Abstract
A history of the visual arts, defined simply as a chronological description of the various objects we now classify as art, would be a pretty marginal affair, probably of less general interest than a history of machinery, or a history of clothing. It would certainly be a history that remained on the fringes of what most people recognise as the central concerns of life. A history of art begins to look a little more interesting where it claims that art has a symbolic value, and that visual artefacts reflect important attitudes and ‘realities’ of the society in which they were produced.
The authentication and dating of brushstrokes? An analysis of the development of style? A chronicle of patronage and taste? A focus of debate about definitions of culture? A gloss on connoisseurship? A reflection of the realities of society? What is the history of art?
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Further Reading
Antal, F., Florentine Painting and its Social Background (London, 1948);
Baxandall, M., Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford, 1972);
Patterns of Invention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven and London, 1985);
Berger, J., Ways of Seeing (London, 1972);
Borzello, F. and Rees, A. (eds), The New Art History (London, 1986);
Clark, T. J., The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848–51 and The Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (London, 1973, p/back, 1981);
The Painting of Modern Life (London, 1985);
Crow, T. E., Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven and London, 1985);
Crowe, J. A. and Cavalcaselle, G. B., Titian: His Life and Times (London, 1977);
Gombrich, E., Art and Illusion (Oxford, 1960);
Gretton, T., Murders and Moralities: English Catchpenny Prints 1800–1860 (London, 1980);
Hadjinicolaou, N., Art History and Class Struggle (trans. Asmal, L.) (London, 1973);
Haskell, F., Patrons and Painters: Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (New Haven and London, 1980);
Ivins, W., Prints and Visual Communications (Cambridge, Mass., 1953);
James, L., Print and the People 1819–1851 (London, 1976);
Panofsky, E., The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, 1955);
Podro, M., The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven and London, 1982);
Seznec, J., The Survival of the Pagan Gods (trans. Barbara F. Sessions) (New York, 1961);
Shepherd, L., The History of Street Literature (Newton Abbot, 1973);
Vasari, G., Le Vite de’ Piu Eccellenti Pittori, Scultori et Architettori (Florence, 1568), selection in Eng. trans., Lives of the Artists (Harmondsworth, 1965);
Wind, E., Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London, 1958, Harmondsworth, 1967);
French Popular Imagery: Five Centuries of Prints (Arts Council exhibition catalogue, 1974).
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© 1988 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Potts, A., House, J., Hope, C., Gretton, T. (1988). What is the History of Art … ?. In: Gardiner, J. (eds) What is History Today … ?. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19161-1_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19161-1_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-42226-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-19161-1
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