Feminine Beauty

Since the second millennium BC feminine beauty has inspired great art. In a superb and highly informative essay Kenneth Clark demonstrates that while different periods and cultures in the West have held different ideals of the female form, beauty has a timelessness which transcends fashion and environment, and its image can be found in any age. It can be as diverse as a medieval Madonna and a voluptuous nude of the Baroque, an enchantment by Fragonard and the characteristic melancholy of Virginia Woolf or Greta Garbo. Yet, in citing the figures of antiquity-Nefertiti, the Venus of Milo and of modern times, Lord Clark reveals the constancy of beauty over four thousand years. He discusses chronologically, with visual references, the plates he has selected to illustrate his subject, and his perceptive personal commentary is a reminder that he is not only one of Britain's leading art historians but also that he has a rare capacity for communicating his scholarship. -- from dust jacket.