Elsner - Comparativism in Art History

Featuring some of the major voices in the world of art history, this volume explores the methodological aspects of comparison in the historiography of the discipline. The chapters assess the strengths and weaknesses of comparative practice in the history of art, and consider the larger issue of the place of comparative in how art history may develop in the future. The contributors represent a comprehensive range of period and geographic command from antiquity to modernity, from China and Islam to Europe, from various forms of art history to archaeology, anthropology and material culture studies. Art history is less a single discipline than a series of divergent scholarly fields in very different historical, geographic and cultural contexts but all with a visual emphasis on the close examination of objects. These fields focus on different, often incompatible temporal and cultural contexts, yet nonetheless they regard themselves as one coherent discipline namely the history of art. There are substantive problems in how the sub-fields within the broad-brush generalization called art history can speak coherently to each other. These are more urgent since the shift from an art history centered on the Western tradition to one that is consciously global.

Ja Elsner is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art and Archaeology, Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, UK and Visiting Professor of Art and Religion, University of Chicago, USA.

Studies in Art Historiography
Series Editor: Richard Woodfield

University of Birmingham

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/rfbm

The aim of this series is to support and promote the study of the history and practice of art-historical writing focusing on its institutional and conceptual foundations, from the past to the present day, in all areas and all periods. Besides addressing the major innovators of the past, it also encourages rethinking ways in which the subject may be written in the future. It ignores the disciplinary boundaries imposed by the Anglophone expression art history and allows and encourages the full range of enquiry that encompasses the visual arts in its broadest sense, as well as topics falling within archaeology, anthropology, ethnography and other specialist disciplines and approaches.

A Theory of the Tache in Nineteenth-Century Painting
ystein Sjstad

British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 17931840
Maureen McCue

The Expressionist Turn in Art History
A Critical Anthology
Kimberly A. Smith

Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Kristel Smentek

Vladimir Markov and Russian Primitivism
A Charter for the Avant-Garde
Jeremy Howard, Irna Buinska and Z.S. Strother

Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary
Reconfiguring the Architectural Past in a Modernizing Empire
Ahmet A. Ersoy

Michael Baxandall, Vision and the Work of Words
Peter Mack and Robert Williams

Circulations in the Global History of Art
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Batrice Joyeux-Prunel

Video Art Historicized
Traditions and Negotiations
Malin Hedlin Hayden

Comparativism in Art History
Jas Elsner

Edited by Ja Elsner

First published 2017
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2017 selection and editorial matter, Ja Elsner; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of Ja Elsner to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN: 978-1-472-41884-5 (hbk)

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STANLEY ABE AND JA ELSNER

OUR LITERAL SPEED

WU HUNG

WHITNEY DAVIS

MARGARET OLIN

ITTAI WEINRYB

STANLEY ABE

AVINOAM SHALEM

SUSANNE KCHLER

RICHARD NEER

ROBERT SLIFKIN

JEREMY TANNER