The Importance of Source-Hunting
Manet, Portrait of Mme. Brunet
Source-hunting, searching for the origin of a form in an earlier artist’s work, is one of the most maligned activities in art scholarship. John Shearman, a professor of the history of art at Harvard, wrote:
‘The study of sources is treated now, in art history, with widespread contempt. People can lose their jobs for doing it in public. To the extent that source hunting becomes an end in itself, it falls to one of the lower levels of the historical enterprise, and contempt in such cases may be well deserved.”1
And he’s not the only one to snarl at it. In the latest chapter of Sight Unseen published online today we see how source-hunting is, in fact, essential for interpretation and that the contempt scholars have for the process has seriously damaged the progress of art history.
1. John Shearman, Only Connect....: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton University Press) 1992, p. 233
Posted 31 Aug 2011: ManetTheoryVisual Perception
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