Origins, Imitation, Conventions: Representation in the Visual Arts

by James S. Ackerman

Twelve studies by eminent art historian James S. Ackerman. This collection contains studies written by art historian James Ackerman over the past decade. Whereas Ackerman's earlier work assumed a development of the arts as they responded to social, economic, political, and cultural change, his recent work reflects the poststructural critique of the presumption of progress that characterized Renaissance and modernist history and criticism. In this book he explores the tension between the authority of the past—which may act not only as a restraint but as a challenge and stimulus—and the potentially liberating gift of invention. He examines the ways in which artists and writers on art have related to ancestors and to established modes of representation, as well as to contemporary experiences. The "origins" studied here include the earliest art history and criticism; the beginnings of architectural drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; Leonardo Da Vinci's sketches for churches, the first in the Renaissance to propose supporting domes on sculpted walls and piers; and the first architectural photographs. "Imitation" refers to artistic achievements that in part depended on the imitation of forms established in practices outside the fine arts, such as ancient Roman rhetoric and print media. "Conventions," like language, facilitate communication between the artist and viewer, but are both more universal (understood across cultures) and more fixed (resisting variation that might diminish their clarity). The three categories are closely linked throughout the book, as most acts of representation partake to some degree of all three.

Genres: Art, Architecture

342 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2002

About the author

James S. Ackerman, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Fine Arts Emeritus at Harvard University and a Fellow and former Trustee of the American Academy in Rome, was born in San Francisco in 1919 and studied at Yale and New York University. He is a former editor of the Art Bulletin, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding member of the British Academy, the Accademia Olimpica (Vicenza), the Ateneo Veneto and the Royal Academy of Uppsala. He gave the Slade Lectures at Cambridge in 1969-70.

Professor Ackerman has lived several years in Italy, beginning with service during the last war, and is the author of many studies on Italian architecture, including The Cortile del Belvedere (1954), a history of the Renaissance portion of the Vatican Palace, and The Architecture of Michelangelo (1961), which received the Charles Rufus Morey Award of the College Art Association of America and the Alice David Hitchcock Award of the Society of Architectural Historians. Recently, he has published The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses (1990); a volume of collected essays, Distance Points, is in press. He is co-author of a volume on historical practice and theory, Art and Archaeology (1963). He has conceived an narrated the films Looking for Renaissance Rome (1975, with Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt) and Palladio the Architet and His Influence in America (1980).

Reviews

[Heather Larcombe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Class book. Better than Stone.