Journal of Interdisciplinary History, L:4 (Spring, 2020), 567–586.

The 50th Year: Special Essay 11

Peter Burke
Art and History, 1969–2019 This article discusses a half-
century of encounters between art historians and generalist historians,
and their consequences for the study of art. On the history side,
scholars such as Maurice Agulhon, Patrick Boucheron, Georges
Duby (an amateur painter), Carlo Ginzburg (a painter in his youth),
Serge Gruzinski, Simon Schama, Carl Schorske, and Jan de Vries
might all be described as friendly “invaders” of art history, incorpo-
rating art into their vision of the past. Art historians who have in their
turn invaded history, to everyone’s beneﬁt, include Svetlana
Alpers, Michael Baxandall, Hans Belting, Albert Boime, Horst
Bredekamp, Michael Camille, Timothy Clark, Jaś Elsner, David
Freedberg, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Sergiusz Michalski,
Martin Warnke, and Paul Zanker.

On occasion, individuals from the two disciplines have
worked together, reducing the risks that are often involved in
frontier crossings. For example, Brown, a historian of Spanish paint-
ing, and Elliott, a historian of early modern Spain, collaborated on a
book about the seventeenth-century Spanish palace of the Buen
Retiro, viewing it as a case study in “the complex relationship of
art and politics” and aiming at a “total” history of both the construc-
tion and the “ﬁrst occupation” of the palace in the 1630s. More of-
ten, essays by historians and art historians appear side by side in
collective volumes such as the special issue of the JIH entitled
“Art and History” (1986), published in book form two years later,
or the special issue of the journal Art History (2018) devoted to “Art
and Religious Reform.” The latter volume revealed, according to
one of its editors, “how porous traditional disciplinary boundaries
have become.” Conferences have encouraged the dialogue between

Peter Burke is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History, University of Cambridge. He is the
author of What Is the History of Knowledge? (Cambridge, 2018); What Is Cultural History?
(Cambridge, 2004); History and Social Theory (Cambridge, 1992); “The Crisis in the Arts of
the Seventeenth Century: A Crisis of Representation?” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XL
(2009), 239–261.

© 2020 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, Inc., https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01486

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| PETER B URK E

the two disciplines. Scholars from other disciplines or outside the ac-
ademic world altogether have sometimes joined in the conversation—
for instance, Barrell (English literature), Montias (economics), Alsop
(journalism), Kempers (sociology), Gell (anthropology), and Matless
(geography).1

THE OLD REGIME The boundaries were not always porous; before
the 1960s, the situation was vastly different. History and art history
were usually studied and taught in different departments, and often
in different buildings, at research universities from the mid-
nineteenth century onward. In the universities of Oxford and
Cambridge, courses in modern history were established in 1872
and 1873. Germany, the original home of the professional his-
torian, had ninety tenured history professors (Ordinarien) in the
year 1900. Chairs in art history, a particularly strong subject in
the German-speaking world, were founded at the universities of
Berlin (1844), Vienna (1852), Zurich (1856), Basel (1858), and
Bonn (1860). In the United States, lectureships in art history were
established at the universities of Michigan (1852) and Princeton
(1859). Britain lagged behind—ﬁrst at Edinburgh (1880) and later
at Oxford (1955).2

1
Jonathan Brown and John H. Elliott, A Palace for a King: The Buen Retiro and the Court of
Philip IV (New Haven, 1980). Another collaboration that same year was Loren Partridge and
Randolph Starn, A Renaissance Likeness: Art and Culture in Raphael’s Julius II (Berkeley, 1980).
Theodore K. Rabb and Robert Rotberg (eds.), Art and History: Images and Their Meaning
(New York, 1988), which was ﬁrst a special issue, “The Evidence of Art: Images and Meaning
in History,” JIH, XXXVII (1986), 1–310; Bridget Heal and Joseph L. Koerner (eds.), the
special issue, “Art and Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe,” Art History, XL
(2018), 240–455; Heal, “Art and Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe,” in idem and
Koerner (eds.), Art and History, 12. JIH’s special issue derived from a conference. So did Freedberg
and de Vries (eds.), Art in History: History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture
(Chicago, 1991), “dedicated to advancing the dialogue” between history and art history. John
Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (New York,
1980); Michael Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth
Century (Princeton, 1982); Joseph Alsop, The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting
(London, 1982); Bram Kempers (trans. Beverley Jackson), Painting, Power and Patronage: The Rise
of the Professional Artist in Renaissance Italy (London, 1992; orig. pub. 1987); Alfred Gell, Art and
Agency (New York, 1998); David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London, 2001).
Irmline Veit-Brause, “The Disciplining of History,” in Rolf Torstendahl and Veit-Brause
2
(eds.), History-Making: The Intellectual and Social Formation of a Discipline (Stockholm, 1996), 7–30;
Heinrich Dilly, Kunstgeschichte als Institution: Studien zur Geschichte e. Disziplin (Frankfurt, 1979);
Wolfgang Beyrodt, “Kunstgeschichte als Universitätsfach,” in Peter F. Ganz (ed.), Kunst und
Kunsttheorie: 1400–1900 ( Wiesbaden, 1991), 313–333.

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569

Separation was not complete. Jacob Burckhardt, who occupied
chairs in both art history and history, published essays on Renaissance
architecture and altarpieces as well as his famous fresco of Italian Re-
naissance culture. Aby Warburg, an independent scholar, did not
need to worry about the frontiers between disciplines and what
he called their “guards” when he wrote his famous essays about
Florentine portraits, the last will and testament of a Florentine
merchant, astrological themes in frescoes in Ferrara, and so on.
Johan Huizinga was inspired to write The Waning of the Middle Ages
(London, 1924) by a visit to an exhibition of Flemish “primitives”
in Bruges. Marxist historians of art such as Frederick Antal, Francis
Klingender, and Meyer Shapiro all refused to exclude economic,
social, and political history from their studies.3

AN INTERDISCIPLINARY MOMENT Notwithstanding those precedents,
the 1960s and 1970s marked a turning point. The two disciplines
began to converge in earnest at a time of increasing enthusiasm for
academic interdisciplinarity, marked by the foundation of new insti-
tutions in a number of different countries, among them the univer-
sities of Sussex (1961), Bochum (1962), Konstanz (1966), La Trobe
(1967), Bielefeld (1969), and Linköping (1970). The foundation of
the JIH in 1969 formed part of that conjuncture.

