Volume 40, Number 5 · March 4, 1993
Getting the Picture
By Ernst Gombrich
Only Connect…Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance
by John Shearman
National Gallery of Art/Princeton University Press, 281 pp., $49.50
A few years ago I visited the Accademia in Venice in the company of a friend, an excellent painter and highly successful teacher at one of our leading art schools. As we were standing in front of Titian's Presentation of the Virgin, which covers a large wall, I happened to remark, after a period of silence, how touching I found the lonely figure of the young Virgin standing on the steps of the Temple. 'Where is the Virgin?' asked my friend. I couldn't help asking him how he could possibly have failed to recognize her in the very center of the composition, but he assured me that he never looked at the subject matter; what interested him were mainly the negative shapes resulting from the representations on the canvas.
Review, 3805 words
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