Search Results

“... wealth on art. There were similar attacks all over Europe, from the British Isles to the Balkans.David Freedberg, who teaches art history at Columbia (and who was, long ago, my dissertation adviser), describes himself as ‘haunted’ by the question of what it is about art that arouses such fierce responses. Most academic art history considers the ...”

“... David Freedberg’s new book is illustrated with wonderful, detailed drawings and engravings of plants, fungi, fossils, birds, insects and animals – nearly all made in the 17th century. Freedberg is an art historian; the starting point of his book is a dream he had sometime before 1986 in which Anthony Blunt appeared holding a drawing of an orange ...”

“... response. In so doing he may have hoped to enhance his critical reputation as well: for if, as David Freedberg recently argued in The Power of Images, the aesthetic appreciation of art depends on the repression of instinctual physical reactions, the construction of an incorporeal viewer is a demand for critical (rather than popular) recognition. And ...”

“... is one source for the Hanged Man tarot card. All these examples attest to what the art historian David Freedberg calls ‘the power of images’, which more puritanical critics might see as fetishism writ large. ‘To be adored or punished, to be welcomed, dreaded, or expelled,’ Heller-Roazen concludes, ‘the image of the absentee is each time ...”

“... that is hard to reconcile with the serious meanings which have been attached to them – by Sydney Freedberg, for instance, who had the very beautiful and intelligent idea that they represent ‘creatures of the pagan, classical, pre-Christian world, who are half-conscient of the meaning of the history they attend and the prophecy they oversee’. It is also ...”