Five hours to cover 19,000 years of art doesn’t allow for much slack but compression, an art in itself, is Whitfield’s forte. His contributions to Naxos’s single-CD In a Nutshell series include the Renaissance and Darwin, and his history of 600 years of English poetry from Chaucer to Sylvia Plath is as much a miracle of economy as of erudition. Whitfield inspires. His enthusiasm makes you want to reappraise statues you’ve already seen but, until he reminded you, had forgotten how wonderful they are. Statues such as Donatello’s life-size bronze David in Florence, hand on hip, one knee flexed, wearing nothing but a flowered hat and a cheeky pair of boots. It was the first free-standing figure any artist had produced for a thousand years, says Whitfield, and wham – suddenly you understand the significance, the brilliance of the renaissance. It has been a long haul from the stone age cave paintings of Lascaux circa 16,000 BC via Ninevah’s lion-hunting murals, Mesopotamian winged bulls, Persian mozaics, Egyptian sphinxes, Greek caryatids, Etruscan urns, Viking helmets, the Book of Kells and Gothic cathedrals to Raphael and Da Vinci – but compared to the narrow 500-year gulf between Michelangelo’s Pietàs, acme of Renaissance humanism, and the soiled sheets of Tracey Emin’s unmade bed shortlisted for the 1999 Turner prize, it’s a blink. What happened? Listen to Whitfield analyse the succeeding artistic schools – baroque, neo-classical, impressionist, cubist, surrealist, avant garde, op, pop and performance – and you’ll find out. Whether you’ll be any the wiser is something else. How, for instance, does the German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-86) striding around a Dusseldorf gallery in iron boots and a mask made of honey, discussing his paintings with the dead hare cradled in his arms, fit into the bigger picture? It doesn’t. Neither do pictures any more. Modern art, surrounded by a foghorn chorus of blah emanating from the media and the artists themselves, has become something that we talk about, think about, argue about and, if we can afford it, pay astronomical sums of money for, rather than actually look at. That’s not Whitfield talking, by the way, it’s reactionary me. He remains impressively neutral.

The History of Western Art is a broad view of art history by Renaissance man Peter Whitfield, who covers the subject from ancient times to the modern dilemma of defining what art is. An intriguing connection between past ideals & beliefs, and our current estrangement from the natural world is discussed, as modern deconstruction has led us into a box canyon of perpetual revolution without agreed upon parameters. It’s all covered in four CDs, from Greek & Roman & Christian art to Baroque, Romantic, Impressionism and Avant-Garde (and including commentary on architecture, architects, and artists), and is read by Sebastian Comberti, with classical music accompaniment.

Peter Whitfield skilfully compresses a great sweep of culture – from the ancient world to the present – into five hours. The changes in the 20th century have been the most seismic: the age-old stability of belief has been largely swept away along with ‘high art’. Now, anything goes, with ‘ugliness as valid as beauty, and formlessness as valid as form’. Most of all, this invigorating gallop through the centuries makes you set off for the galleries.

Naxos have done art an immense service with the publication of this splendid audiobook which is a must purchase for any of those who are interested in western art in general. Sebastian Comberti has already lent his inimitable voice to Jan Morris’s Venice, to my mind one of the most beautifully nostalgic [titles] in the Naxos Audiobooks series focused on culture.
Here we get a totalitarian perspective of western art from the very early beginnings up to the present day, with Comberti describing the various stages of development in an extremely romantic manner. We hear about Greek art and sculpture, Roman architecture and the journey of Christian art which created the incredible plethora of artists in the Middle Ages and the Baroque. One is transfixed and sits down to listen almost spellbound with Comberti’s detailed and fastidiously created descriptions.
This is an audiobook to thrill and for those who love culture, it surely is a must have.

Author Whitfield and narrator Sebastian Comberti do an excellent job of guiding the listener on a quick tour of Western art. (Five minutes and 42 seconds on Roman Art, four minutes and 40 seconds on French Impressionism, etc.) Why would anyone produce an audio history of Western art? No pictures? The production does provide graphics that are available as a PDF, but not an audio preface. In addition, Comberti’s pronunciations are excellent, and his voice is clear and measured. For those familiar with Western art, these mini-lectures will conjure up vivid mental images and memories. For those less familiar, they can provide a narrative to accompany a do-it-yourself slide show that can be created with any decent Internet connection.