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History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past, by Francis Haskell. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. 558 pp. $50.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-300-05540-4.
For sociologists of culture, disenchantment may be the more prudent methodological predicate, the more those of us in the field deal with such enchantments as present themselves in works of art. Paintings may seduce the scholar into thinking they are symbolic, that they are what they represent. Mote plausibly, works of art are symptomatic. They are representations of what they are not.
This paradox informs all the work, from his first major book, which appeared in 1969, Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (London: Chatto and Windus), to this most recent work, twenty-four years later, by Oxford's reigning Professor of the History of Art, Francis Haskell. First and last, and, in between, in his works on the history of taste, Haskell has demonstrated his mastery of the ambiguous relations between Western art and the social orders in which they have been produced. Haskell practices a disenchanted version of the old German motto, Der lieber Gott steckt im detail. Now, Haskell has turned his trained skeptical eye on the history of historians' uses of images. His methodological principle of disenchantment has informed the permanent structure of his scholarship.
In Patrons and Painters, Haskell's implicit methodological principles may be summed up as "Follow the money" or, at other times, as the closely related, "Follow the ego." So Haskell illuminates the serene and...