Rowland Benjamin. The Classical Tradition in Western Art

Harvard University Press, 1963. — 552 p.The purpose of this book is to provide an introduction to art through the understanding and love of our common Western heritage from Greece and Rome: the exaltation of the beauty and nobility of man in sculpture and painting. This ennoblement of the human being as the most intrinsically perfect form imaginable for the revelation of the emotions and passions, tender and strong, happy and sad, that illumine and darken man's mind, stems from the Greeks' selection of the human shape as the embodiment of the unknowable beauty of the gods. The vicissitudes that have accompanied this momentous Hellenic choice through later centuries constitutes in itself a history of Western art and taste.