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In what they modestly describe as a sociological approach, Kris and Kurz present views of the artist through a number of biographical motifs that recur with extraordinary clarity from Homer to Pliny, from Vasari to Chamisso, or from art historians of the twentieth century. These anecdotal motifs cluster around certain themes. The child prodigy is an important theme: as in mythology, “the origin of the hero … is depicted in a very special way [with a] tendency to deny the real father of the man who is elevated to a hero” (p. 35). The “family romance” is as dominant in anecdotes about artists as in fain-tales or children's fantasies (p. 37).
Besides the “heroized” artist, the concept of the artist as God-like creator (corresponding to the notion of God as an artist) has been prevalent since the Renaissance. Dues artifex, divino artista are countered by the image of the artist faithfully copying nature, of which the magician is a complex outgrowth.
After trying to find “the roots from which several themes in artists' biographies grew” (p. 91), the authors turn to a few typical motifs that express the “interplay between artist and his surroundings” in the reactions of contemporaries. The earlier motifs reappear in new guises: lifelike representation (pp. 92-3); speed (p. 94); virtuosity (p. 96); deception and superiority (pp. 100-4); magic (p. 106). Artists' rivalries and enmities with their clients lead quite directly into the final passages on the conditions of creativity, in which Chinese anecdotes seem to render most tellingly “the idea of the work of art as an extension of its creator, as a child of the artist” (p. 129).
The examples range easily and effortlessly over Greek literature, Far Eastern texts, the Western Renaissance, and the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries without ever obscuring the meaning. (The emphasis on the Greeks and the Renaissance can be partly explained by the fact that the examples are limited to painters, sculptors, and architect