When I was an undergraduate and took my first art history course, I encoun-
tered an almost legendary text: H. W. Janson's History of Art, which has led gen-
erations of eager undergraduates through the history of art from the Old Stone
Age to the present. Janson's name has become synonymous with the title "Sur-
vey" in an art history course. What impressed my fellow students and me back
in 1963 was the sheer quality of the book: solid, beautifully bound, handsomely
laid out, and with probably the best art reproductions any of us had ever seen.
The black and white illustrations were sharply detailed, with a full tonal range
from dark to light, and always in perfect "register" (no blurriness of detail).
And the color plates, bound in separate sheaves, were-and this is the word I
remember we used-breathtaking. Most of my friends were studio majors,
which made them, I believe, especially keen on the quality of the text. And as
we sat down to do the assigned reading, we found Janson's prose, on the whole,
clear, precise, careful, explanatory, but sometimes difficult or too evocative. In
the colloquialism of the day, we couldn't tell quite where he was "coming from."
For instance, in comparing Cimabue's Madonna Enthroned (fig. 1) with earlier
Byzantine icons, he writes: "His huge altar panel, Madonna Enthroned, rivals the
finest Byzantine icons or mosaics; what distinguishes it from them is mainly
a greater severity of design and expression, which befits its huge size." Now,
there's certainly nothing wrong here, but much seems unsaid or implied. And
as a freshman art history student, I wasn't too sure what to make of so short a
characterization of such a large and, according to my professor, very impor-
tant painting. Even though Janson wrote several more sentences on the panel,
it just didn't seem enough to us. What were we supposed to make ofCimabue's
"rivalry" with Byzantine icons and mosaics (fig. 2)? Was there some sort of
competition for grandeur? Perhaps. And the "greater severity of design and
expression"-what, exactly, does that mean? More square, more solemn? Jan-
son never told us; we hoped our professor would explain things. We assumed
that the textbook was written in a kind of shorthand that was best deciphered
by listening to further lectures and looking at slides. But often we heard more
1
2 Art History's History
Figure 1. Cimabue, Madonna En-
throned, c. 1280. Uffizi Gallery, Flor-
ence. Photo: Uffizi Gallery, Florence.
of the same in lectures: professors characterizing works of art rather than analyz-
ing them. Such phrases as "note the subtle modulation from plane to plane"
were not uncommon in describing Greek sculpture, for instance. And here's an-
other quotation from Janson, this time on Jean-Antoine Fragonard's The Bathers
(Louvre, Paris): "A franker 'Rubeniste' than [Antoine] Watteau, Fragonard
paints with a fluid breadth and spontaneity reminiscent of [Peter Paul] Rubens'
oil sketches. His figures move with a floating grace that also links him with [Gio-
vanni Battista] Tiepolo, whose work he had admired in Italy." All right, so his
paintings look like those ofTiepolo and Rubens. What does that tell a student?
Fragonard's art has fluidity, breadth, grace, and spontaneity. So does a well-
played baseball game. I do not wish to diminish the enormous contributions to
the discipline of art history made by Janson and other eminent art historians,
such as Ernst Gombrich, Helen Gardner, and Frederick Hartt, but as was
pointed out in a review that appeared in the Art journal, there are problems with
the texts by these authors because they emphasize the idea of appreciation at the
. --- -11::::-
--- --. __ ... - -~ ----
- - -------'- --
Figure 2. Madonna Enthroned,
late 13th century. National Gallery
of Art, Washington, D.C., Andrew
W. Mellon Collection. Photo:
© 1993, National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C.
Introduction 3
expense of other methodologies and forms of criticism. I believe today's readers
are aware,just as I was as an undergraduate, that courses in history, literature, phi-
losophy, chemistry, and physics do not proceed this way. The methods in these
disciplines seem more geared toward a conception or version of "truth," or a
process that leads toward "understanding." Art history, we thought, was about
"appreciation," although we weren't entirely sure what that word meant either.
"Appreciation" seemed to be some skill developed by experts and sophisticates.
And to develop that skill, one needed a certain vocabulary. Students try
their best to imitate their teachers and their textbooks, often with unnerving
results. Now as a teacher, well remembering my many frustrations as an art his-
tory major, I tell my students that I do not want their papers to adopt the
pseudo-anonymous and authoritative voice of a textbook. And when looking at
works and attempting verbal analyses, I expect them to go beyond such catch
words as "fluid," "buoyant," and "graceful." But of course, we as professionals
are ultimately to blame for language that is frequently strange, unnecessarily in-
flated, overly decorous, and sometimes frivolous. I think our problem arises
from an unclear sense of the purposes, nature, origins, and assumptions of the
discipline of art history. Figure 2. Madonna Enthroned,
late 13th century. National Gallery
of Art, Washington, D.C., Andrew
W. Mellon Collection. Photo:
© 1993, National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C.
Introduction 3
expense of other methodologies and forms of criticism. I believe today's readers
are aware,just as I was as an undergraduate, that courses in history, literature, phi-
losophy, chemistry, and physics do not proceed this way. The methods in these
disciplines seem more geared toward a conception or version of "truth," or a
process that leads toward "understanding." Art history, we thought, was about
"appreciation," although we weren't entirely sure what that word meant either.
"Appreciation" seemed to be some skill developed by experts and sophisticates.
