Some valuable articles, but could have been better.
This book is a very interesting and useful compendium of traditional philosophies of art and artistry. Included are writings by such seminal thinkers of the traditionalist movement as Coomaraswamy, Guenon, and Schuon, and the book is worth the purchase price for these hard to obtain essays of Coomaraswamy's alone. However, this book is needlessly skimped on eastern philosophy (according to Seyyed Hossein Nasr's foreward the size of this anthology was limited due to the lack of space available, but other works in this series are more than twice the length of the present tome). The traditional philosophy of art is a fascinating and oft neglected subject, but one wishes it could have been more comprehensively treated here, especially as the editor obviously knows this field so well.
This volume also contains some fascinating articles by modern or contemporary practitioners of traditional arts such as Eric Gill, the poet Kathleen Raine, and the composer Sir John Taverner who provide a point of view different to, but still mostly consonant with, the above mentioned traditionalist metaphysicians. Also as above, one is grateful to have these works collated together in a single volume.
This book would normally get 5 stars alone from me for its subject matter, but due to its limited scope I must (sadly) give it three.
