Leseprobe

27 and Astronomer . Many art historians create such displays of reproductions, rather than consider the actualities available to them in a variety of settings, including museums, as in the case of the Geographer , or in churches such as Nuestra Señora del Rosario. Indeed, some art historians who have never worked in a museum ‘believe that the aims and con- straints of display lead it almost invariably to be a clog on alert, adaptable, and radical thinking,’ as I expressed it on a previous occasion. 11 Why this hostility to the display of things in the world on the part of so many art historians? They claim to seek to attend to individual works, but since the days of Heinrich Wölffin, have instead contrived their own displays of reproductions with slide projectors, and latterly with PowerPoint, producing fantasy pairings irrespective of the physical char- acter—most obviously the size—of the things reproduced. As a second example, follow- ing the Vermeer Geographer , we can take one painting isolated in reproduction as a slide: the Assumption of the Virgin , begun in Florence by Filippino Lippi, and completed after his death by Pietro Perugino in about 1506. I can project it side-by-side with Titian’s painting of the same subject of about ten years later, and make art historical points about differ- ences between Florence and Venice, disegno and colore , and so on. But—and this seems vital—my wholly artificial display of reproductions can give the viewer no idea of the actual existence of these things in the world. Furthermore, whereas inmy earlier example there is plentiful evidence that the two paintings by Vermeer were once treated as a pen- dant pair in actuality, in the case of the two Annunciations , the paintings have nothing to do with each other conceptually—other than theologically—or physically. Any art his- torical points I make by drawing the comparison concern the differences between these two paintings, not any association between them. The Assumption by Lippi and Perugino is in the Chapel of the Assumption of the Basilica della Santissima Annunciata in Florence, a quite different kind of space from that occupied by the Titian, which is over the high altar in the apse of the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice. Furthermore, whereas the Titian retains its physical integrity, the Lippi and Perugino is but one element of a polyptych that was long ago dismembered and dispersed. It is a repurposed fragment. This is not to say that nothing of value can be claimed by making the kind of contrived comparison I have described, but I want to stress that the display of actual things in the world, rather than reproductions, invites different forms of attention: attention to each thing as part of a greater physical whole, a greater physical whole that can change radically over time, but that remains an element of actuality. Each and every work is sited—is displayed—and has its being in particular circum- stances more or less controlled by humans for a period sometimes of minutes, sometimes of decades, centuries or millennia. ‘Hidden Gem of the Taos High Road,’ ColonialMexicoInsideandOut (3 July 2017): http://colonialmexicoin- sideandout.blogspot.com/2017/07/new-mexican-gem-of-taos-high-road.html (last accessed 23 October 2017).  11 Gaskell, ‘Museums and Philosophy,’ 2012, p. 80.