Meyer Schapiro’s Mousetrap

Gabriel Josipovici

  • Late Antique, Early Christian and Medieval Art: Selected Papers, Vol. 3 by Meyer Schapiro
    Chatto, 414 pp, £20.00, April 1980, ISBN 0 7011 2514 4

I have always thought that there was a striking resemblance between Freud’s earliest case-histories, which he published as Studies in Hysteria, and the Sherlock Holmes stories. In the Studies, as in Sherlock Holmes, we are presented with the man of wisdom to whom people bring their problems; who listens in silence; then asks a number of carefully considered questions; and who finally solves the mystery and restores things to the order they were in before tragedy struck – or at least unearths the culprit. There is even an episode in the Studies about the great doctor on holiday in a mountain resort. But a man like Freud and Holmes can, of course, never take a holiday: here, too, a mystery is brought to him to solve; naturally, he obliges.

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[1] ‘The third of four volumes, two of which, Modern Art and Romanesque Art, have already been published by Chatto and Windus.

[2] It is a great pity that this otherwise beautifully produced book does not runs to coloured illustrations. A good deal of Schapiro’s analysis of the Beatus apocalypse will thus be lost on the reader, since that work depends to a large extent on its strikingly bold colouring. But he can make up for this by purchasing another Chatto volume in their series of manuscript illuminations, Early Spanish Manuscript Illumination by John Williams.

[3] His remarks here need to be filled out by reading his superb essays on Van Gogh, Picasso and Mondrian in Modern Art.