Art historians who were looking outward at this time included
the Australian Bernard Smith, author of European Vision in the South
Paciﬁc: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas (Oxford, 1960); the
Englishman Francis Haskell, author of Patrons and Painters: A Study
in the Relations Between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque
(New York, 1964); and the Swede Allan Ellenius, whose Karolinska
Bildidéer (Uppsala, 1966) was concerned with the relation between
art and ideas. Both Smith and Ellenius had studied at the Warburg
Institute, and Rubinstein, a historian who interpreted a number of
fourteenth-century frescoes as evidence for political ideas, published
his essay in the Institute’s journal in 1958.4

3 Huizinga (trans. Fritz Hopman), The Waning of the Middle Ages (London, 1924), orig. pub.
in Dutch as Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (Amsterdam, 1919). The original title, Autumn of the
Middle Ages, was used in the second (fuller) English version (trans. Rodney J. Payton and
Ulrich Mammitzsch, Chicago, 1996).
4 Nicolai Rubinstein, “Political Ideas in Sienese Art: The Frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti
and Taddeo di Bartolo in the Palazzo Pubblico,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,
XXI (1958), 179–207.

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| PETER B URK E
From the 1970s onward, this trickle became a ﬂood. Among
the most important early contributions from the side of the art his-
torians were books by Baxandall (1972), Clark (1973), Bredekamp
(1975), Warnke (1976), and Girouard (1978). Artistic genres such
as the landscape and the portrait were placed, or more exactly
replaced, in their social and political contexts. Sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century portraits were examined as expressions of
individualism or, as Erving Goffman put it, “the presentation of
self,” while nineteenth-century paintings of typical national land-
scapes (in Britain, Scandinavia, the United States, and elsewhere)
were analyzed as expressions of national identity.5

Why did art historians make this turn toward generalist his-
tory at this time? The shift from an overwhelming concern with
style to an interest in iconography, exempliﬁed by the work of
Erwin Panofsky and Jan Białostocki, encouraged the turn, although
it does not fully explain it. Another part of the story is the discovery
of “context.” Like their colleagues in departments of literature, art
historians were becoming increasingly concerned with the milieu or
situation from which the works that they studied emerged—from
the micro-milieu of art patronage to the wider milieu of political
events. Such concerns were no longer left to Marxists.

The generalist historians’ desire to include art in their studies
was part of a wider movement for a “total history” best known in
its French incarnation, the so-called “Annales School,” but visible
in other countries as well. In an attempt to include every aspect of
human life, this movement turned not only to texts for evidence

5 Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of
Pictorial Style (New York, 1972); Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution
(London, 1973); Bredekamp, Kunst als Medium soziale Konﬂikte: Bilderkämpfe von d. Spätantike bis z.
Hussitenrevolution (Frankfurt am Main, 1975); Boehm, Bildnis und Individuum (Munich, 1985);
Burke, “The Presentation of Self in the Renaissance Portrait,” in Historical Anthropology of Early
Modern Italy (New York, 1987), 150–167; Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday
Life (New York, 1959); Ann J. Adams, Public Faces, Private Identities: Portraiture and the Production of
Identity in 17th-Century Holland (New York, 1998); Warnke, Politische Landschaft: zur Kunstgeschichte
der Natur (Munich, 1992); Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity
in England and the United States (New York,1993); Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National
Representation: Britain 1815–1850 (Princeton, 1997); Matless, Landscape and Englishness. At this time,
social historians began to incorporate architecture into their studies. We omit this perspective from
the discussion for lack of space, but pioneering works in this vein include Warnke, Bau und
Überbau: Soziologie der mittelalterlichen Architektur nach den Schriftquellen (Frankfurt am Main,
1976); Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History
(New Haven, 1978).

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571

but also to objects, such as images. Febvre, one of the founders of
the group, who called himself a disciple of art historian Louis
Courajod, gave lectures on the art of the French Renaissance;
Braudel, the group’s leader in its second generation, included art-
ists in his study of Italians abroad.6

All the same, historians appeared to be—and perhaps remain—
less bold, less likely to move into the territory of art than art historians
are to move the other way. Signiﬁcantly, in 1979, Agulhon, another
member of the Annales group, still felt the need to defend his study of
the history of Marianne as the female personiﬁcation of France against
the idea that it was trivial. Nonetheless, further studies by historians
such as Elliott (1980), Starn (1980), Ginzburg (1981), and Scribner
(1981) quickly followed, and not long thereafter, many more.7

The convergence of history and art history has resulted in a
body of work too large to analyze in detail herein. The art of the
Italian Renaissance in particular has attracted scholarly approaches
from many angles—economic, social, political, and artistic—for a
long time. Studies have often focused on the patronage system
and the responses of artists to its constraints. Witness, for example,
the work of Antal (1947) and, more recently, Kent and Simons
(1987), Hollingsworth (1994), Dale Kent (2000), Jill Burke (2004),
and O’Malley (2005). The surviving contracts clearly reveal that the
balance of power was on the patrons’ side and that artists who are
now famous were treated in their day like ordinary artisans. One of
the achievements of the generalist historians in this ﬁeld has been to
show how art patronage formed part of a much wider system of
patron–client relations.8

