Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

A picture's title is often our first guide to understanding the image. Yet paintings didn't always have titles, and many canvases acquired their names from curators, dealers, and printmakers-not the artists. Taking an original, historical look at how Western paintings were named, Picture Titles shows how the practice developed in response to the conditions of the modern art world and how titles have shaped the reception of artwork from the time of Bruegel and Rembrandt to the present.Ruth Bernard Yeazell begins the story with the decline of patronage and the rise of the art market in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the increasing circulation of pictures and the democratization of the viewing public generated the need for a shorthand by which to identify works at a far remove from their creation. The spread of literacy both encouraged the practice of titling pictures and aroused new anxieties about relations between word and image, including fears that reading was taking the place of looking. Yeazell demonstrates that most titles composed before the nineteenth century were the work of middlemen, and even today many artists rely on others to name their pictures. A painter who wants a title to stick, Yeazell argues, must engage in an act of aggressive authorship. She investigates prominent cases, such as David's Oath of the Horatii and works by Turner, Courbet, Whistler, Magritte, and Jasper Johns.Examining Western painting from the Renaissance to the present day, Picture Titles sheds new light on the ways that we interpret and appreciate visual art.

Painting. --- Titles of works of art. --- Allegory. --- Allusion. --- Altarpiece. --- Ambroise Vollard. --- Anecdote. --- Art critic. --- Art criticism. --- Art dealer. --- Art history. --- Art world. --- Arthur Danto. --- Artists Rights Society. --- Bernard Berenson. --- Bourgeoisie. --- Canvas. --- Classical mythology. --- Claude Lorrain. --- Claude Monet. --- College Art Association. --- Contemporary art. --- Cosimo de' Medici. --- Cubism. --- Curator. --- Desk. --- Drapery. --- Dulcinea del Toboso. --- Eloquence. --- Emblem book. --- Emblem. --- Engraving. --- Evocation. --- Francisco Goya. --- Genre painting. --- Gerrit Dou. --- Grosvenor Gallery. --- Gruel. --- Guercino. --- Gustave Courbet. --- History painting. --- Iconography. --- Illustration. --- Impressionism. --- Isabella d'Este. --- J. M. W. Turner. --- Jackson Pollock. --- Jacques-Louis David. --- James Abbott McNeill Whistler. --- Jasper Johns. --- John Ruskin. --- Joshua Reynolds. --- Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. --- Lee Krasner. --- Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. --- Literacy. --- Literature. --- Livy. --- Lorenzo Lotto. --- Marcel Duchamp. --- Mercure de France. --- Meyer Schapiro. --- Modern art. --- Monastery. --- Mr. --- Museum. --- Narrative. --- National Gallery of Art. --- National Gallery. --- Newspaper. --- Oath of the Horatii. --- Painting (Blue Star). --- Parody. --- Perspective (graphical). --- Pieter Bruegel the Elder. --- Poetry. --- Princeton University Press. --- Printmaking. --- Private collection. --- Publication. --- Rembrandt Research Project. --- Rembrandt. --- Renaissance art. --- René Magritte. --- Rijksmuseum. --- Saskia van Uylenburgh. --- Satire. --- Shorthand. --- Stefano Conti. --- Sterling Memorial Library. --- Surrealism. --- The Painted Word. --- Thomas J. Watson Library. --- Tom Wolfe. --- Visual culture. --- Western painting. --- Whistler's Mother. --- William Powell Frith. --- Work of art. --- Writing. --- Yale Center for British Art.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

What is cultural about vision--or visual about culture? In this ambitious book, Whitney Davis provides new answers to these difficult and important questions by presenting an original framework for understanding visual culture. Grounded in the theoretical traditions of art history, A General Theory of Visual Culture argues that, in a fully consolidated visual culture, artifacts and pictures have been made to be seen in a certain way; what Davis calls "visuality" is the visual perspective from which certain culturally constituted aspects of artifacts and pictures are visible to informed viewers. In this book, Davis provides a systematic analysis of visuality and describes how it comes into being as a historical form of vision. Expansive in scope, A General Theory of Visual Culture draws on art history, aesthetics, the psychology of perception, the philosophy of reference, and vision science, as well as visual-cultural studies in history, sociology, and anthropology. It provides penetrating new definitions of form, style, and iconography, and draws important and sometimes surprising conclusions (for example, that vision does not always attain to visual culture, and that visual culture is not always wholly visible). The book uses examples from a variety of cultural traditions, from prehistory to the twentieth century, to support a theory designed to apply to all human traditions of making artifacts and pictures--that is, to visual culture as a worldwide phenomenon.

Art and society. --- Art --- Historiography. --- ADAPT. --- Aesthetic Theory. --- Aestheticism. --- Aesthetics. --- Allegory. --- Analogy. --- Art criticism. --- Art exhibition. --- Art for art's sake. --- Art history. --- Art of memory. --- Awareness. --- Causal theory of reference. --- Causality. --- Cognitive anthropology. --- Cognitive module. --- Color scheme. --- Comparative research. --- Concept. --- Conflation. --- Connoisseur. --- Consciousness. --- Contextualism. --- Courtauld Institute of Art. --- Cultural artifact. --- Cultural history. --- Cultural icon. --- Culturalism. --- Culture theory. --- Depiction. --- Dissemination. --- Emergence. --- Engraving. --- Explanation. --- Feminist art. --- Figurative art. --- Fine art. --- Formalism (art). --- Formality. --- Handbook. --- Historical method. --- Human figure (aesthetics). --- Iconicity. --- Iconography. --- Iconology. --- Ideation (creative process). --- Ideology. --- Illustration. --- Illustrator. --- Individuation. --- Intentionality. --- Interaction. --- Invention. --- Language-game (philosophy). --- Languages of Art. --- Level of analysis. --- Level of consciousness (Esotericism). --- Mental image. --- Metaphor. --- Narrative. --- Nominalism. --- Notation. --- Obfuscation. --- Objectivity (philosophy). --- Ontology. --- Ostensive definition. --- Performativity. --- Perspective (graphical). --- Pictorialism. --- Pigment. --- Platitude. --- Pop art. --- Positivism. --- Precognition. --- Publication. --- Reflexology. --- School of thought. --- Self-consciousness. --- Social theory. --- Sociocultural evolution. --- Sociology of culture. --- Solipsism. --- Sophistication. --- Subjectivity. --- Suggestion. --- Symbol. --- Symptom. --- Theoretical definition. --- Theory of Forms. --- Theory of art. --- Theory. --- Thought experiment. --- Thought. --- Typography. --- Visual arts. --- Visual culture. --- Visual perception. --- Visual semiotics. --- Work of art. --- Writing.