"What decisively motivated patronage in the culture of the Italian city state was a particular conflation of interests - political, economic, religious, and ecclesiastical"
But what about the pleasure of looking at something - apart from all those interests? Don't the best paintings of that era (or any era) have more than "The rhetoric of graphic representation" which "aims to delight, convince, and instruct"? (BTW -- unfortunately, so much of neo-academic painting does that and only that.) Berger talks about "a mechanism of equilibrium, a kind of themocouple sustaining recipricoity or "feedback" between piety and usury" But what about the equilibrium of visual balance? As Focillon wrote in 1935: "The most attentive study of the most homogenous milieu, of the most closely woven concatenation of circumstances, will not serve to give us the design of the towers of Laon." -- and even Derrida has noted that "If there is a work, it is because, even when all the conditions that could become the object of analysis have been met, something still happens... If there is a work, it means that the analysis of all the conditions only served to, how shall I say, make room, in an absolutely undetermined place, for something that is at once useless, supplementary, and finally irreducible to those conditions." But Berger represents a tradition that ignores the "something that still happens" Probably because they just can't see it. Some people have no ear for poetry -- some people have no eye for painting. ____________________________________________________________ Love Spell Click here to light up your life with a love spell! http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/c?cp=z4pLifQucxfLH5peau4sGwAAJz6c l_zTaptgNR5c8Mer1v9kAAYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARwAAAAA=
