Grotesques and gargoyles Book

Obscurely disappointed with this one. They started with a fixed idea and shoe-horned the evidence in to try and make it fit. They completely ignored the fact that most of these carvings were brightly painted which changes the expression totally, and assume that they're all supposed to be scary. The most common descriptions are ferocious, malevolent, sinister and snarling, even for carvings that don't actually look anything like that. In trying to argue for continuation of ideas they've vanished a 400 year period of history, treat europe as a homogeneous whole and cherry pick examples with no connection to each other. Nothing is really analysed or explained and some of the photos are wrongly numbered in the text which is just sloppy. Some of the other photos are just not print quality which is somewhat unfortunate when they are trying to point out features.