6 Lucien Febvre (ed. and trans. Marian Rothstein), Life in Renaissance France (Cambridge,
Mass., 1977); Fernand Braudel (trans. Sian Reynolds), Out of Italy 1450–1650 (Ann Arbor,
2008; orig. pub. 1991).
7 Agulhon, Marianne au combat: l’imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1789 à 1880 (Paris, 1979);
Brown and Elliott, Palace; Partridge and Starn, Renaissance Likeness; Ginzburg, Indagini su Piero: il
Battesimo, il ciclo di Arezzo, la Flagellazione di Urbino (Turin, 1981); Robert W. Scribner, For the
Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (New York, 1981).
8 Frederick Antal, Florentine Painting and Its Social Background (London, 1947); F. William
Kent and Patricia Simons (eds.), Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy (Oxford,
1987); Mary Hollingsworth, Patronage in Renaissance Italy (London, 1994); Dale Kent, Cosimo
de’Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre (New Haven, 2000); Jill Burke,
Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence (University Park,
2004); Michelle O’Malley, The Business of Art: Contracts and the Commissioning Process in Re-
naissance Italy (New Haven, 2005); Guy F. Lytle and Stephen Orgel (eds.), Patronage in the
Renaissance (Princeton, 1981).

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Because the Renaissance is often in the limelight, it is more
illuminating to examine other movements, periods, and topics.
This article therefore proceeds with an analysis of three case
studies—art and the Reformation in the sixteenth century, the rise
of the art market in the eighteenth century, and the proliferation
of political monuments in the nineteenth century—before discuss-
ing two general problems, that of agency and that of deciding
what counts as “art.”

THE REFORMATION The explosion, from the 1980s onward, of
studies about the importance of art (or, more generally, of images)
in both the Catholic and Protestant reformations offers an example
of both the convergence and the continuing difference between
the interests of art historians and those of plain historians. These
studies tend to center on two main themes, one negative and
the other positive. The negative theme is iconoclasm, the destruc-
tion of images; its complementary opposite is propaganda, the
making of images in order to persuade. Notwithstanding the in-
vestigation of both themes in various regions and throughout var-
ious periods, from early medieval Byzantium to the twentieth
century, the scholarly concentration of studies on the sixteenth
century remains remarkable.9

Odd as it may seem that one of the richest examples of col-
laboration between generalist historians and art historians should
be the destruction rather than the creation of art, it makes perfect
sense given the problems that iconoclasm poses. For generalist his-
torians, iconoclasm is primarily a historical phenomenon in need
of explanation. Is it an example of “mindless” violence, or did it
have a purpose? For a subset of this group, ecclesiastical historians,
what matters is to reconstruct the arguments for and against the
legitimacy of religious images. For art historians, however, icono-
clasm, which was “written out” of art history until the 1970s, is

9 The scholarly concentration of studies on the sixteenth century include, besides the studies
cited in the following paragraph, Hans-Dietrich Altendorf (ed.), Bilderstreit (Zurich, 1984);
Carlos Eire, War against the Idols (New York, 1986); Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts
(New York, 1988); Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question
in Western and Eastern Europe (New York, 1993; orig. pub. 1989); Scribner (ed.), Bilder und
Bildersturm ( Wiesbaden, 1990); Gruzinski, La guerre des images (Paris, 1990); Olivier Christin,
Une révolution symbolique: l’iconoclasme Huguenot et la reconstruction catholique (Paris, 1991); Lee P.
Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zürich, Strasbourg and Basel
(New York, 1995).

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A R T AN D H I S TO R Y
both a disaster, depriving the world of magniﬁcent works of art,
and precious evidence of the public response to images.10

Two books published in the 1980s typify the contrast. The
ﬁrst, written by two French historians, explicates the wave of icon-
oclasm in Flanders and northern France in the summer of 1566 in
myriad ways—by mapping its distribution, reconstructing its chro-
nology, identifying its participants, determining whether it was
spontaneous or premeditated, assessing the relevance of the poor
harvest of that year, and, ﬁnally, interpreting the destruction as a
ritual of puriﬁcation by zealous Protestants who associated images
with idolatry. In similar fashion, Heimpel, a German medieval his-
torian, who tried to identify the iconoclasts, summarized his con-
clusions in the epigram, Die Bilderstürmer waren die Bilderstifter
(often translated, “the image breakers were the image makers,”
meaning not the artists but the people who had paid for images
and became angry when Martin Luther and other preachers told
them that they had spent their money in vain).11

The second book, written by Freedberg (whose dissertation at
Oxford in 1972 treated iconoclasm and painting in the Netherlands),
bears the subtitle Studies in the History and Theory of Response. In his
chapter devoted to iconoclasm, Freedberg shows himself to be well
aware of the historical context studied by Deyon and Lottin in Les
casseurs de l’été 1566, but he is more interested in what he accuses
the “purely empirical historians” of neglecting, “the deeper psycho-
logical issues”—the emotions triggered by images and the power and
the paradoxes of iconoclasm in all periods. “We love art and hate it;
we cherish it and are afraid; we know of its powers.” Hence, the
book’s title, The Power of Images. More recently, Joseph Koerner
noted Luther’s claim that iconoclasts felt the need to break images
precisely because they took their power seriously.12

Koerner also studied the devotional art of the Lutherans, who
were less iconophobic than the Zwinglians and the Calvinists but
preferred their paintings to adopt a more modest style, as visitors to
churches in Saxony or Denmark can still observe today. In any

10 Koerner, “Afterword,” in Heal and idem (eds.), Art and Religious Reform, 216.
Solange Deyon and Alain Lottin, Les casseurs de l’été 1566: l’iconoclasme dans le Nord de la
11
France (Paris, 1981); Christin, Une révolution symbolique, also stresses puriﬁcation. Hermann
Heimpel, Der Mensch in seiner Gegenwart (Göttingen, 1954), 134.
12 Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago,
1989), 390, 388; Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (London, 2004), 153–168.

