The Shaping of Art History: Meditations on a Discipline

by Patricia A. Emison

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 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.

Genres: Art

108 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pleasing read, although she misspells Thomas Kinkade (mentioning him once only in order to make a derisive comparison) and in one case, Winckelmann! I hate typos.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the accomplishments of Patricia Emison’s The Shaping of Art History is to model a new kind of historiography of art history: her writing is free of jargon and truly a pleasure to read. One of the themes running through this book is the degree to which science (read: hard science) and its methods have deflected art history from its humanist project. She writes, “science, again, has made us phobic about being wrong: better to say nothing refutable than to say anything interesting” (p. 30). Her stated project is to find viable alternatives to the scientific model of knowledge. Each of its six chapters covers a cluster of methodologies. Chapter One, “Why Not Just Write Biography?” pits approaches privileging the art maker (Vasari, Freud) against methods that first consider a social or cultural context (Wölfflin, Baxandall, Winkelmann). Winkelmann, for example, believed that only the art of classical antiquity was worth study, and in order to do so, one had to master the entire and complex context of social, political, and cultural history.
Chapter Two, “Toward a More Chaotic Definition of Style,” takes on connoisseurship. Too often lay persons feel unqualified to make judgments of connoisseurship, believing it is the primary activity of art historians, and it was, when art historians primarily served the market and judged taste.
Chapter Three considers the debts of art historians to Freud and the challenges of moving beyond him. When the connoisseur Morelli made attributions based on the whorls of an ear, he resembled Freud in his study of Michelangelo’s Moses, relied on observing minute details to extrapolate a narrative. Leo Steinberg, too, could write about the sexuality of Christ by compiling hundreds of previously unnoticed details of pudenda. Even Panofsky’s hidden symbolism owes something to Freud’s cigar. The author makes an impassioned plea for art historians to ask more compelling questions, to eschew complex (and often empty) theoretical micro-analyses for elegant ones that say more.
Her fourth chapter explains why she doesn’t “do” feminist art history. To lobby for equal pay for equal work is one thing; to search the storerooms for works by female artists can lead to strained and artificial art historical writing.
Although “art is often arbitrarily placed above commodification” (p. 79) and art historians often maintain a “discreet silence” about art and money, Emison posits the art market as a framework from which we can ask interesting questions in Chapter Five, “The Bottom Line.” In this chapter, more than in the others, the author ventures into the contemporary art scene. If we fail to revive local cultures, she warns, cinema may become “our principal experience of visual art” (82). One does not have to be a Marxist to consider the effects of market on style, or the forces of a museum board’s taste on collection policy.
In her crowning chapter, Emison warns, “We need to steer between the Scylla of overspecialization (a plague in particular of cultural and social history) and the Charybdis of superficiality (to which style history, connoisseurship, and theory have been prone)” (89). Biography as a method is too provincial. In considering Michelangelo’s continual copying of the Belvedere Torso, for example, Emison proposes an approach that addresses “various facets—formal sources, cultural issues, and the essentially psychological issues—embedded in such a choice of obsessions,” since merely lumping the artist’s choice under the Renaissance tendency to quote the classical past would miss the obsessive quality, and considering it just a psychological/biographical event would lack the weight of the larger cultural forces.
Her book would be a welcome read in an advanced undergraduate methodological survey, or even a master’s level survey of methods. Even the non-specialist could become absorbed in it. Hundreds of sentences in this book are quotable. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in 25 years, people are saying, “as Emison once said, ‘Art is the compensation we give ourselves for our mortality.’” (p. 66).