Ivins uses this brief book to express his regard for classical Greece's culture, art, and contribution to the last two millennia of Western culture.
That regard is very low. He first starts by debunking their ideas of perspective. It's a brief task because, as he demonstrates clearly, they had nothing we could identify by that name. Instead of arranging figures according to the logic of sight, Ivins argues that Greek art arranged figures according to a `tactile' perspective, as if they were placed for easy reach rather than easy visual interpretation. He also dismisses the classical Greek sense of composition, on the ground that there was none. Figures were simply placed, without regard for their relationship to a time sequence, to a landscape, or to each other. He uses, as example, the battle friezes of Bassae, which were dismantled without noting their relationships to each other. At least six guesses at their arrangement, based on content, were in turn declared to be `definitive.' The question of their proper order was only resolved when mounting marks on the backs were matched to the holes in the walls from which they had been detached - with no regard to the pictures themselves.
The rest of the book argues likewise against the importance of classical Greek science, philosophy, and even Aristotelian logic (or illogic). Along the way, Ivins throws a number of barbs at the so-called scholars of ancient Greek culture, including those who argue the relative merits of different works that no longer existed even at the time of the earliest known commentary on them.
This brief book (or sustained essay) is a wonderful contrarian work by a man of inarguable qualification. He was director of prints for many years, in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, well trained in art but independent of traditional scholarship. It's great by itself, or as a foil to your favorite snob of the classics - enjoy!
