Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image - Review

24. Moxey, 67. Horst Bredekamp and Julius Held are reported to have told Moxey when he delivered papers on the subject on previous occasions that his thesis that Panofsky's Jewish identity shaped his treatment of Durer in response to German nationalism and Nazism is incorrect. Panofsky expressed many of the same views before the rise of Nazism, even at the time of his earliest writings on Durer. Moxey does not deal with this critique in the version of his paper published here.

25. Gombrich, "The Visual Arts in Vienna," 28.

26. Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundation of Art History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).

27. Svetlana Alpers, "Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari's Lives," Journal of the Warburg and Courtlauld Institutes 23 (1960): 190-215. Cf. Ruth Webb, "Ekphrasis," in The Dictionary of Art (London: Grove, 1996), vol. 10, esp. 130, and "Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: the Invention of a Genre," in Word and Image, forthcoming. I am grateful to Webb for allowing me to read a copy of this paper before publication.

28. Webb, "Ekpbrasis Ancient and Modern." For Vasari and rhetoric, see Rubin, passim, mentioning the difficulties with the Alpers thesis, 275. In "Can You Trust Vasari?" New York Review of Books, October 10, 1995, 20, his review of Rubin's book, Charles Hope says of Alpers's thesis: "This sounds very impressive, but even Rubin concedes that the claim is no longer tenable, because ekphrasis did not take root in Italy and Vasari cannot have known anything about it."

29. See Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, "Reception Theory," in The Dictionary of Art (London: Grove, 1996), vol. 26, 61-64, in which I discuss the difficulties inherent in an "ahistorical phenomenological viewpoint": the "'implied beholder' like the implied reader exists outside history, and it is difficult to situate this beholder in a specific historical context."

30. In a forthcoming review of Past Looking, Robert Williams, to whom I am grateful for showing me an advance copy, has suggested that Holly's approach represents a regression to formalism.

31. This is also the case, among other like-minded writers cited by Holly, with Moxey's closely related book The Practice of Theory, where no particular politics is offered.

32. Cf. Strzygowski's comments in Europas Machtkunst, which are relevant to the present review's themes: "Solange die Jnden sich unseren Volke zugehorig fuhlten, gingen sie reit der Humanisten. . . . Ebenso wurde mir auch immer mehr bewusst, wie stark der akademischer Humanismus den Juden in die Hande gespielt hat und wie sehr dies ihn Ihren eigenen Absichten dienstbar machte" (So long as the Jews felt they belonged to our people [Volk], they went along with the humanists, just so have I become ever more aware how strongly academic humanism has played into the hands of the Jew and how much it has placed itself in the service of their own ends," 747).

33. Warburg, "Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten," in Ausgewahlte Schriften and Wurdigungen, 267.

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