Main entry:

Haskell, Francis, 1928-2000, author

Title & Author:

History and its images : art and the interpretation of the past / Francis Haskell.

Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, ©1993.

Description:

x, 558 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 27 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 520-542) and index.
The early numismatists -- Portraits from the past -- Historical narrative and reportage -- The issue of quality -- Problems of interpretation -- The dialogue between antiquarians and historians -- The birth of cultural history -- The arts as an index of society -- The Musée des Monuments Français -- Michelet -- Museums, illustrations and the search for authenticity -- The historical significance of style -- The deceptive evidence of art -- Art as prophecy -- Huizinga and the 'Flemish Renaissance'.

Summary:

Over the last four centuries, historians have increasingly turned to images in their attempts to understand and visualize the past. In this wide-ranging and engrossing book, a distinguished art historian surveys the various ways that they have adopted for making use of this material, and he examines the specific objects that became available to them through excavation, the creation of private collections and public museums, easier means of travel, and the startling displacements brought about by vandalism and art exhibitions. Francis Haskell begins by discussing the antiquarians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who brought to light and interpreted as historical evidence coins, sculptures, paintings discovered in the catacombs beneath Rome and other relics surviving from earlier ages. He explains that, in the eighteenth century, historians gradually began to acknowledge the significance of such visual sources and to draw on them in order to validate and give colour to their narratives or to utilize them as foundation stones for a new branch of learning - the history of culture. Later writers followed the example of Michelet in making inferences from the visual arts to indicate the whole mentality of an age, while (more erratically) others saw in them the harbingers of political, religious or social upheavals. Haskell concludes by discussing those cultural historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Burckhardt and Huizinga above all, who did not merely give the visual arts a prominent and necessary place in their interpretations of the past, but in some ways actually interpreted the past through the visual arts.

Resources:
Table of contents
Table of contents

ISBN:

0300055404 (hbk.)
9780300055405 (hbk.)
0300059493 (pbk.)
9780300059496 (pbk.)

Subject:

Art and history.
History Sources.
Picture interpretation.
Art et histoire.
Histoire Sources.
Illustrations, images, etc. Interprétation.
History
Geschichte
Geschichtsschreibung
Geschichtswissenschaft
Historisches Ereignis
Ikonographie
Kunstgeschichte
Kunstvoorwerpen.
Beeldende kunsten.
Geschiedbronnen.
Geschiedschrijving.
Historisches Ereignis (Motiv)
Kunstgeschichte (Fach)
Historiography Use of Visual arts

Form/genre:

Sources
Books.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 104004
Call No.: ID PLS; ID:94-B190
Status: Available