Theories of Art

This second book in Moshe Barasch's series on art theory surveys the development of the field from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. During this period theories of the visual arts, particularly of painting and sculpture, underwent a radical transformation, as a result of which the intellectual foundations of our modern views on the arts were formed. Because this transformation can only be understood within the context of cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical developments of the period, Barasch surveys the opinions of the artists, as well as the doctrines of philosophers, poets and critics. He thus traces for the reader the entire development of modernism in art and art theory.