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“... Like last year’s student riots in Switzerland, the fact that there have recently been historiographical disturbances, sometimes of a heated kind, affecting what have long seemed to be the most placid and amiable of all artistic schools – those of Dutch 17th-century genre painting and of French 18th-century painting in general – may come as something of a shock to those members of the public who do not keep their ears uncomfortably close to the ground ...”

“... in Europe, at different times the friend of Byron, Foscolo and Canova.’ In this manner, Francis Haskell begins the third of his selected essays, written over the last twenty years and brought together in this volume. It is a manner which seems to parody, in its relentless accumulation of the circumstantial, a lost genre of writing, the late ...”

“... has to be set this vast, immensely learned, superbly illustrated, and deeply depressing volume by Francis Haskell, which tracks the futile efforts of historians, century after century, to make some credible and non-ideological use of the visual records of the past. What, he asks, has been the impact of the image on the historical imagination? His short ...”

“... before. In The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition, Francis Haskell, who was chairman of the advisory committee for this show, describes how Old Master ex-hibitions began as more or less random displays of available pictures and only later became more scholarly. Their origins were varied: auction sales in ...”

“... They discovered that Blunt had recently given a lecture in Oxford and had been the guest of Francis Haskell, the professor of art history there. Haskell was obviously suspect, since he had a Russian mother and a Russian wife and had been to King’s College, Cambridge, so the press surrounded his house, making it ...”

“... arduous about the latest of the Walter Neurath Memorial Lectures, except, perhaps, its title. Francis Haskell’s subject is the painful or rather protracted development of the art book, those large volumes built on superior illustrations of painting and sculpture. In tracing its origins, he returns to the field which he exploited so successfully in ...”

“... Spender) three have previously been published. Alfred Brendel writes about humour in music, Francis Haskell on controversies about the transition from Late Roman to Early Christian art; Bernard Williams, in a wonderful and unsummarisable essay called ‘Naive and Sentimental Opera Lovers’, writes about distinctions in operatic taste, the sources ...”

“... by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. His views have been recently brought to our attention by Francis Haskell in his fascinating and sceptical History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past. In his Waning of the Middle Ages (published in English in 1924), Huizinga rejected the established view that the realistic mode and richness of ...”

“... expense of the social and intellectual milieu. All this is an old story. Now that works such as Francis Haskell’s Patrons and Painters (first published in 1963) and Michael Levey’s Painting at Court (1971) have made the social history of art respectable, it is becoming quite difficult to remember the time when it was virtually restricted, or ...”

“... great proponents of this method in the English-speaking world: T.J. Clark on the theoretical, Francis Haskell on the anecdotal, wing’, but dismisses both as not promising much ‘as far as my interests, or the central problems of the study of art, are concerned’. Both these writers have done much to discourage the sort of confidence Wollheim ...”

“... the Frari record a rivalry almost in the class of the one described a quarter of a century ago by Francis Haskell, between Francesco Morosini, the Venetian Captain-General of the Sea in the later 17th century, and Antonio Barbaro, his subordinate in the war of Candia, dismissed for incompetence, who used the façade of Santa Maria del Giglio, not far ...”

“... squabbling super-powers today. The political circumstances were admirably summarised long ago by Francis Haskell in Patrons and Painters. Gould should read this book more carefully. He alleges that it propounds the crazy theory that ‘Bernini’s mission was planned by the French as a further means of humbling the Pope.’ Bernini’s bust of Louis ...”

“... Here, at last, is a book of which we can sincerely say in the old phrase that it meets a long-felt want. It offers, in the modest words of the Preface, ‘a series of illustrations (which are now often impossible to find except in specialised libraries) of the principal sculptures which were at one time accepted as masterpieces’ – that is, of antique statues with which, until a hundred years ago, the educated public were expected to be familiar ...”

“... the only new recruit made in the 20th century to the first rank of Old Masters was (as the late Francis Haskell pointed out) Georges de La Tour, whose brilliantly lit pickpocket and solemn, candlelit Magdalen both derive from Caravaggio’s inventions. The reassessment of Caravaggio was in part due to the advent of loan exhibitions, to the cleaning and ...”