Category: Art History
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The Power of Art (2006) by Simon Schama
Simon Schama’s The Power of Art (2006) is less a history of art than a forceful meditation on why certain artists still command our attention centuries after they lived. Schama’s core argument is that truly great art is not decorative, polite, or merely technically accomplished – it is disruptive. It shocks, unsettles, compels, and, at…
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The Story of Art (1955) by E. H. Gombrich
“There really is no such thing as Art,” E. H. Gombrich famously declares at the opening of his 1955 classic The Story of Art, “there are only artists.” Art with a capital “A,” he continues, “is a bogey and a fetish.” For Gombrich, art is ultimately about feeling and expression rather than abstract definitions or…
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Seven Centuries of Art: Survey and Index (1970) by H.W. Janson et al.
Seven Centuries of Art: Survey and Index, the capstone volume of the classic Time-Life Library of Art, is best understood as a grand connective tissue – an effort to show how Western art evolved not as a sequence of isolated geniuses, but as a long conversation across time. Rather than focusing on the twenty-eight individual…
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Painting & Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A primer in the social history of pictorial style (1972) by Michael Baxandall
I was fully prepared to love this book. Michael Baxandall’s “Painting & Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A primer in the social history of pictorial style” (1972) is considered a classic in the field and shaped an entire generation of Renaissance scholars in their appreciation and understanding of period art. Unfortunately, this slender little volume lacks…
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