Michael Ann Holly
A lecture in the Handwerker Gallery Critical ForumHandwerker Gallery
Professor
Holly's scholarly interests include art historiography and criticism; the
intellectual history of the history of art; and ancient, medieval, and
Renaissance art. The following description of her book Past Looking:
Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1996) illustrates the nature of her research. The quotation is
from the cover of the book.
In my talk Art
History as Melancholy, I will speculate on the way art historical writing in
general is derived from a melancholic connection to the past through its attempt
to enliven historical images. I will explore some of the ways in which art
historical narrative might be construed as a response to the paradox of writing
about an absent past through the material presence of works of art. The
"rhetoric of mourning" that has engendered and connected so many late
20th-century studies in the humanities is one devoted to the incomplete and the
missing: fragments, allegories, ruins, retreats from definitive meanings. Yet
the practice of art history provides an interesting twist on this
characterization. The very materiality of the objects with which we deal
presents historians of art with an interpretative paradox absent in other
historical inquiries, for the works are both lost and found, both present and
past, at the same time. As a specific historiographical example, I will consider
the collected writings of Michael Baxandall.
is chair of the Department of Art and Art History and professor of art history/ visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester. She is the author of Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), Iconography and Iconology
"Michael Ann Holly asserts that historical interpretation of the pictorial arts is always the intellectual product of a dynamic exchange between past and present. Recent theory emphasizes the subjectivity of the historian and the ways in which any interpretation betrays the presence of an interpreter. She challenges that view, arguing that historical objects of representational art are actively engaged in prefiguring the kinds of histories that can be written about them.
"Holly
directs her attention to early modern works of visual art and their rhetorical
roles in legislating the kinds of tales told about them by a few classic
cultural commentaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Burckhardt's
synchronic vision of the Italian Renaissance, Wölfflin's exemplification of the
Baroque, Schapiro's and Freud's dispute over the meaning of Leonardo's art, and
Panofsky's exegesis of disguised symbolism in Northern Renaissance painting.
"Convinced that reciprocity between works of visual art and the historian depends on the relationship between objecthood and subjectivity, Holly explores a range of contemporary theoretical perspectives, asking how works become intelligible to those who write about them. If dynamic interpretation demands that art historians come to terms with what they do to the work, it is equally useful to see what the work of art does to them."
from the cover of Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image
Fuente: http://www.ithaca.edu/handwerker/critical/holly1.htm
