A Discerning Eye

A Discerning Eye is an anthology of some of the finest and most lasting essays by a great critic-historian of Early Italian painting, Richard Offner. Its contents span the Florentine fourteenth century and thus compose a kind of portrait album of some of its most notable painters between the Gothic and Renaissance eras, from the Magdalen Master in the thirteenth century to Masaccio in the early fifteenth. Each essay contains insights that are as incisive, fresh, and evocative today as when they were first written. The essays are illustrated using Offner&’s original photographs supplemented by new or additional photographs when dictated by the material or when the reader might be better helped to see the relationship between Offner&’s analytical prose and a given image. This book reintroduces Offner and places him in the wider context of art-historical writing to reassess his work and underscore what his writings have to offer art historians working today. Three interpretive essays approach Offner from distinct but complementary perspectives: historiographical, philosophical, and biographical. Reassessments of such figures as Erwin Panofsky and Millard Meiss aid the ongoing debate about what art history is and how it ought to be practiced. The reader is asked to reconsider not merely the value but also the philosophical foundation of connoisseurship as a method of investigation and its compatibility with other methods.

Egyptologist Jack A. Josephson, a writer and researcher in the tradition of the gentleman scholar, has achieved broad recognition as an authority in Egyptian art history. His lucid investigative analyses have probed and redefined the limits of inquiry, expanded research parameters, and broadened perspectives, emphasizing the undeniable contributions of art history in an intra-disciplinary framework. This volume of collected essays is dedicated to Josephson by distinguished friends and colleagues, a select roster including eminent, established scholars in the field of Egyptology and rising stars of the younger generation. Josephson views Egyptian art history as a critical but neglected area of study, and is a strong proponent of its reinstatement in the academic curriculum as an essential component in the formation of new cadres. The quality of the articles in this Egyptological medley is a tribute to the honoree and an affirmation of the esteem of his peers, while the range of subjects and variety of themes addressed reflect the degree to which he has, in his own scholarship, undertaken to implement his ideal.

An art heist sets into motion a high-stakes operation that will involve Interpol, the FBI, the Mafia, drug lords, and a daring female art dealer.

James Elkins's How to Use Your Eyes invites us to look at--and maybe to see for the first time--the world around us, with breathtaking results. Here are the common artifacts of life, often misunderstood and largely ignored, brought into striking focus. With the discerning eye of a painter and the zeal of a detective, Elkins explores complicated things like mandalas, the periodic table, or a hieroglyph, remaking the world into a treasure box of observations--eccentric, ordinary, marvelous.