I always make the error of assuming that listers share a certain acquaintance with the basic art history. The sort of acquaintance one used to get in undergraduate survey courses, plus some initiative to learn more.
I'm an incorrigible dope. Miller proves foolishness of my assumption every time. There is so much literature dealing with the Ren artists and so much evidence that many of them, the leading ones, were not so moved by religiosity and devoutness as they were by art problems, material gain, and competing with peers. (Yeeesss, there were exceptions like Fra Angelico). Miller says I make this stuff up and I tell him to read the literature; he says I should pay better attention to outlier art history like he does, always searching for some shred of evidence that the past several hundred years of scholarship had got it all wrong, or worse, warped the facts on purpose, thus adding a pawn or two on his side of the board. I guess it's the nature of our era to do that, like the talk show entertainer/politicians do. Is it too outrageous or troublesome to go to the actual source material, even in translation? How about The Documentary History of Art by E. Holt, in several volumes, popular and still in print. Similar other sources are easily found. When I'm really discouraged by Miller's total lack of curiosity for anything mainstream, I even suggest authors, names of books, etc, all of them foundational, not eccentric. But Miller never looks at such distracting stuff, or takes his knowledge from non-vetted internet sources, some of it written by my cat in the middle of the night. Call it arrogance on my part if you wish, but it's only the weary sigh of exhausted bafflement in the face of astonishing, righteous ignorance and bad faith. You don't go to top universities on fellowships, study with the major scholars, teach art history surveys and all levels of studio, then be tenured at a tier-one university hire, evaluate, help to tenure a generation of art historians for decades without having been measured and by people far and away more informed than Miller. What does he think? Maybe he thinks it's a conspiracy that he's not holding a chair at Harvard. Here is where I can appreciate Cheerskep's view. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Chris Miller <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tue, March 2, 2010 11:04:36 AM Subject: Re: Norris Kelly Smith - Introduction 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=
