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Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art. By Rochelle Gurstein. Yale University Press; 520 pages; $40 and £30
After Taylor Swift , the “Mona Lisa” is probably the most recognisable female face in the world. Every day around 20,000 people gape at Leonardo da Vinci’s painting in the Louvre. Yet it became famous not because of a beguiling semi-smile, but a thief. Until a worker stole the masterpiece in 1911, it was still mostly unknown; viewers flooded in to see what a French newspaper called “an enormous, horrific, gaping void”.
Classics of art, literature and music are supposed to carry some mysterious appeal that endures across the ages. But as Rochelle Gurstein, a historian, writes in a new book, the “timeless classic” is anything but. “What I believed was written in stone was actually written in water,” she argues. Classics come and go.
Take other celebrated works of art that, along with da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”, define the European canon. Until the end of the 19th century Michelangelo’s...