Patricia Emison: The Shaping of Art History


		The Shaping of Art History Meditations on a Discipline By Patricia Emison 120 pages \| 14 illustrations \| 6 x 9 \| February 2008 ISBN 978-0-271-03305-1 \| cloth: $40.00 sh Our shopping cart is temporarily out of service. To order, please call our toll free number. 800-326-9180. Thank you.

"This book brings profound issues into new and vivid focus." —Angus Trumble, Yale Center for British Art In this provocative book, Patricia Emison invites the reader to consider and reconsider how past thinkers—from Pliny and Alberti to Freud and Fried—have conceptualized the history of Western art. What a book review attempts to be for a book, this extended essay attempts to be for several hundred years’ worth of books in a field: an indicator of problems with the old attempts and hopes for the new ones. It is a defense of art history for those outside the field who question its reliability or even its importance; it is a critique of art history for those in the field who may have been preoccupied with looking at trees but who might be interested in trying to see the forest.

Patricia Emison is Professor of the History of Art at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of The Simple Art: Printed Works on Paper in the Age of Magnificence (2006), Creating the ‘Divine’ Artist from Dante to Michelangelo (2004), and The Art of Teaching: Sixteenth-Century Allegorical Prints and Drawings (1986).

Contents Acknowledgments Preface 1 Why Not Just Write Biography? 2 Toward a More Chaotic Definition of Style 3 Venturing Somewhat Beyond Freud 4 Rated XX 5 The Bottom Line 6 Back to Idolatry? Brief Bibliographies List of Illustrations Index