Beskrivelse

Sir John Summerson’s brief account of classical architecture has every right to be called a classit itself. Few books can have had such an enthusiastic reaction from the learned and at the same time added so much to the layman’s pleasure in his surroundings. For to appreciate the classical style – its variety and its strength, its wit and its occasional eccentricity – demands instruction. The author takes us easily from the great originals of Greece and Rome to the recapitulations and innovations of the Renaissance, the explosive rhetoric of the Baroque and the grave statements of Neo-classicism; thence to the exuberant eclectism of the Victorians and Edwardians and, finally, to be ‘stripped Neo-classicism’ of some of the moderns – every age using the classical language to make its own statement.