Footnote 3 – Europe Confronts Assyrian Art

See Jacob Rothenberg, “Lord Elgin’s Marbles: How Sculptures from the Parthenon Got to the British Museum,” AO 01:02. Another prominent 18th-century German scholar, Johann Gottfried Herder, objected to the notion that Greek art, or any body of art, could provide a universal standard to which all traditions should aspire. He argued that Egyptian art, for instance, was an independent body of art produced for its own reasons; it therefore had to be understood on its own terms, not by comparison with Greek art.