Three Essays on Style

Erwin Panofsky, a preeminent art historian who spent many years teaching at Princeton, wrote these essays originally as public lectures to be delivered to non-academic audiences. And while the material is dense in the sense of being packed with information, it is also entertaining. A notable intellectual romp is the essay, "Ideological Antecedents of the Rolls-Royce Radiator," an eccentric essay remarking on how such influences as cathedral architecture and illuminated manuscripts somehow led to the famous car radiator that Panofsky reveres as the summation of "twelve centuries of Anglo-Saxon preoccupations and aptitudes."