Francis Haskell

Taste and the Antique. The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900

A history of the development of critical opinions on ancient Greek and Roman sculpture discusses the owners, identification, copies, and fame of individual statues.

The Artist and the Writer in France: Essays in Honour of Jean Seznec

completely formulated; . . . any solution is a function, not merely of a subject matter but of the particular dialectic employed upon it.’ So dissent may just be methodological difference or concern with different aspects of the subject. Olson solves his problem by putting up 10 conditions for sound value judgments. Among these there are such intricacies as the following: ‘The suprasensible substructures must be grasped in their totality’ (No. 5) and ‘[The standard or criterion] must be appropriate to the form’ (No. 7). Possible criticism on his set of ten is made impossible in the last paragraph by returning to the invocation of the ubiquitous problem of complexity: ‘Our conception of art and its values must be qualified always by the reflection that we shall never know all about them.’ When I was in Ireland, 1 found that people there have a nice and polite way of reacting to statements pretentious and overdone. They ask: ‘Oh, is that so?’ I cannot help feeling compelled to ask that very same question when confronted with Olson’s book.

History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past.

Over the last four centuries, historians have increasingly turned to images in their attempts to understand and visualize the past. In this wide-ranging and engrossing book, a distinguished art historian surveys the various ways that they have adopted for making use of this material, and he examines the specific objects that became available to them through excavation, the creation of private collections and public museums, easier means of travel, and the startling displacements brought about by vandalism and art exhibitions. Francis Haskell begins by discussing the antiquarians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who brought to light and interpreted as historical evidence coins, sculptures, paintings discovered in the catacombs beneath Rome and other relics surviving from earlier ages. He explains that, in the eighteenth century, historians gradually began to acknowledge the significance of such visual sources and to draw on them in order to validate and give colour to their narratives or to utilize them as foundation stones for a new branch of learning - the history of culture. Later writers followed the example of Michelet in making inferences from the visual arts to indicate the whole mentality of an age, while (more erratically) others saw in them the harbingers of political, religious or social upheavals. Haskell concludes by discussing those cultural historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Burckhardt and Huizinga above all, who did not merely give the visual arts a prominent and necessary place in their interpretations of the past, but in some ways actually interpreted the past through the visual arts.