Spencer Harold (Ed.). Readings in Art History: Volume II: The Renaissance to the Present (Second Edition)

Charles Scrinber's Sons, 1976. — 468 p.The aim of this anthology is to assemble a convenient and useful collection of modern writings on the history of Western art. As a supplement to the texts usually assigned in introductory courses in art history, this anthology should prove at least a partial answer to the familiar problem of providing multiple copies of supplementary readings on library reserve shelves. But, apart from its use in surveys of Western art, this anthology will offer a valuable set of readings to any student of Western civilization or of the creativeness of man.
Although each selection stands alone on the merits of its content, the reader will soon discover that patterns tend to develop throughout the anthology and at some level link themes from a number of selections into a logical relationship across time and space. This volume opens, for example, with selections by Erwin Panofsky and John White. Panofsky distinguishes between early fifteenth-century art in the Lowlands and in Italy while at the same time emphasizing the commitment of each of these regional arts to the transcription of the visible world. The selection by John White carries the distinction between the Lowlands and Italy even further by discussing in detail the development of linear perspective in Italy, thus dramatizing the differences between the empirical approach in the north and the theoretical predilections of the Italian artists. Since the representation of space as a three-dimensional continuum, as developed both in Italy and the Lowlands, was to be an underlying assumption for Western art from these Renaissance beginnings to the twentieth century, the theme of these opening selections will be evoked again. To cite but a few of many instances, a variation on the opening themes is developed in Friedlaender's discussion of Caravaggio where the real and spiritual worlds are seen to be dramatically joined in the striking illusionism of that artist's religious paintings; and, much later, in Novotny's paper on the reaction to Impressionism (as well as in Greenberg's