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case, Huldrych Zwingli objected only to images in churches. Both
he and Jean Calvin allowed images to be displayed in houses as
moral examples. The unintended consequences of the Reforma-
tion may also have been important. It was suggested long ago that
the ban on religious images in churches (or “temples,” as Calvinists
often preferred to call them) led to a rise of secular paintings in the
Dutch Republic and elsewhere, the response of artists to a fall in
the demand for Madonnas and saints.13

The study of sixteenth-century art as a means of religious per-
suasion or propaganda also came to prominence during the 1980s.
For example, the historian Scribner turned to the study of images
as a means to discover popular attitudes regarding the Lutheran
Reformation, which occurred at a time when most Germans—
the “simple folk,” as Luther called them— could not read. Scribner
studied cheap prints that vividly contrasted the poverty and humility
of Christ with the greed and arrogance of the pope, and (ironically
enough) presented Luther as a saint with a halo at a time when
Luther and other Protestant leaders were trying to do away with
the cult of saints. A few years later, the art historian Keith Moxey
produced a complementary study also focused on cheap German
woodcuts of the early sixteenth century. Despite the reference to
“popular imagery” in his title, Moxey was hostile to descriptions of
these woodcuts as “folk art” or as a “mass medium.” Like Scribner,
he viewed these images as part of a campaign by elites to persuade
ordinary people to support what we call the Reformation.14

On the Catholic side, Emile Mâle’s L’art religieux après le
Concile de Trente (Paris, 1932) had already identiﬁed changes in
religious iconography and placed them in the context of the
Counter-Reformation. Later scholars took up the mantle of
Mâle’s pioneering work. De Maio, for instance, produced two
case studies of Counter-Reformation art, one on Michelangelo
and the other on Naples. Gruzinski, a historian of Latin America,

13 Andrew Morrall, “The Family at Table: Protestant Identity, Self-Representation and the
Limits of the Visual in Seventeenth-Century Zurich,” in Heal and Koerner (eds.), Art and Religious
Reform, 336–357. For this argument about the ban, which goes back at least as far as the nineteenth-
century Dutch minister (and Prime Minister) Abraham Kuyper, see Seymour Slive, “Notes on
the Relationship of Protestantism to Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting,” Art Quarterly,
XIX (1956), 2–15.
14
Imagery in the Reformation (Chicago, 1989), 8–9.

Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk; Keith Moxey, Peasants, Warriors and Wives: Popular

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wrote several books about the history of images, primarily in
colonial Mexico, and what he calls the “image war” waged by
Catholic missionaries, who destroyed what they called the “idols”
of indigenous gods (iconoclasm was not conﬁned to Protestants)
and replaced them with images of Catholic saints. Particular atten-
tion has been paid to the role of Jesuits both as patrons and occa-
sionally as artists. Some studies tackle the controversial question of
the distinctiveness of their contribution to the art of the Counter-
Reformation. Others employ modern theories of propaganda to
analyze the function of the images produced by or for the Jesuit
order.15

THE RISE OF THE ART MARKET A different opportunity for collab-
oration, this time between economic historians and art historians,
derives from the growing interest in the early history of the art
market. It is surely no coincidence that this interest has developed
at a time when today’s art market makes so many headlines, thanks
to the higher and higher prices paid for selected works of art, both
old and new.

In Renaissance Italy, most paintings were produced for indi-
vidual patrons, “made on a bespoke basis,” as Baxandall once put
it. In Italy, the sale of works of art to individuals who had not
commissioned them goes back at least to the fourteenth century.
The art market probably thrived more than surviving documents
reveal; unlike commissioned works, cheap works that were sold
informally (in markets and fairs or directly from the workshop)
would presumably not have required contracts or elaborate records
of any kind. Some religious paintings of popular subjects, such as
Annunciations or Nativities, might be left unﬁnished to accom-
modate the requirements of particular customers, thus occupying
a space between the market and patronage systems.16

The evidence for the purchase of paintings “off the peg” is
greater in the southern Netherlands, the Dutch Republic, and,
as the market system expanded in the eighteenth century, else-
where. In the case of late ﬁfteenth-century Bruges, Martens noted

15 Romeo De Maio, Michelangelo e la Controriforma (Rome, 1978); idem, Pittura e Controri-
forma a Napoli (Rome, 1983); Gruzinski, La guerre des images; Rudolf Wittkower and Irma B.
Jaffé (eds.), Baroque Art: The Jesuit Contribution (New York, 1972); Evonne Levy, Propaganda
and the Jesuit Baroque (Berkeley, 2004).
16 Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 1.

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“the increase of on spec production of cheaper works.” A similar in-
crease took place in sixteenth-century Antwerp and in seventeenth-
century Amsterdam, followed in the eighteenth century by the rise
of an art market in Rome, Paris, and London, as well as in other
cities. This trend did not develop in isolation but formed part of
what is often described as the commercialization of Western
European society.17

A major contribution to this growing ﬁeld of study came
from Montias, a Yale economist previously known for his studies
of central planning in Poland and economic development in
Communist Romania. Montias moved to art history in mid-
career, producing a series of books about Dutch art in the seven-
teenth century from an economic perspective. In a case study of
the city of Delft, based mainly on the evidence of inventories,
Montias estimated that the city had “forty to ﬁfty thousand
paintings” c. 1650, their owners amounting to “perhaps two-
thirds of the population.” Most of the paintings were bought
cheaply, for “two gulden or less.” In similar fashion, van der
Woude, a Dutch economic historian, estimated that 25 million
paintings were produced in the Dutch Republic between 1580
and 1800.18

