Search results for ""Author Paul Barolsky""

Art history as we know it would not exist without Vasari, and Barolsky shows us that something of the same claim should be made for literary history. He demonstrates the ways in which a literary approach to Vasari's book deepens our understanding of its historical, art-historical, and imaginative character. Why Mona Lisa Smiles discusses Vasari's shrewd, witty, intimate awareness of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio and relates the Lives to the works of Castiglione, Aretino, Cellini, and Rabelais. Barolsky reveals the unexpected fantasy of Vasari, who imagined and then invented artists and works of art, totally fabricating the lives of artists about whom he knew little or nothing. Barolsky traces the myth of Pygmalion through the Lives, demonstrating that Vasari was himself a Pygmalion in words and showing how he wittily played on the names of artists, revealing these poetical fantasies as part of the very iconography of Renaissance art. By approaching the Lives as a combination of genres—biography, history, novella, autobiography, novel, and literary banquet—Barolsky connects Vasari's highly fictionalized history to the modern historical novel. The fictional character of Vasari's book should not be ignored or dismissed by art historians, Barolsky insists, since it is itself a historical document—the record of how a painter and writer of extraordinary sensibility beheld works of art at a particular moment in history. Barolsky's unique approach to the Lives makes this study a valuable contribution to the history of the reception of art.

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Fictions of Art History, the most recent addition to the Clark Studies in the Visual Arts series, addresses art history’s complex relationships with fiction, poetry, and creative writing. Inspired by a 2010 conference, the volume examines art historians’ viewing practices and modes of writing. How, the contributors ask, are we to unravel the supposed facts of history from the fictions constructed in works of art? How do art historians employ or resist devices of fiction, and what are the effects of those choices on the reader? In styles by turns witty, elliptical, and plain-speaking, the essays in Fictions of Art History are fascinating and provocative critical interventions in art history.Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

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