Reframing Art History: Text and Context: Introduction to Section 2

Abstract

Considering such diverse historically-based issues as the relationship between painting and sign language and the encoding of textual traditions in portraiture, all four articles in this section demonstrate, in varying degrees, the crucial impact of the contemporary critical gaze on the discipline of art history. The examination of issues related to gender and the recognition of difference, psychoanalysis, semiotics and contextual analysis all reveal the complexity and diversity of approach that both challenges and illuminates the historian of eighteenth-century visual culture. And while none of these critical strategies originated in the field of art history, it is a tribute to the discipline's intellectual flexibility and dedication to interdisciplinarity that methodologies learned from other disciplines have wholly re-defined the way art historians look at and write about art. Many scholars in the humanistic disciplines, most of all traditional and conservative art historians, consider this phenomenon in a decidedly negative light, plaintively lamenting the loss of the and interpreting the success of new methodologies in the field as signs of intellectual torpor and a crisis in the discipline. But as the four following articles demonstrate, the object is alive and well in art history, and the application of more diverse modes of investigating and evaluating art-historical problems has provided the field with the ability to integrate itself more efficiently and effectively with other humanistic endeavors to a degree unimaginable in the not-sodistant past. Both Kevin Parker's essay on Winckelmann and Julie Plax's contribution to Watteau studies are connected thematically and method-