Alongside new works, a market in second-hand pictures or
“old masters” was becoming important by the seventeenth cen-
tury, as collecting works of art became more and more fashionable
among princes, such as Philip IV and Charles I, as well as among
aristocrats. The investigation of the history of collections and
collectors has been growing ever since the launch of the Journal
for the History of Collections in 1989. In this interdisciplinary enter-
prise, museum curators and art historians have joined forces with

17 Maximilian P. J. Martens, “Some Aspects of the Origins of the Art Market in Fifteenth-
Century Bruges,” in Michael North and David Ormrod (eds.), Art Markets in Europe,
1400–1800 (Aldershot, 1998), 26. See also Lorne Campbell, “The Art Market in the Southern
Netherlands in the Fifteenth Century,” Burlington Magazine, 118 (1976), 188–198. Elizabeth
A. Honig, Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp (New Haven, 1998), 13–18; Paolo
Coen, Il mercato dei quadri a Roma nel diciottesimo secolo (Florence, 2010); David Ormrod,
“The Origins of the London Art Market,” in Michael North and idem (eds.), Art Markets
in Europe, 1400–1800 (New York, 1998), 167–186; Antoine Schnapper, “Probate Invento-
ries, Public Sales and the Parisian Art Market,” ibid., 131–142.
18 Michael Montias, Artists and Artisans, 220, 327; Ad van der Woude, “The Volume and
Value of Paintings in Holland at the Time of the Dutch Republic,” in Freedberg and de Vries
(eds.), Art in History, 285–372.

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historians of consumption, sociologists, and even psychologists,
some of whom treat collecting as pathological.19

At the more expensive end of the scale, the art market took
the form of what Alsop called “a cultural-behavioral system”—a
network of institutions and social roles that included, and still in-
cludes, art auctions, exhibitions, dealers, forgers, connoisseurs (in
other words, well-informed collectors, whether concerned with
rarity or with skill), critics (publishing reviews of exhibitions, as
Denis Diderot did in his Salons), and art historians (often called up-
on to authenticate the attribution of unsigned works to famous
artists).20

Competition is an essential element in the market system. In
the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century, for instance,
many artists responded to it by what economists call “product
differentiation.” Different artists specialized in different subject
matter—landscapes, portraits, still lives, and various “genre” paint-
ings. As the division of labor increased, these genres came to be
subdivided. Seascapes and townscapes appeared alongside land-
scapes. Some painters of still lives specialized in ﬂowers and others
in “Vanitas” paintings in which objects such as hourglasses, clocks,
and newspapers showing their date of publication all emphasized
the brevity of human life. Genre painters produced tavern scenes,
market scenes, and kitchens. Others concentrated on church inte-
riors or on skating scenes. Needless to say, attempts to examine art as
an economic enterprise have proved controversial. A well-known
sensitive case involved art historian Alpers’ study of Rembrandt’s
workshop, which received a favorable review in the Journal of
Economic History but a denunciation as reductionist from some of
her colleagues in art history.21

On the consumer’s side, one response to the market system
was investment in art, whether in the narrow sense of buying
works to sell for proﬁt or in the wider sense of buying them for

19 Classic studies in this ﬁeld include Krzysztof Pomian (trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier), Col-
lectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1990; orig. pub. 1987); Jaś Elsner and
Roger Cardinal (eds.), The Cultures of Collecting (London, 1994); Brown, Kings and Connoisseurs:
Collecting Art in 17th-Century Europe (New Haven, 1995). For the pathology, see Werner
Muensterberger, Collecting, an Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives (Princeton, 1994).
20 Montias, Artists and Artisans, 183–219; Alsop, Rare Art Traditions; Thomas Crowe, Painters
and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, 1985).
21 Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (Chicago, 1995).

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what Bourdieu called “symbolic capital,” an important means of
social mobility. Studies of this phenomenon by economic and
social historians may not be common, but they are not lacking ei-
ther. Other scholars have investigated the relationship between in-
creasing wealth and the growing demand for art in the Dutch
Republic or between “the sudden explosive rise of Dutch eco-
nomic power [and] the similarly surprising and rapid ﬂowering
of Dutch cultural life” in the seventeenth century, including
painting.22

THE POLITICS OF MONUMENTS The interaction between art and pol-
itics has aroused even more interest than that between art and eco-
nomics. Three generalist historians—Rubinstein, Skinner, and
Boucheron—have written about the frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti
in the town hall (Palazzo Pubblico) of Siena, viewing them as
contributions to political theory. In our age of advertising, it is
no surprise to discover a large and ever-expanding literature on
the “fabrication,” “marketing,” or “selling” of public images of
rulers, from the Roman emperor Augustus to Benito Mussolini,
via the emperor Maximilian, the Tudors, and King Louis XIV.
Other historians prefer to employ the concept of propaganda,
which is technically an anachronism if employed before the age
of the French Revolution but a useful anachronism all the same.23
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, statues of rulers
were sometimes erected on public squares. They included monu-
ments to Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici on Piazza della Signoria
in Florence; Louis XIV on Place des Victoires in Paris; and Peter the
Great on Senate Square in St. Petersburg, the “bronze horseman”

22 Annalisa Guarducci (ed.), Investimenti e civiltà urbana, secoli xiii–xviii (Florence, 1989);
Richard Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore, 1993);
de Vries, “Art History” in Freedberg and idem (eds.), Art in History, 255.
23 Quentin Skinner, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The Artist as Political Philosopher,” Proceedings
of the British Academy, LXXII (1987), 1–58 (a reply to Rubinstein’s “Political Ideas in Sienese
Art”); Boucheron (trans. Andrew Brown), The Power of Images (New York, 2018; orig. pub
2013). For an intervention by an art historian, see Enrico Castelnuovo, Ambrogio Lorenzetti: Il
buon governo (Milan, 1995). Dino Biondi, La fabbrica del duce (Florence, 1967); Zanker (trans.
Alan Shapiro), The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor, 1990; orig. pub. 1987);
Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, 1992); Larry Silver, Marketing Maximilian:
The Visual Ideology of a Holy Roman Emperor (Princeton, 2008); Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor
Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (New Haven, 2009); Henk van
Veen, “Art and Propaganda in Late Renaissance and Baroque Florence,” Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes, XLVII (1984), 106–118; Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque.

