ART WRITERS: THEIR SOURCES AND THEIR EFFECTS

Longinus’ text On the Sublime, written during the Roman Empire, was much read by aestheticians of the eighteenth century in particular and has been thought to have helped prepare the public sensibility for Romantic landscape painting with its preference for wild and threatening landscapes. Dolce’s dialogue, set in Renaissance Venice, is a discussion of the merits of Raphael’s and Michelangelo’s painting styles, in which the dominant speaker is Pietro Aretino, a man who used the newly available printing press to make a living as a freelance writer with a speciality in art criticism. Ruskin was a popular writer, a specialist in Venetian art and architecture, who championed the painter J.M.W. Turner and who helped catalyze the pre-Raphaelite movement, a response to an increasingly mechanized world. Al-Sabouni is a practicing architect in the war-ravaged city of Homs in Syria, who writes about how architectural practice can foment and possibly solve grievous problems. We will read such authors as these to learn about how the history of art is both a history of particular societies and of human concerns that bridge differences of time and place.