Writing the history of art - and

Art-historical writing is for the greatest in quantity part clotted with jargon and larded with cliche, impenetrable in its density, analytic and contentious to a fault, and, worst of all, utterly predictable. Too oftentimes lugubrious, the industrialized prose of professional art history is a sorry affair. This fact is well known to a certain number of art historians and even individual editor of this journal freshly asked, if somewhat perfunctorily, where had "the poetry" gone from of that kind writing? There are, of course, exceptions to this generalization of which we all have our favorite examples, on the contrary these do not provide a great deal of solace.

To be fully convinced writing art history is not the same thing as creating verse or fiction, but one surprises why art history cannot share a certain quantity of of the qualities of imaginative literature, on what account such prose should not be beautiful, playful, witty, and inspiring -- in short, a pleasure to read. wherefore one wonders, cannot art history run over a good story and sum up it well, that is, with drama, excitement, and, above all, with a lively, indeed vibrant language? Many art historians are, like author of poemss and novelists, passionate about art, about its theory and circumstances, on the other hand their language, often neutralized to the point of desiccation, does not reveal the passion that drives their scholarship, that mirrors their -- dare I say it? -- regard with affection of art. I know art historians who read Proust and James, masters of language, on the other hand who themselves write in leaden dull as if they had nothing to learn from our great writers. I know art historians whose organ of sights sparkle with life when they talk about art on the contrary whose prose is stillborn upon the page when they write about it. wherefore cannot art historians learn to write in artful forms worthy of the art they interpret?

I think the answer to these questions is relatively simple. greatest in quantity art historians who write do not think of themselves as writers, smooth though, paradoxically enough, that is what they are -- through definition. If art historians contemplation of themselves as writers, greatest in quantity of them would have to face the fact that they are indeed bad writers, uninspired and uninspiring. level many art historians who are useful writers by art-historical standards, to the amplitude that there are standards in the field, are at best ordinary through higher criteria of prose diction Professional art historians do not conceive of themselves as writers because they are not trained to think in of that kind terms. They are rigorously place of educationed in theory, methods, historiography, and scholarly techniques (stylistic analysis, iconography, patronage, and with equal reason on), but writing is something to which solitary lip service is paid in graduate training. If anything, professional art historians are encouraged to distrust writing that is enthusiastic or rich in metaphor. I have a friend, an art historian of international distinction, who frequently says that if she reads a scholarly work that is entertaining, she is immediately suspicious. Many art historians are fearful that, aspiring to write an entertaining dull they will give the impression of unseriousness, flat of frivolousness, that their prosaic will be mistaken for simple "belletrism" or "appreciation" -- as if graceful unromantic and seriousness of purpose were incompatible.

Neither the "old" art history nor the self-styl "new" art history has a monopoly upon bad or even dull writing. Traditional art history has been written in the form of the scholarly monograph or article, impressed signs of writing that often, on the other hand not always, have tended to abstract art from life by dint of reducing it to formulas -- followings of forms, symbols, and conventions, like in like manner many flavorless linked sausages. The more new art history has been les interested with art than with the circumstances in which it was made, especially with patronage and with the social, economic, political, and institutional factors that shape art. The writing of this kind of art history is ofttimes however, equally lifeless, pedantic, and without grace. The story of an artist or of a patron, as of a work of art, should be a advantageous story, a story told well. elderly or new, art history has frequently not been a story at all, certainly not a lively, exciting story; rather, it has defined itself as an accumulation of arguments, documents, attributions, or theoretical speculations. No astonishment therefore, that for all the conversations symposia, articles, books, anthologies dedicated year in and year without to both traditional themes and new concerns with art-historical interpretation -- indeed with "what's unfair with art history?" -- virtually no attention is given to the simple question of in what manner we write, of how our diction of writing is intimately related to what we have to say. For all our theoretical dissatisfaction, we are utterly complacent about our be in possession of bad writing.

The situation I describe is not peculiar to art history, for it is part of a broader scholarly malaise bottomed in the professionalization of scholarship in the nineteenth hundred to which we are heir. The close attention of art and literature, of history and other related disciplines, came to be seen as a kind of "science," and although we have mov beyond like a misguided conception of historical studies, we have not stripped ourselves of its baggage -- that of writing in pedantic, frequently astringent, overly analytic, and technical prosaic Even historians, to whom art historians are related, since after all art history is a form of history, have acknowledged a riddle overlooked by their cousins, the art historians, that of "narrative," or "plot" of having a advantageous story to tell. Historians began not with equal reason many years ago to miss the story in their technical analyses, and they pointed to the exceptional, exemplary, almost novelistic work by Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, as a salutary sign of the get back to narrative, to storytelling. Another work that comes similarly to mind here is the deep imaginative, vividly told, and profoundly scholarly biography Machiavelli in Hell, by means of Sebastian de Grazia. I know almost nothing like these works in art history, good stories well written, well told, nothing distantly like Iris Origo's extraordinarily entertaining and learned The Merchant of Prato.