A new edition of a fundamental and formerly unavailable text by one of the most eminent twentieth-century archaeologists.
[Organicity and Abstraction] The book is illustrated with images chosen by Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli himself. “That damn little book” was how Bianchi Bandinelli described it as he was writing it. It concerns the relations between our culture and the art of ancient Greece, which was not an “idealistic” art but an art “of reality”, and the problem of the so-called “decadence of the form” in the transition between Roman antiquity and the Middle Ages. This leads to an examination of the debate between abstraction and realism in contemporary art where he discovers that in criticism the yardstick of the art of antiquity remains valid.