Rome

Starred review from July 25, 2011
With elegance and beauty, Hughes, who for three decades was Time's chief art critic, majestically conducts us through the rich history of Rome, a city he discovered as a young man, which for him gave physical form to the ideal of art and "turned art, and history, into reality.â From its foundation to the modern world, Hughes points out the wealth of Rome's art and its influence on Roman history. For example, propaganda statues in ancient Rome perpetuated the power of leaders; the statue of the emperor Augustus, for instance, has few equals as an image of "calm, self-sufficient power.â Hughes characterizes 19th-century Rome as a movement between orthodoxy and modernism, and reflects artists' commitment to or rejection of Italian unification. During this period, Rome was also swarming with foreign artists, notably a group of young Germans dubbed the Nazarenes for their demonstrative piety. Hughes bemoans the rampant tourism that has turned Rome into a kind of Disney World for the art set; yet the glories of the past remain. In a delightful guide, Hughesâwhose The Shock of the New was recently named by Britain's Guardian one of the 100 greatest nonfiction books of the 20th centuryâprovides a sometimes cantankerous but always captivating tour through the remarkable depth and breadth of the ancient city.

August 15, 2011

In the spirit of his Barcelona (1992), the art critic and cultural historian zooms through Roman history, from Romulus and Remus to today.

Hughes' (Things I Didn't Know, 2006, etc.) subtitle is a bit misleading—"personal history" composes but a nail or two in the impressive edifice he has erected—but few readers will complain about anything else. Though his focus is principally on architecture, painting and sculpture, he pauses occasionally to provide historical context, offer portraits of key personalities and grouse about popular culture. Hughes eviscerates The Da Vinci Code ("wretchedly ill-written"), religious fundamentalists (who, he says, have created no art above the level of "drive-in megachurches"), the belief in the virginity of Mary and the noisy crowds in the Sistine Chapel ("just shut the fuck up, please, pretty please, if you can, if you don't mind, if you won't burst"). He also raves about artists and artistic works he loves, injecting his text with heavy doses of superlatives: The Pantheon is "certainly the greatest of all surviving structures of ancient Rome"; the Sistine ceiling is "one of the world's supreme sights." (Hughes also gives a grand account of the debate about the recent cleaning of Michelangelo's masterwork.) The author's knowledge about individual artists and works—and about Roman history—is prodigious, but he is never is pedantic or dull. There are a couple of strange moments—do readers need to be told what Schadenfreude means? Isn't it a stretch to say that Keats and Shelley were friends?—but mostly there are moments of delight and surprise. We learn that on the Grand Tour, Horace Walpole saw his dog eaten by a wolf in the Alps; we smell the streets of ancient Rome; we discover that hippos were among the animals that fought in the Colosseum.

An appealing mixture of erudition about high culture and curmudgeonly complaints about low.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 1, 2011

Longtime art critic for Time, Hughes is the right man to tell us about the glory that remains Rome. He doesn't stop with painting, sculpture, and architecture but covers Rome's entire history, using as a framework his discovery of the city starting in 1958, when he arrived as a young student. I'm betting on this one. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2011
From Etruscan statuary to Fascist-era buildings, Rome's artistic and architectural inventory comes under Hughes' incisive review of everything that an informed visitor would wish to see there. Hughes' commentary eschews art-history jargon and adopts direct diction to interpret for readers what an object says in aesthetic terms and in relation to the historical moment in which it was created. Monumentality being a Roman habit through the ages, the Pantheon, Saint Peter's Basilica, and the Victor Emmanuel memorial arrest the eyes and a few of Hughes' paragraphs, but his most impassioned passages render verdicts on paintings, sculptures, and smaller structures, accompanied by opinions of those who commissioned and those who crafted them. The latter, of course, include immortals like Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Bellini. The less immortal names of their patrons earn Hughes' equal attention for being exponents of the money, power, and beliefs that engendered their artworks. Distilling a lifetime of visiting and contemplating Rome's history and heritage, Hughes stands stoutly independent as a critic, richly repaying the reading of any visitor to Rome in actuality or in imagination.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)