cover image Creation: Artists, Gods and Origins

Creation: Artists, Gods and Origins

Peter Conrad, . . Thames & Hudson, $45 (592pp) ISBN 978-0-500-51356-9

In this expansive and often electrifying exploration, Oxford English professor Conrad (Modern Times, Modern Places ) aims to present “a celebration of art that doubles as a critique of religion.” His supreme faith is in human, not divine creators, and though he thinks it “unfashionable,” his premise is that artistic genius does indeed exist. Plato, Mozart, Michelangelo, Schoenberg and Wagner are not surprisingly among the many examples; Mary Shelley and Hildegard of Bingen are among the few women discussed at any length. Thirty-three chapters are thematically arranged, probing concepts of creation in a sometimes dizzying, often brilliant fusion of the linguistic, aesthetic and philosophical. When focused on one artist or period, Conrad's ideas are most acute, his arguments most intrepid, as in the chapter on Leonardo. His conclusion that man is both a creator and destroyer, and that the beauty of aesthetic forms can deliver us from the world's “entropic decay” is hardly new, yet the book's vigorous, engagement with these ideas and others gives it a potency that will appeal to both general and scholarly readers. 160 illus. (Nov.)