Volume 40, Number 17 · October 21, 1993
What Art Tells Us
By Ernst Gombrich
History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past
by Francis Haskell
Yale University Press, 558 pp., $50.00
With his splendidly written and beautifully produced book Francis Haskell has broken entirely new ground. There are libraries full of books on the history and method of historiography dealing with the development of historical criticism, the use of charters and documents, and (more recently) with the statistical evaluation of personal records, but none of them is much concerned with the use of visual evidence by historians. Not that the reader should expect or fear to encounter lengthy disquisitions on method. Instead, the author adopts the good old approach that goes back, at least, to Aristotle of first confronting any fresh problem by reviewing the contributions of his predecessors. True, while Aristotle generally devoted a few perfunctory sections to such retrospection, Haskell has filled no fewer than 495 learned pages, rich in vivid anecdotes and half-forgotten incidents.
Review, 3894 words
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