Volume 31, Number 20 · December 20, 1984
The Voyage of Watteau
By Francis Haskell
Watteau: 1684–1721
by Margaret Morgan Grasselli, by Pierre Rosenberg, with the assistance of Nicole Parmantier
National Gallery of Art (Washington), 580 pp., $14.95
Antoine Watteau
by Donald Posner
Cornell University Press, 300 pp., $75.00
Le Serment du Jeu de Paume de Jacques-Louis David
by Philippe Bordes
Editions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux (Paris), 260 pp., fr 150
There are times when one wishes that the great art historians and theorists of the past who wrote biographies of their contemporaries had been more like the art historians of today…. Put like that the wish appalls by its condescension and Philistinism. Can one really imagine the intelligence and imagination of Vasari or Bellori confined within the pages of an 'Outstanding Dissertation in the Fine Arts' or of a contribution to the Art Bulletin or Burlington Magazine? Nonetheless the fact remains that Marcantonio Michiel (who in the first half of the sixteenth century was planning to write a history of Italian art) could have asked Giorgione himself, or at least one of his friends, whether his (Michiel's) description of the Tempesta as 'the small landscape…with the storm, the gypsy and soldier' was an adequate one, or whether this beautiful and enigmatic picture in the Accademia in Venice did not really represent an abstruse legend involving Hermes Trismegistus (or whatever fanciful theory currently holds the field). The answer might perhaps have spared us several dozen articles in the learned journals of today.
Review, 5344 words
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