William and MR. Asthetik are dismissing N.K.Smith's thesis with what amounts to nothing more than "that's not what I was told".
But as David Rosand wrote in the foreward: "Here I stand" is an original and important book. It is the kind of book one wants to see in art history: passionately partisan, cricially interpretive, focused and precise in its analysis and large in scope and in the implications of its thesis" Remember David Rosand ? He was one of the experts quoted by Berger and according to Wikipedia is "one of the foremost scholars of Italian Renaissance art active today.... Since 1964, Rosand has taught at Columbia, where he was Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History" How can William possibly know that "A lot of Ren. artists could care less about the religious subject matter they were hired to portray. What they competed with one another for was the best idealized portrayal of the figure in action, in space." That sounds a lot like a modern, secular artist projecting his attitudes back into the past - coinciding with what K.B. McFarlane (as quoted by Smith) called "the Agnostic Ascendancy". Smith further quotes the Jesuit scholar, Walter J. Ong, regarding what "discourse and communication was like...for every educated man in the Renaissance": "In accord with the rhetorical outlook, students were almost never taught objective description or reportorial narration: the object of education was to them to take a stand, as an orator might, and defend it, or to attack the stand of another... the whole purpose of speaking or writing about anyone , as one can see in so standard a manual as Aphthonius's Progymnasmata, was to praise or blame him. Even in treating with inanimate objects, training in cool, objective, uncommitted description is by and large not a part of formal education in the arts of language at least through the 17th C. Consequently it is very difficult to find a real connection between any pedagogical system, based as these were upon training in the language arts, and an experimental frame of mind. The pedagogy of the time bore hard on personal relations" And lacking testimonials from all but a few artists of that period (few of whom, BTW, were institutionally qualfied to discuss theology, which at time was a life and death issue) -- all we can do is look at the paintings and judge for ourselves whether "the religious elements seem to be restricted to thematic content, or at least are not coextensive" ____________________________________________________________ Small Business Tools Reduce your business expense. Click here to find products for your small business. http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/c?cp=w1otmXfXbeNgeWcRPN8VCQAAJz6c l_zTaptgNR5c8Mer1v9kAAYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARMQAAAAA=
