Robertson Giles, Henderson George (Eds.). Studies in Memory of David Talbot Rice

Edinburgh University Press, 1975. — 460 p.David Talbot Rice, who died in 1972, defied the narrow categories of a specialist age. Man of letters as much as historian of art, he would have been at ease in the company of Symposium or Convivio, and he adorned an Edinburgh that had not quite forgotten its robust intellectual heritage. Where laboratory and slide-rule have become the measure of scholarship, his tools were sensibility and discrimination, work and zest. All his life he urged his students to look at the things men had made, to take pleasure in them and to analyse that pleasure, not to treat them as pieces of a historical jigsaw. The breadth of scholarship exemplified in the twenty-two contributions to this Memorial Volume directly reflects the wide interests, enthusiasms and expertise that David Talbot Rice conveyed and professed throughout his long and distinguished career as teacher, writer, and researcher; for although his fame as a Byzantinist was paramount, his knowledge and understanding extended to many other aspects of the history of art, as a glance at the list of his published work (at the end of this book) will reveal, lit is therefore entirely appropriate that from this cosmopolitan collection of friends, fellow scholars and colleagues, there should be papers with subject-matter as disparate as Bulgarian ceramics, Sinai icons, Batty Langley’s architecture, and the aesthetic theories of Gregory of Nyssa.