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described in a poem by Alexander Pushkin. The nineteenth cen-
tury, however, was the great age of “statuemania,” to borrow
Agulhon’s term. Noting that the rise of statues followed the revolu-
tions of 1789, 1830, and 1870, Agulhon suggested that the prepon-
derance of ﬁgures who were neither saints nor kings should be
interpreted as an expression of secular, liberal values. Since his work
in the 1970s, studies of this phenomenon have multiplied, encour-
aged by the boom in historical studies of nationalism and memory.24
As in the case of religious art, attention has been paid to both
the destruction of secular images and their fabrication. This interest
was doubtless encouraged by the wave of political iconoclasm that
followed the demise of Communist regimes in Central and Eastern
Europe after 1989, sweeping away statues of Joseph Stalin, Vladimir
Lenin, and Felix Dzerzhinsky (head of the Soviet secret police).
McBride, an Irish historian (who was surely thinking of Admiral
Horatio Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin, blown up by the Irish Republi-
can Army in 1966), described this form of destruction as “a tradition
of explosive de-commemoration.” It co-exists alongside a non-
violent tradition of removal and re-erection of monuments, usually
in some form of open-air museum or statue park. Statues of Queen
Victoria are still standing in Delhi, for instance, as are statues of
Stalin in Budapest. Less dramatic, this practice also deserves study
as an aspect of the links between political and cultural history.25

Two major themes dominated the study of public monu-
ments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ﬁrst theme
is a political one, nationalism. In Latin American cities, bronze
horsemen are highly visible, usually in the form of national liber-
ators like José San Martín and Manuel Belgrano in Buenos Aires;
San Martín and Bernardo O’Higgins in Santiago; José Gervasio
Artigas in Montevideo; and Simon Bolívar in Caracas, Bogotá,
Lima, and Medellín. In many Italian cities, statues of Giuseppe
Garibaldi (nearly 400 of them), or, less frequently (and standing
rather than riding), of Camillo Benso, count of Cavour, have a

24 Agulhon, “La ‘statuomanie’ et l’histoire,” Ethnologie française, VIII (1978), 145–172; Boime,
Hollow Icons: the Politics of Sculpture in 19th-Century France (Kent, Ohio, 1987); Lars Berggren and
Lennart Sjöstedt, L’ombra dei grandi: monumenti e politica monumentale a Roma, 1870–1895 (Rome,
1996); Michalski, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage, 1870–1997 (London,1998).
25 Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution
(London, 1996); Ian McBride, “Memory and National Identity in Modern Ireland,” in idem
(ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (New York, 2001), 2n.

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similar prominence on public squares, many of them erected soon
after the uniﬁcation of Italy in 1871. Statues of Dante, which are
homages to the nation as much as to poetry, are also ubiquitous. In
what was newly united Germany, Otto von Bismarck and Johann
Wolfgang Goethe took the places of Cavour and Dante. The
United States, too, has what Boime, an art historian, calls its “na-
tional icons,” from the Statue of Liberty to the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial. Many statues of Confederate generals such as Robert E.
Lee and Thomas Jonathan (better known as “Stonewall”) Jackson
in the South, monuments to a failed attempt at independence, are
now waiting their turn for de-commemoration.26

The second theme in recent studies of public monuments is a
social one, patronage, whether public or private. As Savage re-
marked, “Public monuments do not arise as if by natural law to
celebrate the deserving: they are built by people with sufﬁcient
power to marshal (or impose) public consent to their erection.”
The attempt to discover what kind of people these were has in-
spired much recent research. Boime made the point that given the
cost of production, sculptors, much more than painters, needed
support from the state, and that the French government used
sculpture “to project a particular image.” So did municipalities.
After 1871, the city council of Paris was responsible for some sig-
niﬁcant commissions, notably the monument to the Republic
(1883) on Place de la République and the Triumph of the Repub-
lic (1899) on Place de la Nation. Statues of heroes of the Revolu-
tion, such as Jean-Paul Marat and Georges Danton, reinforced the
message, and statues of Étienne Dolet and Diderot paid respect to
individuals regarded as the Revolution’s precursors.27

France was not alone in this political use of sculpture. In
Britain, James Wolfe’s monument in the Abbey, in which Prime
Minister William Pitt (the Elder) took a close interest, was “the
ﬁrst memorial built as state propaganda.” Nelson’s Column in
Trafalgar Square, erected through a public subscription organized
by a committee mainly composed of members of both Houses of
Parliament, straddles the frontier between public and private

26 Albert Boime, The Unveiling of the National Icons (New York, 1998); Hans A. Pohlsander,
National Monuments and Nationalism in 19th Century Germany (New York, 2008).
27 Kirk Savage, “The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monu-
ment,” in John R Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton,
1994), 135; Boime, Hollow Icons, 4; Michalski, Public Monuments, 13–55.

