Synopses & Reviews
Style is one of the oldest and most powerful analytic tools available to art writers. Despite the importance of style as an artistic, literary, and historiographic practice, the study of it as a concept has been intermittent, perhaps, as Philip Sohm argues, because style has resisted neat definition since the very origins of art history as a discipline. His analysis of the language that painters and their literate public used to characterize painters and paintings will enrich our understanding about the concept of style.
Review
"Shines a brilliant new light upon the concept and descriptive terminology of artistic style.... Sohm's own writing style, exquisite, incisive, and frequently witty, makes this complex topic accessible, enjoyable, and thought provoking." CAA Reviews
Synopsis
A study of style as an important artistic, literary, and historiographic practice.
Table of Contents
Introduction; Part I. Language and Style: 1. Fighting with style; 2. The language of style; Part II. Definitions of Style: 3. Defining definition; 4. Giorgio Vasari: aestheticizing and historicizing style; 5. Nicolas Poussin and the rhetoric of style; 6. Marco Boschini: the techniques and artifice of style; 7. Filippo Baldinucci: cataloguing style and language; 8. A conclusion on indeterminate styles.