Form and Meaning: Writings on the Renaissance and Modern Art

by Robert Klein, Leon Wieseltier (Translator), Madeline Jay (Editor)

This collection of essays is an essential part of any serious library on the basis of the title essay, or of the essay on perspective in the Renaissance, alone; for these have been accorded landmark status since they first appeared, in 1961-63. The collection also suggests Klein's astonishing further range: painting and phenomenology, Baudelaire's A Season in Hell, "The Eclipse of the Work of Art," "Utopian Urban Planning," and many other issues in modern and Renaissance culture.

"For readers interested in the Italian Renaissance - its art, symbols, emblems, allegories, aesthetic theories, philosophy, and science - the essays of Robert Klein are capital works. I know of nothing in recent writings more thoughtful and searching. Klein's command of the old and new literature is impressively thorough, and ranges from the technical treatises on perspective to the abstruse speculations of the philosophers.
"'Form and Meaning' includes several challenging essays on the concepts underlying twentieth-century painting. These are the works of a keen mind, equally at home in philosophy and the history of art. - Meyer Schapiro

"Klein had a prodigious intellectual curiosity and did not shut it off when faced with the works of his own time." - The New York Times Book Review

263 pages, Paperback

First published October 22, 1979