Continental Crosscurrents is a series of case studies reflecting British attitudes to continental art during the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. It stresses the way in which the British went to the continent in their search for origins or their pursuit of sources of purity and originality. This cult of the primitive took many forms; it involved a reassessment of medieval German and Italian art and offered new ways of interpreting Venetian painting; it opened up new readings of architectural history and the "discovery" of the Romanesque; it generated a debate about the value of...