ART009000 Archives

How do people make sense of works of art? And how do they write to make others see the same way? There are many guides to looking at art, histories of art history and art criticism, and accounts of various ‘theories’ and ‘methods’, but this book offers something very unlike the normal search for difference and division: it examines the general and largely unspoken norms shared by interpreters of many kinds.

Ranging widely, though taking writing within the Western tradition of art history as its primary focus, Interpreting Art highlights the norms, premises, and patterns that tend to guide interpretation along the way. Why, for example, is the concept of artistic ‘intention’ at once so reviled and yet so hard to let go of? What does it really involve when an interpretation appeals to an artwork’s ‘reception’? How can ‘context’ be used by some to keep things under control and by others to make the interpretation of art seem limitless? And how is it that artworks only seem to grow in complexity over time?

Interpreting Art reveals subtle features of art writing central to the often unnoticed interpretative practices through which we understand works of art. In doing so, the book also sheds light on possible alternatives, pointing to how writers on art might choose to operate differently in the future.

Canaletto’s Camera explores the ways in which the great Venetian artist Antonio Canaletto (1697-1768) made use of the camera obscura – the forerunner of the photographic camera – as an aid to drawing and painting. It surveys Canaletto’s contacts with contemporary Venetian and Paduan scientists, in particular Francesco Algarotti who wrote on Newton’s philosophy and the camera obscura. Canaletto also relied on many measured drawings of Venetian buildings by his colleague Antonio Visentini, a debt that has not previously been recognised.

Steadman proposes that Canaletto used the camera for two purposes: tracing from real scenes, and copying and collaging drawings and engravings by other artists. By analysing camera sketches made by Canaletto in a notebook, he shows how the artist traced views in Venice and then altered the real scenes in his finished drawings and paintings. By using a reconstructed eighteenth-century design of camera obscura, the author and his colleagues have made drawings of views that Canaletto painted in London. Steadman has recreated both a veduta (a real view) and a capriccio (a fantasy) using Canaletto’s processes of ‘photomontage’. The experiments are detailed in the book, shedding new light on the artist’s procedures, and emphasising how weak and permeable the boundary is between the two types of picture.