"While none of [the book's] components [are] original, the combination of them may be. The best section, on the invention of perspective... cites art historian Erwin Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form. Lepenies isn't writing history; he's building an intellectual construct. Its end point is the assertion that contemporary thinking on development supports a linear concept of progress and that we possess a privileged viewpoint on it."--Library Journal, October 2013