Resumen de Writing art history
Part of a symposium on writing and the history of art. Art-historical writing is for the most part full of jargon and cliché, impenetrable in its density, analytic and contentious to a fault, and utterly predictable. Art historians are so completely absorbed in their own scholarly procedures, lost in their own habits of mind, that they do not contemplate much on the simple fact that they have cut themselves off from the imaginative tradition of writing about art that extends from Philostratus to Dante, Vasari, Bellori, Diderot, and Winckelmann. What is needed is a sensitivity to the art historian's potential as a writer with the capacity to tell a good story and to describe works of art vividly and suggestively.
