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When artists glorified war

Brainiac

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 19, 2012|By Joshua Rothman

The equestrian Statue of emperor of the Roman empire Marcus Aurelius in… (FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP/Getty…)

Bookshelves, the ultimate marketing device

Bookshelves have long been a familiar, reassuring sight in every readerly home. But in a short history of the bookshelf in The Paris Review, writer Francesca Mari explains that modern bookshelves, with their books arranged spines outward, haven’t been the historical norm. In fact, they’re a relatively recent invention.

Until the 16th century, Mari writes, and even afterward, books were stored in all sorts of zany ways: in trunks and armoires, shackled to podiums in reading rooms, on their sides, or with the paper facing outward, in which case “an identifying design was drawn across the thick of the pages.” And even after books assumed their modern position, the built-in bookshelf — “the gold standard of shelving” — was only popularized in the 1930s. According to the historian Henry Petroski, Mari writes, publishers, looking for new ways to boost sales, hired Edward Bernays, the inventor of public relations; Bernays reasoned that “where there are bookshelves, there will be books!” He convinced architects and interior designers to build bookshelves into new homes.

“Two decades later,” Mari writes, “The New York Times was putting out a dollar magazine, The New York Times Shows You 65 Ways to Decorate with Books in Your Home, celebrating the cheering effect of a wall of the publishing industry’s lithe and colorful new covers.”

When artists glorified war

From Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” to Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket,” we’re accustomed to thinking of artists as antiwar. You don’t have to go back very far into history, though, to find great artists taking quite the opposite stance: openly celebrating war, warriors, and the battlefield. How this shift occurred is one of the central themes of “The Artist and the Warrior: Military History Through the Eyes of the Masters,” by Theodore Rabb, an emeritus professor of history at Princeton University. Rabb’s lavishly illustrated book explores the changing ways artists have responded to war through the ages, beginning with the art of the Assyrians and ancient Greeks and ending with the great war films of the 20th century.

On the one hand, Rabb shows, the art history of war is full of continuities. It’s because of a single Roman statue of Marcus Aurelius on horseback, for example, that our modern-day cities still feature statues of mounted generals, like the equestrian statue of George Washington in the Boston Public Garden; the gesture of command shown in this and other Roman statues — a single upraised arm — was “so potent,” Rabb writes, that it “remained an emblem of imperious assertiveness until it was adapted for the Nazi salute in the twentieth century.”