Development

Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image

By: Michael Ann Holly

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Paperback | 12 September 1996

At a Glance

Paperback
234 Pages

Age
22+

Dimensions(cm)
23.39 x 15.6 x 1.25

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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.

Industry Reviews

"A strangely moving book to read... Surely our desire to experience a kind of privileged timelessness before images-or our satisfaction with signification of any kind-has something to do with the consciousness of our own historicity; surely the challenge of art history, the challenge posed by the deep fascination of old art-or those faces from the past, so similar to our own, yet not our own-is like an encounter with the uncanny, with that otherness in which we discern our own end. A critical art history-like philosophy, like psychoanalysis-ought to take implications of that encounter seriously."-Robert Williams, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 21, No. 2, 1998

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