Book Review: The Story of Art

There are hundreds of artworks mentioned throughout, each one introduced in detail and with infectious enthusiasm. Photographs accompany the descriptions, like lecture slides supporting the material. 

The book comes with a “two-ribbon system.” As you read through the chapters, you use the ribbons to keep your place as you flick back-and-forth to the picture section. It’s an alternative way to engage with a book, and you adapt to the flow of it quickly. It sometimes leads to pleasing surprises. You read about the demon-mask of an Inuit tribe, but turning the page to see it gives a chilling effect. Some paintings and sculptures are especially beautiful, so seeing them after reading about them is a pleasing surprise.

Gombrich doesn’t present art history as a process of improvements, where primitive art is lesser than Renaissance masterpieces. Rather, he presents each era and period as its own thing, worthy in its own right, created with different motivations and cultural contexts, each one full of unique masterpieces. 

What also comes across is the disappearance of art. More artworks have been lost throughout history than retained. Missing tribal artefacts, melted bronze sculptures from eras where metal was a scarcity, artworks destroyed due to blasphemy and war crimes. The destructive hand of censorship is a saddening constant in The Story of Art, and we are invited to appreciate what has survived.

Every reader will get something different from this. The author wishes to show how artists of any age can enrich our lives: “If we follow them and learn from them, even a glance out of our own window may become a thrilling adventure.”

While the standard version of The Story of Art works well as a coffee table book or perhaps a library-read, this pocket edition allows you to bring this towering work with you. For the convenience alone, we’d give it a high recommendation indeed.