![]() He offers some delicious pen portraits of the artists and architects who designed and made what are now the tourist high-spots of the city: the Sistine chapel, the Piazza Navona, St Peter's basilica, the Campidoglio. By the time Hughes reaches this point, he is well in command of his material and is on characteristically cracking form. Skip the first 200 pages and start this book at chapter six, "The Renaissance". ![]() Now in his 70s, he has brought out Rome, a cultural history of the city he first visited in 1959 it is a narrative that stretches from Romulus and Remus to Berlusconi. Since 1980 Hughes has continued to work as a critic he has written, among other things, a bestselling account of British transportation of convicts to Australia ( The Fatal Shore) and a volume of memoirs and he has weathered accusations of plagiarism, a near-fatal car-crash and years of litigation that followed. His message was that you didn't have to like 20th-century art (in fact he happily pointed the finger at some that was pretentious, overvalued and bad) but you did need to see how art contributed to the great debates of the period, from technology to the politics of social change. Hughes was a straight-talking Australian there was no posh, languid reverence in his presentation. Shock was a powerful antidote to the Kenneth Clark style of TV art history. ![]() D oes modern art matter? In 1980, in The Shock of the New – a BBC television series-turned-book – Robert Hughes convinced millions of sceptics that it did. ![]()
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