Название: Before Cortes: Sculpture of Middle America
Автор(ы): Elizabeth K. Easby, John F. Scott
Издательство: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Год: 1971
ISBN: 978-0300200539
Страниц: 324
Язык: English
Формат: PDF
Размер: 75 MB

The course of pre-Hispanic or, as it is frequently called, pre-Columbian art, has come full circle in our own twentieth century. It amazed the Spanish conquistadors four hundred fifty years ago, and, when first seen by European audiences, it evoked the spontaneous admiration and extravagant praise of such Renaissance figures as Dürer, Cellini, and Peter Martyr, an Italian cleric who wrote the first history of the New World. But all too soon it lapsed as art in Europe, to continue there merely as exotica in some princeling's Wunderkammer and still later in museums narrowly confined to ethnology and anthropology.
It is only in the United States that this art has been included in the collections of the most significant fine-arts museums and begun to be recognized by a few graduate schools of art and art history in our universities—a twentieth-century development of fairly limited acceptance. We at the Metropolitan are now proud to present it with other great art of the world.