Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image - Hardcover

Holly, Michael Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080143209X ISBN 13: 9780801432095

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 1996

Synopsis

Michael Ann Holly asserts that historical interpretation of the pictorial arts is always the intellectual product of a dynamic exchange between past and present. Recent theory emphasizes the subjectivity of the historian and the ways in which any interpretation betrays the presence of an interpreter. In Past Looking, she challenges that view, arguing that historical objects of representational art are actively engaged in prefiguring the kinds of histories that can be written about them.

Holly directs her attention to early modern works of visual art and their rhetorical roles in legislating the kind of tales told bout them by a few classic cultural commentaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Burckhardt's synchronic vision of the Italian Renaissance, Wölfflin's exemplification of the Baroque, Schapiro's and Freud's dispute over the meanings of Leonardo's art, and Panofsky's exegesis of the disguised symbolism of Northern Renaissance painting.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Ann Holly is Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute and teaches in the graduate program at Williams College. Her other books include Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations; The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspective; Art History, Aesthetics, and Visual Studies; and Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, the latter also available from Cornell.

From the Back Cover

Michael Ann Holly asserts that historical interpretation of the pictorial arts is always the intellectual product of a dynamic exchange between past and present. Recent theory emphasizes the subjectivity of the historian and the ways in which any interpretation betrays the presence of an interpreter. She challenges that view, arguing that historical objects of representational art are actively engaged in prefiguring the kinds of histories that can be written about them. Holly directs her attention to early modern works of visual art and their rhetorical roles in legislating the kinds of tales told about them by a few classic cultural commentaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Burckhardt's synchronic vision of the Italian Renaissance, Wolfflin's exemplification of the Baroque, Schapiro's and Freud's dispute over the meaning of Leonardo's art, and Panofsky's exegesis of disguised symbolism in Northern Renaissance painting. Convinced that reciprocity between works of visual art and the historian depends on the relationship between objecthood and subjectivity, Holly explores a range of contemporary theoretical perspectives, asking how works become intelligible to those who write about them. If dynamic interpretation demands that art historians come to terms with what they do to the work, it is equally useful to see what the work of art does to them.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080143209X
• ISBN 13: 9780801432095
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256