How does an art historian get the audience of her book to approach a painting? What stylistic form serves as the gesture that, in the gallery, bids visitors to take a step closer and look again? I want to look at work by two very different art history essayists, Svetlana Alpers and Florence Delay. BothContinue reading “Style in Art History Writing: Looking closely at Zurbarán with Florence Delay”
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Death and the Historian
Great historical writing paints vivid pictures, but also draws meaningful conclusions from those images. The dullest historical writing sinks into a heavy mass of abstraction: representative individuals are molded by the forces of their times, like so many pieces of cheap pottery made from the same thin mixture poured into a mold. Jules Michelet’s styleContinue reading “Death and the Historian”