Christopher Allen

Christopher Allen reviews 'SPQR' by Mary Beard

March 2016, no. 379 • 24 February 2016

At the very bottom of Hell, Dante represents Satan with three mouths, each of which endlessly devours a figure personifying treachery and rebellion against God. One of these, predictably enough, is Judas. What may be surprising to the modern reader is that the other two are Brutus and Cassius, the assassins of Julius Caesar. In the medieval vision of the universe and of human history, however, the ... (read more)

Christopher Allen reviews 'Art as Therapy' by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong

February 2014, no. 358 • 19 January 2014

Art, in all its diverse manifestations, from storytelling to picture-making, from singing and dancing to poetry, is as distinctive and universal an activity of the human mind as language. It is, in essence, a way of thinking about the world, of shaping experience as it is felt to be and reshaping it as it could be, that long predates the development of rational reflection. Stories have been told f ... (read more)

Christopher Allen reviews 'Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance: The legacy of the "Natural History"' by Sarah Blake McHam

December 2013–January 2014, no. 357 • 01 December 2013

When the intellectuals, writers, and artists of the Renaissance sought a theoretical basis for the new styles they were developing – at a time when the new meant all’antica and the term modern was still coloured by associations with the Middle Ages – they found that ancient sources were relatively abundant in some areas and scarce or non-existent in others. Poets could find inspiration in Ho ... (read more)

Christopher Allen reviews 'Confronting the Classics' by Mary Beard

June 2013, no. 352 • 27 May 2013

When Confucius was asked by his disciples how they should become wise, he would enjoin them to study the classics; over two millennia later and much closer to home, Winckelmann declared that it was only by imitating the supreme masterpieces of the Greeks that we too might one day become inimitable – putting his finger on the paradox that the greatest originality always has deep roots in the past ... (read more)

Christopher Allen reviews 'The Classical Tradition' edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis

March 2011, no. 329 • 01 March 2011

Unlike China, whose history similarly goes back to the Bronze Age, Europe has been shaped by spectacular collapses and profound renewals, first after the Mycenaean Age and then with the fall of the Roman Empire, which severed what we know as Antiquity from the modern world. The new Europe that emerged from half a millennium of turmoil, cultural regression, and repeated invasion by foreign predator ... (read more)