Visions of Art History

Whitney Davis reconsiders the work of major art historians and writers on the arts, from the early nineteenth century to the present day, including G. W. F. Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Ernst Cassirer, through to E. H. Gombrich, John Onians and David Summers, in order to show that vision has been shaped historically by the visual arts. The book includes an intellectual autobiography recounting Davis’s trajectory in his discipline.Emphasising interactions between several generations of modern art history and the psychology, anthropology and philosophy of art, he explores a whole new field: the relevance of vision to this history of art.