Apelles in Bohemia

Abstract

The historiography of western European artists' lives over the last few centuries can be seen as comprising two dominant traditions. On the one hand, the significance of stories about artists derives from their being seen as vehicles for rhetorical claims about the power of art. Artists are in this sense symbolic figures, and narration of their lives relies on the recycling of exemplary topoi. As in classic studies by Kurz and Kris and the Wittkowers, or more recently, George Levitine's Dawn of Bohemianism, biographical information pertaining to individual artists is shown to be contained within generic narrative moulds which tells us at least as much about the dis-