And to develop that skill, one needed a certain vocabulary. Students try
their best to imitate their teachers and their textbooks, often with unnerving
results. Now as a teacher, well remembering my many frustrations as an art his-
tory major, I tell my students that I do not want their papers to adopt the
pseudo-anonymous and authoritative voice of a textbook. And when looking at
works and attempting verbal analyses, I expect them to go beyond such catch
words as "fluid," "buoyant," and "graceful." But of course, we as professionals
are ultimately to blame for language that is frequently strange, unnecessarily in-
flated, overly decorous, and sometimes frivolous. I think our problem arises
from an unclear sense of the purposes, nature, origins, and assumptions of the
discipline of art history.
4 Art History's History
So it is my intention to attempt to describe in this book what art history
is, where it came from, what ideas, institutions, and practices form its back-
ground, how it achieved its present shape, and what critical methods it uses. The
audience I hope to reach consists of those who are encountering art history for
the first or nearly the first time, and who are curious not just about the art but
about why we say the things we do about it. I would like to convince the reader
who believes that there is only one way to talk about art-the text's way-that
this point of view is simply too simplistic and authoritarian. At the the other
extreme, I wish to persuade the resistant and laconic reader how invalid is the
belief that all art is merely personal, and that everyone's opinion is equally
valid. Along the way, the reader will become aware, I hope, of what makes art
history humanistic.
The humanities not only study discrete works of art and literature, but
also concern themselves with process: how one reads, looks at, understands,
and enjoys art. Literary theory, for example, has blossomed in academic circles
over the past fifty years, to the point where there are many now who fear that
theories of criticism are of equal or greater interest to graduate students and
professors than the original texts. Murray Krieger has written that a piece oflit-
erary criticism is "a fully autonomous literary object." In this intentionally pro-
voking statement, Krieger wants to challenge the notion that critics and teachers
serve the artist and his or her work, trying with our meager powers to interpret
things for those less enlightened than we, and at the same time teaching the
skills of interpretation. But there never used to be any question about who had
priority, who was the boss: the artist and the work of art have been in charge.
Krieger of course says no. The critic is equal to the artist; the criticism is equal
to the work of art (although, in the visual arts at least, it probably wouldn't sell
for quite so much).
Until recently, the scenario in art history has not been anything like that
of its companion disciplines. We take seriously the original painting, statue,
craft work, performance, or building, sometimes preferring to contemplate it
in silence. John Keats addressed a Grecian urn: 'Thou foster child of silence and
slow time." This constitutes an aesthetic condition and experience we some-
times can feel when moving through the still halls of a great museum looking
at mute works of art. But we as teachers and students tend toward loquacity, just
like the literary critics. We talk and write about art. So serious is this desire that
it has been appropriated, for better or worse, by the "academy" (the universi-
ties, museums, galleries, and the art world), institutionalized and turned into
a discipline. The "New Art History" is more theoretical than ever before. Times
have changed. Perhaps not even the works of art have stayed the same.
What follows are chapters, or more properly speaking essays, on this dis-
cipline of art history. Much of the first part of the book will be historical, for
"history" is in fact half of our name. History is remembering, and through this
act of "anamnesia" we can come to have some understanding of why things are
the way they are.
The modern ac
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADAMS, LAURIE, Tin
BELTING, HANS, Tlu :
Chicago Pre,,
BRYSON, NoRMAl\ (ec
New York: C::
CHEETHAM, MARK.-\.-
Historical Obi•
University Pre--
COLLINS, BRADFORD.::
Story of Art, .\
GARDNER, HELE./\, c;
Fred S. Kleine
GoMBRICH, ERNST H
HARTT, FREDERICK, .-'.
Cliffs, NJ-, a::
HAUSER, ARNOLD, T
J.t
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. it
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Introduction 5
The modern academy, as a place for studying art, begins in later sixteenth-
century Italy as a professional forum for artists. It often encouraged theoreti-
cal discourse on the arts, sometimes to less-than-enthusiastic artists. But as a
cultural and ideological phenomenon, its influence has been keenly felt; it is
experienced today perhaps more strongly than ever. By its very nature the acad-
emy, whether an independent artistic organization under the protection of the
papacy-Rome's Accademia di San Luc(];-or a royal academy controlled by Louis
XIV's lieutenants, or a modern university, creates agendas and influences artists
and art historians in one manner or another. These and related matters will be
explored in more detail in the first part of my text.
History meets aesthetics in the chapters on theories of art from Plato to
the nineteenth century; history backs off somewhat in my treatments of theo-
ries of criticism in the twentieth century. Ways of doing art history, what we call
methodology, have become very complex in the twentieth century, especially
since the 1960s. The College Art Association's annual meetings, where artists
get together with other artists and debate contemporary issues, and where art
historians give talks or participate on panels, have changed substantially in
character since the mid-1980s, all in an effort to come to terms with shifting
methodologies, ideologies, and practices. We art historians are the self-
appointed keepers of the sacred flame of understanding art. And how we do it
is very interesting, especially at the turning of this new century. Just the rich-
ness of the variety of recent art historical approaches with which this text deals
gives some suggestion of how involved our project is: semiotics, deconstruc-
tion, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminist critiques, multiculturalism-to name
only the better known. As I write about each of these approaches, I'll try to
show how they apply to individual works of art.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADAMs, LAURIE, The Methodologists of Art: An Introduction. New York: Icon Editions, 1996.
BELTING, HANs, The End of the History of Art? (trans. C. S. Wood). Chicago: University of
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