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A
Discerning Eye Essays on Early Italian Painting
Edited
by Andrew Ladis
Fall 1998 |
8-1/2 x 11 inches | 320 pages
Art History
Hardback: $85.00 SH
ISBN: 978-0-271-01747-1
A
Discerning Eye is an anthology of some of
the finest and most lasting essays by a great critic-historian of
Early Italian painting, Richard Offner. Its contents span the Florentine
fourteenth century and thus compose a kind of portrait album of some
of its most notable painters between the Gothic and Renaissance eras,
from the Magdalen Master in the thirteenth century to Masaccio in
the early fifteenth. Each essay contains insights that are as incisive,
fresh, and evocative today as when they were first written. The essays
are illustrated using Offner's original photographs supplemented by
new or additional photographs when dictated by the material or when
the reader might be better helped to see the relationship between
Offner's analytical prose and a given image.
This book reintroduces Offner and places him in the wider context
of art-historical writing to reassess his work and underscore what
his writings have to offer art historians working today. Three interpretive
essays approach Offner from distinct but complementary perspectives:
historiographical, philosophical, and biographical. Reassessments
of such figures as Erwin Panofsky and Millard Meiss aid the ongoing
debate about what art history is and how it ought to be practiced.
The reader is asked to reconsider not merely the value but also
the philosophical foundation of connoisseurship as a method of investigation
and its compatibility with other methods.
Andrew
Ladis was Professor of Art History at the University of
Georgia. He has been Dorothy K. Hohenberg Professor of Excellence,
University of Memphis, and Visiting Professor at the Harvard University
Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti.
