into decadence. He subtly traces the very gradual changes through the paintings of Leighton and Alma-Tadema, the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, the ‘aesthetic scripture’ of Pater, even the advertisements for Beecham’s pills, to show how the merely eclectic became the distinctive fin-de-si�cle style and eventually began to point the way forward to Modernism.

Jenkyns’s discussion of these grand themes moves brilliantly to and from the general to the particular and is refreshingly unafraid to make judgements. In its course there are, almost incidentally, some of the best descriptions of Victorian pictures, sculpture and architecture to have appeared in recent years.

“With his new book Richard Jenkyns’s reaches a position comparable to that of the late Kenneth Clark, both for the penetration of his artistic insights and the distinction of his writing.”
A.L. ROWSE

“A pleasure and an education to read.”
FREDERIC RAPHAEL, 'Sunday Times'

“Enviable elegant and witty writing: scholarly exposition at its very best.”
PETER JONES, 'The Times, Books of the Year'

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