Sunflower
Peter Burke
- Velazquez: Painter and Courtier by Jonathan Brown
Yale, 322 pp, £35.00, March 1986, ISBN 0 300 03466 0 - El Greco and his Patrons: Three Major Projects by Richard Mann
Cambridge, 164 pp, £35.00, February 1986, ISBN 0 521 30392 3
The rise of the professional art historian in the later 19th century has been a mixed blessing. Making paintings, statues or buildings are activities which are as much a part of history as making treaties, making motorcars, making war, making love, or making the crops grow. It was good to have art taken seriously by historians of the calibre of Heinrich Wölfflin, but a pity to have it subtracted from the territory of the ordinary historian, the general practitioner. The declaration of art-historical independence impoverished general history, and encouraged a history of art which stressed the internal history of styles at the expense of the social and intellectual milieu.
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