Spalding has written an art history book that is totally different, exchanging chronology for a narrative about how our ancestors responded to phenomena such as the changing seasons, day and night, birth and death and sun and moon and made sense of it with the medium of art.
The first chapters after the Introduction are thematic: the stars, our vision of the world, the sun and moon, death and darkness, before moving on to modern art and the exchanging of representation of reality for expression of the internal world of the artist.
It is a difficult book to describe, Spalding writes idiosyncratically bringing together diverse strands from across the entire panapoly of human history, and I may not agree with all his jumps of the imagination but I enjoyed it throroughly because it made me think and appreciate the power of art not as a luxury but as something far more fundamental to our needs as human beings since the earliest human history.
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