The book is mediocre, and I'm being kind now. Unlike my esteemed fellow reviewer, I don't see how him having been a spy has any bearing on that though. ( )

By all means this is the most awful book on artistic theory I've found. It's packed with hoary old long-discredited generalizations about the medieval and renaissance worldviews. The man was a raving ignoramus. It's positively painful reading.

It's no coincidence, perhaps, that the author, a sometime art historian to Queen Elizabeth, was also a spy for the Soviet union throughout World War II and much of the Cold War. His knighthood was stripped in 1979.

Thus, Anthony Blunt was not only a master of the bone-headed cliché, he was also a lousy art historian, and a mincing little commie, to boot. He gets half a star, however, for not writing in crayon. ( )