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initiative. In Italy, tourists who pass the statue of Giordano Bruno
on Campo de’Fiori in Rome are usually unaware that it was the
brainchild of Prime Minister Francesco Crispi, who had it built to
honor a leading heretic and thus strike a blow against the
Church.28

Other monuments were the result of subscriptions from indi-
viduals outside the public sphere. In fact, the original idea of a
monument to Bruno came from the University of Rome and
had the endorsement of the Freemasons before Crispi intervened.
The subscription campaign for a statue of Voltaire in Paris, which
began in 1867, was led by Léonor-Joseph Havin, a republican an-
ticlerical politician and journalist. A stroll through central London
will quickly produce examples of other group initiatives, with the
evidence coming from inscriptions on the pedestals. In Waterloo
Place, for instance, a plaque describes the statue of Field Marshal
John Fox Burgoyne as having been “erected by his brother ofﬁcers
of the Royal Engineers.” The statue of the explorer Robert Scott,
better known as “Scott of the Antarctic,” was “erected by ofﬁcers
of the ﬂeet” and that of John Lawrence, Viceroy of India, “by his
fellow subjects, British and Indian” (it would be interesting to
know which Indians gave their rupees to this cause).29

If art expresses attitudes to political
THE PROBLEM OF AGENCY
events, historians need to discover whose attitudes they are. More
generally, the half-century from 1969 to 2019 has seen a major shift
in the social history of art, away from viewing images as an expression
or even a “reﬂection” of society (as Marxists like Arnold Hauser used
to say) and toward viewing them as powerful in their own right. The
titles of many important studies symbolize this shift in orientation.30
The concern with power is linked to an emphasis on action.
Boime discussed both the inauguration and destruction of monu-
ments as patently political acts. Bredekamp recently produced an
essay about the theory of the pictorial act. The interest in action is

28 Holger Hoock, Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War and the Arts in the British World,
1750–1850 (London, 2010), 44; Lars Berggren, Giordano Bruno på Campo dei Fiori; Ett monument
projekt i Rom, 1876–1889 (Lund, 1991).
29
Pierre Nora (ed.), Lieux de Mémoire (Paris, 1984), I, 381–420.
30 Zanker, Power of Images in the Age of Augustus; Freedberg, Power of Images; Boucheron,
Power of Images (translating the French subtitle, “essai sur la force politique des images”).

Jean-Marie Goulemot and Eric Walter, “Les centenaires de Voltaire et de Rousseau,” in

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visible in other disciplines, too. Skinner’s notion of the “speech act”
was borrowed from philosophy and linguistics to intellectual history.
In the study of literature, the “literary act” has become a center of in-
terest. In anthropology, Gell’s Art and Agency: An Anthropological The-
ory (Oxford, 1998) has become a classic. Rejecting alternative
approaches to the anthropology of art, Gell attributed agency to inan-
imate objects. His book is concerned with abstract patterns as well as
with human or animal ﬁgures and with the modern world as well as
with the traditional societies traditionally studied by anthropologists.31

WHAT IS ART? The masks and totem poles with which anthropol-
ogists have often been concerned are certainly objects, but are they
“art”? The question prompts a much more general one: What is art?
Warburg, a pioneer of Kulturwissenschaft (“Cultural Studies,” but in a
wider sense than the term is currently employed in the Anglophone
world) liked to describe himself not as a historian of art but as a “his-
torian of images” (Bildhistoriker). Belting, an art historian—the author
of a book on “the anthropology of the image,” another entitled The
End of Art History? and a third on The History of the Image Before the Age
of Art—argued that the concept of art did not emerge in Europe until
the Renaissance and that it lost its usefulness in the early twentieth
century, with the rise of abstract art.32

Studies of objects in different places raise problems similar to
the ones that Belting identiﬁes in different periods. This point is
vividly illustrated by the turn to global histories of art, increasingly
common in our age of globalization. Take the case of Honour and
Fleming’s World History of Art, currently in its seventh edition. My
review in 1982 had nothing but praise for its discussion of partic-
ular objects from different parts of the world but objected to its
attempt to squeeze them all into the culture-bound category of
art. I still believe it wiser to restrict the term to such places as an-
cient Greece and Rome, the post-medieval West, and the other
cultures (notably, China and Japan) that Alsop used for comparing

31 Boime, Hollow Icons, 13; Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts (Frankfurt, 2010); Quentin
Skinner, “Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts,” Philosophical Quarterly,
XX (1970), 118–138.
32 Hans Belting (trans. Thomas Dunlap), An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body
(Princeton, 2011, orig. pub. 2002); idem (trans. Christopher S. Wood), The End of the History of
Art? (Chicago, 1987; orig. pub. 1985); idem (trans. Edmund Jephcott), Likeness and Presence: A
History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago, 1997; orig. pub. 1990).

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583

and contrasting in Rare Art Traditions (which appeared, coinciden-
tally, in the same year as Honour and Fleming’s book).33

The growing interest in objects, from ex votos to advertise-
ments, that used to be excluded from the traditional Western
canon of “art” has led to the coining of the term visual culture
and the rise of visual-culture studies in the universities, in conjunc-
tion with, but also in competition with, traditional departments of
art history. Generalist historians have their place in visual-culture
studies, alongside students of fashion, the media, and popular cul-
ture, but their interaction with these groups is a different story
from the one told in this article.

CONSENSUS VERSUS CONFLICT The interest in objects that art
historians—or, should we say, “former art historians”?—excluded
from the canon has encouraged a certain convergence with plain
historians in the last half-century. So has the practice of viewing
objects, whether “art” or not, as cultural or ideological constructs
or representations. Notwithstanding the lecture entitled “The Rise
and Fall of the Social History of Art” that Allan Langdale delivered
at the Getty Institute in 1996, the social history of art appears to be
alive and well, and its practitioners continue to innovate.34

Compared with the days of Antal and Hauser, the menu of
questions asked by social historians of art has become much longer
and more various. For example, the central question to which
Honig responded in her book on Antwerp concerned “conjunc-
tions between economic thought and pictorial thought.” O’Malley,
provoked or inspired by Goldthwaite’s argument that the demand
for art in Italy was on the rise in the ﬁfteenth century, studied the
way in which artists responded to this pressure. Turning from eco-
nomics to politics, a number of studies have examined the use of
royal portraits as gifts between princes or as symbols of loyalty on
the walls of courtiers and commoners.35

33 Hugh Honour and John Fleming, A World History of Art (London, 1982); Burke, “A
World History of What?” Art History, VI (1983), 214–217; Alsop, Rare Art Traditions. For
art in East Asia, see Craig Clunas, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences (Princeton 2017); Timon
Screech, Obtaining Images: Art, Production and Display in Edo Japan (Honolulu, 2012).
34 Moxey, Peasants, Warriors and Wives, 6–7.
35 Honig, Painting and the Market, ix; O’Malley, Painting under Pressure: Fame, Reputation and
Demand in Renaissance Florence (New Haven, 2013). For the use of royal portraits, see Rouven
Pons, Die Kunst der Loyalität: Ludwig VIII von Hessen-Darmstadt (1691–1768) und der Wiener
Kaiserhof (Marburg, 2009).

