[In the following review, Denvir presents background on Clark's life and career, and pronounces Clark's Piero Della Francesca to be the authority on the artist.]

Sir Kenneth Clark is an almost purely English phenomenon. A graduate of Oxford University, he studied for some time at Florence under Bernard Berenson. Coming back to England he became the Keeper of Paintings in Britain's oldest museum and art gallery, the Ashmolean Museum, at Oxford; then became Keeper of the King's Pictures, and, while still in his thirties, Director of London's National Gallery. A few years ago he retired from that post and his latest official position was as Slade Professor of the Fine Arts at Oxford.

He prepared the official catalogue of the Leonardo drawings at Windsor Castle and wrote a definitive book about Leonardo (Cambridge, 1939), part of which consisted of lectures given at Yale University in the autumn of 1936. The present study of Piero della Francesca is the crown, thus far, of his work on the art of the Italian Renaissance. But before examining it [Piero Della Francesca], one more thing needs saying about the author. The reader will find that the book is dedicated to Henry Moore, generally recognized as England's leading modern artist. His work is experimental and non-realistic. At a time when art historians' powers of appreciation seem entirely devoid of elasticity, it is invigorating to find an expert on Renaissance painting stretching his antennae forth into the twentieth century.

Kenneth Clark is a collector, and a man of means. He is the possessor of some very famous paintings, Renoirs, Cézannes and so forth. But he is also a most active patron of contemporary artists. Both by his personal efforts, and through the various official positions which he has held, he has done more than any other individual to foster the cause of living art in England today.

These personal factors are not so irrelevant as they may seem. In the first place, they establish the scholarly credentials of an author who has ventured to bring out the first authoritative book on Piero della Francesca. (It is true that Professor Roberto Longhi's work on the same subject was first published in 1927, and reissued in 1942, but it lacks the solidity of Clark's study, which will undoubtedly replace it.) In the second place, they explain the choice of artist. Piero is, despite the five centuries that have elapsed since his death, a curiously modern painter. He is a discovery of our time, and his discovery was largely due to that formula of appreciation evolved by Berenson and exploited by Roger Fry and Clive Bell.

Piero is a plastic artist. The dominant quality of his works, one which strikes even a layman, is their solidity, their complete realization in space. It is a quality which has always been basic to European art, but it has received a greater emphasis in our time than ever before. Cézanne reaffirmed it, and the Cubists carried it to its ultimate conclusions. Yet another quality of Piero to which our restless, anxious age responds is his serenity. Emotional problems concern him not at all. The feelings he depicts are the fundamental ones: dignity and a religious sense that surpasses the bounds of dogmatism or ritual.

To the nineteenth century he appealed hardly at all. Ruskin scarcely mentioned him, and though Crowe and Cavalcaselle appreciated his essential qualities, they saw nothing to admire in that plasticity which means so much to us.

There are qualities in this book that will make it a focus for a new evaluation of Piero. It is not a work of scholarship in the bad sense of the word. The lay mind is not distracted by endless domestic squabbles about attributions. There is little or none of the venom that enters so easily into the world of learning. The text is written in a graceful, easy style. The quality of the seven color reproductions is as high as we ever see, and the 212 ordinary illustrations are technically excellent and—especially in the choice of details—marked by a rare imaginative insight. The fact that there are illustrations to the notes is also admirable. The average reader, despite pious fictions to the contrary, does not have at his fingertips the entire repertory of European art, and the learned commentator who refers to a painting at Siena as a point of reference should at least provide some indication of what this painting is like.

Like many modern artists, the Impressionists, the Pointillists, the Cubists and the Surrealists, Piero was a theoretician. His art was “scientific.” But in establishing this, Sir Kenneth makes a second point that is of great relevance to the criticism of our time: these theories do not in themselves make or mar the purely artistic qualities of their professors. Their sole purpose is to enable artists to liberate and control their need of identifying themselves with the creative process of nature.