Charlotte Mullins's "A Little History of Art"

Charlotte Mullins is an art critic, writer and broadcaster. Currently art critic at Country Life, she was formerly editor of Art Review, V&A Magazine, and Art Quarterly. She has published over a dozen books on visual art.

Mullins applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Little History of Art, and reported the following:

When I opened my book at page 99 I felt short-changed: page 99 falls at the end of Chapter 13 and as such there are only a few lines of print. That said, page 99 is an interesting moment in the book. It is the end of the chapter ‘East Meets West’, which looks at the multicultural city of Venice in the fifteenth century and its relationship with Constantinople (now Istanbul). Page 99 also introduces us to three of the biggest superstars of the age:

Venice was a melting pot of nationalities and cultures, with diverse and wealthy patrons who commissioned great art. Most Venetian artists felt no need to travel to other city-states to look for work but this was not the case elsewhere in Italy. Increasingly many of Italy’s most ambitious artists chose to move to Rome to try to work for the Pope. In the next chapter we will follow three of the greatest Renaissance artists as they all leave the city of Florence for lucrative commissions. These artists are so familiar to us today that we know them simply by their first names: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael.

Page 99 does give you a flavour of the book’s accessible style and hopefully shows you that this book is packed full of context and content. That said, what page 99 doesn’t do is show the diversity of this book – and perhaps no single page could do this. For this book covers 100,000 years of art history. It travels from caves in Indonesia to Assyrian palaces, Chinese tombs to Peruvian plains. It covers monumental sculptures from Rapa Nui, the Terracotta Army, a urinal exhibited as art and the whole cast of a house. It features miniature paintings and murals, prints and videos and art made entirely of ideas. It covers cultural exchange, colonialism and slavery as well as abstraction, figuration and everything in-between.

Perhaps a line from page 4 ultimately sums up the book’s goal: ‘We will roam the world together, reinstating forgotten artists and expanding the traditional view of art history.’ So while page 99 introduces the Renaissance greats of Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael there are hundreds of less well known but brilliant artists to explore on the other pages of A Little History of Art.

Visit Charlotte Mullins's website.

--Marshal Zeringue