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584

| PETER B URK E

Nonetheless, despite many examples of dialogue and collab-
oration between generalist historians and art historians in the half-
century under discussion, a simple image of consensus would be
misleading. Open conﬂicts have been rare (among the exceptions
to the norm was the dispute at Harvard University in the 1980s
between Clark, a proponent of the social and political history of
art, and Freedberg, a traditional, “pure” art historian who special-
ized on Italian Renaissance painting). More common have been
what were described in 1986 as “the difﬁculties of drawing art
and history together.” A review by Davis, an art historian, criti-
cized Duby’s trilogy on art and society in the Middle Ages for “se-
rious omissions and solecisms” in the course of his effort to
“synchronize changes in art with changes in society.” Other art
historians are, or at least used to be, ill at ease with quantitative
methods. When, at a conference held in 1987, van der Woude of-
fered his calculations of the total number and value of Dutch
paintings during the Republic, some art historians thought that
this project was nothing but “hocus pocus.” No wonder that
one of the editors of the conference proceedings described the
two disciplines as “driving in opposite directions down a common
street.”36

Scholars in the two disciplines still work with “distinct sets of
priorities.” Art historians study objects primarily for their own
sake, whereas generalist historians view them as sources. Using
works of art, or images in general, as a form of evidence about
the past like ofﬁcial documents and other texts has gradually be-
come part of what might be called “normal history,” especially since
the 1980s. A collective example of the importance of this “visual
turn” on the part of generalist historians is the series, “Picturing
History,” founded by Michael Leaman of Reaktion Books in 1997,
which presents itself as “a new kind of historical writing in which
images form an integral part.” It has now reached twenty-seven

36 Rabb and Brown, “The Evidence of Art,” in Rabb and Rotberg, Art and History, 1–6;
Michael T. Davis, review of Georges Duby (trans. Eleanor Levieux and Barbara Thompson),
The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980–1420, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians,
XLI (1982), 156–158; van der Woude, “Volume and Value.” For the hostile reaction, see
Marten Jan Bok, “Pricing the Unpriced,” in North and Ormrod (eds.), Markets for Art,
103. When I was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1967, however, the
distinguished art historian Millard Meiss supported my attempt to measure the rise of secular
paintings in Renaissance Italy via a list of the dated paintings surviving from that period.
De Vries, “Introduction,” in Freedberg and idem (eds.), Art in History, 5.

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585

A R T AN D H I S TO R Y
volumes, ranging from “The Feminine Ideal” to “Picturing Trop-
ical Nature” or “The Devil.” The authors draw from the evidence
of images to discuss problems of cultural, social, political, or eco-
nomic history, paying particular attention to long-lasting stereotypes
of foreigners, women, witches, Jews, and Catholics.37

Yet, some art historians exhibit various degrees of discomfort
with the idea of treating art as evidence, as if to do so (bracketing
the question of the quality of a particular item) is to desecrate it. A
sophisticated expression of this reaction comes from Baxandall’s
Painting and Experience: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style
(New York,1972), itself a landmark in the process of convergence
discussed in this article. Training his sights on Marxist historians
such as Hauser, whose Social History of Art (New York,1951) pre-
sented art as a reﬂection of social trends, and Antal, who associated
particular styles of art with social classes, Baxandall decried “the
philistine level of the illustrated social history” on the lookout
for illustrations of “a Renaissance merchant riding to market”
and so on, as well as “facile equations between ‘burgess’ or ‘aristo-
cratic’ milieux on the one side and ‘realist’ or ‘idealizing’ styles on
the other.” His point is well taken, even if some works of art were
originally intended as illustrations, including what the Spaniards call
costumbrista paintings, presenting the manners and customs of par-
ticular cultures.38

Nearly a half-century later, neither generalist nor art historians have
taken the promising approach that Baxandall advocated and exem-
pliﬁed in 1972 as far as it might reach. Baxandall’s approach is
exempliﬁed in his treatment of ﬁfteenth- and sixteenth-century
German limewood sculpture, including the practices of calligraphy
as well as Mastersong (evincing a “period ear” in parallel to a “pe-
riod eye”). Again, Alpers placed seventeenth-century Dutch art in
a context of a “visual culture” that included the practice of map-
making, bringing painting and cartography together under the
rubric “the art of describing.”

The idea of a visual habitus, inﬂuenced by the experiences
and practices with which both artists and their public are best
acquainted, should not be conﬁned to early modern Europe

37 Rabb and Brown, “Evidence of Art.”
38 Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 152.

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586

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(although, given the gradual fragmentation of culture since the ﬁf-
teenth century, it may be advisable to think of period eye in the
plural). Today, we might do well to approach early twentieth-
century art in this way. Cubism and Futurism, for example, could
be linked to the practice of photography, to the cinema, and to the
recurrent experience of rapid motion by train or plane, successive
views coming from a variety of different angles, including from
above. Despite the increasing number of publications that link
art and history, the opportunities for interdisciplinary work in this
ﬁeld are far from exhausted.

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3 Journal of Interdisciplinary History, L:4 (Spring, 2020), 567–586. image

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