The Year One : Art of the Ancient World East and West

Two thousand years ago, the great civilizations of the world were unaware or only dimly conscious of each other. The Year One is the attractively produced catalog of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that brings together art objects created in different parts of the world at the beginning of the first millennium, from Rome to India to China to the Americas. This interesting concept proves too vast for a single exhibition drawn from the collections of a single museum, even the Met's. The essays on the art of different cultures are informative but necessarily too short for their large subjects, though the main introductory essay paints a fascinating picture of a world being drawn together by conquest and trade. The problem is one of choice: narrowing down which cultures should be represented, and by which art works. Beautiful though each one is, the 150 items selected cannot do the job; they have insufficient context and give the impression of being chosen at random. Dividing the objects thematically might have been more successful than geographically--the spectacular Roman landscape frescoes may be a revelation to the reader, but the opportunity to compare contemporary Egyptian or Han Chinese landscapes is not taken. The photography and description of each object is excellent, however, and there is great beauty in this book. Though The Year One fails in its overall purpose, the individual artworks it presents are strong enough aesthetically to stand on their own. --John Stevenson