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kbaj's review against another edition
3.0
I felt this book could have benefited from an inversion. Rather than painting history with a broad brush before mentioning illustrative examples of period art, it would have been more appropriate (and interesting) to introduce the art first and then explain how its attributes are reflective of the society that produced it. This is, after all, a book about art. It is not a high school textbook, but it reads like one with its overabundance of generalizations and lack of thoroughly examined historical examples. As a scholarly work, I expected text- and image-heavy analysis. The survey of medieval society as it related to art was less useful and less insightful because of its relative inattention to actual art.
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