Samothracian Reflections, Aspects of the Revival of the Antique

Reviewed: PHYLLIS WILLIAMS LEHMANN AND KARL LEHMANN, Samothracian Reflections, Aspects of the Revival of the Antique (Rollingen Series xcii), Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1973. Pp. 278; 2 color pls.: 163 black-and-white figs. $20. This handsome volume comprises three monographs, each stemming from the authors' researches on the island of Samothrace. Each is concerned in a different way with the relationship of the Classical past to the Italian Renaissance. The first considers a Renaissance observer of antiquity, a small portion of his records, and their effect on his contemporaries and on modern scholarship. The second examines a Renaissance painter's efforts to find in his Classical inheritance, both monumental and literary, the means to express a contemporary allegory. The third investigates the revival of a Hellenistic motive in Renaissance and Baroque times.