The Holy City
Rome. Fragments in the Sun. By Laurence Scarfe. (Hutchinson.
123. 6d.) •
As subject-matter Rome is inexhaustible. Historians and travel- agents, poets and professional guides have all tried their hands, and have fixed more or less of the city's quality and detail on paper. And yet the evocation is never complete, for this incredible amalgam of Imperial ruins, Baroque churches and human beings is hardly susceptible of exhaustive analysis.
Of the two books at present under review, the first has for a long time been a standard work in its earlier editions • it was first published in 1911, and now appears revised and enlarged. Mr. Hutton has skilfully held the balance between a guide and a history- book. He has devoted a chapter to each of the more important ruins, monuments, churches and museums, and, by arranging his chapters in chronological order, he has written what amounts to a sketch of Rome's history. To read his book as a preliminary to a visit would equip one with a valuable key to a complicated experience.
Mr. Hutton's knowledge and, _Jove of Rome are -incontestable, and his historical digressions are admirably full. Unfortunately, his book is not always easy to read. In the midst of occasional lurid, ninetyish sentences (for example, Messalina is described as " a scarlet shadow a pallid tongue ot flame trembling with he inscrutable desires one sometimes feels a nostalgia for the les
highly charged times of a -Baedeker Nevertheless, one's admiratio for the scope and spaciousness of this book far outweighs an criticisms on- points of style. It contains thirty-two illustrations and its three appendices consist of very useful lists of Christia mosaics, important Baroque architectural works and seventeenth century paintings in Rome.
Mr Scarfe's book makes fewer pretensions than Mr. Hutton's in fact, it is almost embarrassingly unpretentious. Written in degage, conversational style, it takes the form of a series of jottings some the length of a paragraph, others that qualify as shor chapters. Mr Scarfe's observations—those of a young painte of some distinction—are often amusing, sometimes penetrating an only occasionally silly. His book is enlivened by ten of his ow drawings, which, like his writing, have gaiety and poise. There an attractive selection of photographs, the majority of. which ar also the work of the author. Taken is it is intended, as "an easy old-fashioned-book of fragments written by a traveller at' leisure, Mr. Scarfe's sketch-book is an engaging piece of work. It is pity that one or two minor inaccuracies in the spelling of- names or are they misprints ?—should play into the hands of those ver art-historians whom at one point the author mildly trounces.
JONATHAN MAYNE
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