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An acclaimed art historian explains how to identify excellence in art In this book, Jakob Rosenberg takes up the timeless problem of how to make a valid judgment about artistic quality. In his search for criteria of excellence in art, Rosenberg examines both the achievements and failures of other critics from the Renaissance to modern times, including Giorgio Vasari, Roger de Piles, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Théophile Thoré, and Roger Fry. Drawing vital lessons from these critics’ writings, Rosenberg charts an effective approach to the challenges of judging quality in works of art by analyzing master drawings from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries and comparing them with examples of followers or minor contemporaries. The result is a set of practical criteria that are applicable across diverse periods and styles. Brimming with insights from a legendary art critic and historian, On Quality in Art sheds invaluable light on drawings by artists ranging from Dürer, Raphael, Leonardo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Watteau, Degas, and van Gogh to Matisse, Picasso, and Marin.
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The Description for this book, On Quality in Art: Criteria of Excellence, Past Present, will be forthcoming.
These essays examine the seven deadly sins as cultural constructions in the Middle Ages and beyond, focusing on the way concepts of the sins are used in medieval communities, the institution of the Church, and by secular artists and authors.
The authenticity of art has always commanded the attention of experts, dealers, collectors, and the art-minded public-especially those who relish the Robin Hoods of art forgery who deceive rich collectors and pompous experts. This book of essays, edited by a lawyer specializing in art law and authenticity, proposes to make the question of authenticity more easily understood. The main points to be argued are (1) that the perception of form in a work of art is not unlike other types of evidence accepted in courts of law; (2) that in determining authenticity, experts must adopt a careful, organized approach; and (3) that all authentication should be based on the consensus of experts at arm's length from an object.
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‘Both knowledge and truth are beautiful things, but the Good is other and more beautiful than they.’ — Plato, Republic, 508e. This book traces the multiple meanings of art back to their historical roots, and equips the reader to choose between them. Art with a capital A turns out to be an invention of German Romantic philosophers, who endowed their creation with the attributes of genius, originality, rule breaking, and self-expression, directed by the spirit of the age. Recovering the problems that these attributes were devised to solve dispels many of the obscurities and contradictions that accompany them. What artists have always sought is excellence, and they become artists in so far as they achieve it. Quality was the supreme value in Renaissance Italy, and in early Greece it offered mortals glimpses of the divine. Today art historians avoid references to beauty or Quality, since neither is objective or definable, the boundaries beyond which scholars dare not roam. In reality subject and object are united and dissolved in the Quality event, which forms the bow wave of culture, leaving patterns of value and meaning in its wake.