DAVID CARRIER
MUSEUM SKEPTICISM
A History
of the
Display of Art in
Public Galleries
D U K E U N I V E R SIT Y PRE S S Durham and London 2006 

~
90 PICTURING MUSEUM SKEPTICISM
will suggest how to develop a proper philosophical argument. To fully
understand how we can identify the changes produced when paintings
are moved, what is required is not just a bare, ahistorical analysis, but
dose study of the history of the public art museum. That is the task for
the remainder of this book. Chapter 5discusses the general structure of
art museums, and then the remainder of the book presents a sequence
of case studies.
\.
5
Art Museum Narratives
Nothing about museums is as splendid as their entrances-the sudden
vault, the shapely comices, the motionless uniformed guard like a wittily
disguised archangel, the broad stairs leading upward into heaven
knows what mansions ofexpectantly hushed treasure.
-JOHN UPDIKE
A museum based upon Vasari's Lives would start with Cimabue and
Giotto and end with Michelangelo and Titian, focusing on the High
Renaissance, with a small annex devoted to Flemish art. After Vasari's
time, the list of canonical figures expanded. In 1841, for example, Paul
Delaroche's mural for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, included Correggio,
Veronese, Antonello da Messina, Andrew del Sarto, Michelangelo,
Titian, and others ofVasari's heroes, but also such later artists as Caravaggio,
Claude Lorrain, Murillo, Paul Potter, Rembrandt, Rubens, Ruisdael,
Terborch, Van der Helse, Velazquez, and Gaspard and Nicolas Poussin.1
And nowadays many museums add non-European art.
Imagine that thanks to a time travel machine Giorgio Vasari is able
to visit our museums. In the galleries devoted to older European art, he
finds familiar paintings by Giotto, Mantegna, Raphael, Leonardo, and
himself But the arrangement ofthese rooms surprises him. His Lives has
a historical perspective. As Barolsky describes Vasari's organization, '1\11
artists are defined as either coming before Giotto and thus lacking his
virtue or following him as 'disciples' and thus absorbing it."2 But Vasari
hardlyexpected that much ofthe art he describes would be removed from
churches or palaces and exhibited in museums. Personal collections are
usually displayed in aesthetic hangings. In my home, for example, an abstract
painting by Emilio Vedova is next to a print by Alphonse Legros,
and a nineteenth-century Chinese scroll hangs alongside aJacques Callot
t
'­
""
92 ART MUSEUM NARRATIVES
engraving. Like such private displays, the older public hangings typically
were designed to be aesthetically pleasing. Johann Zoffany's The Tribuna
ofthe UfJizi (1777-78), for example, shows a variety of antique sculpture,
and a very dense hanging ofpaintings by Pietro da Cortona, Guido,
Holbein, Michelangelo, Raphael, Guido Reni, Rubens, Titian, and other
artists.3 By contrast, most public museums employ historical hangings.
Were a loan exhibition to present Manet's Olympia (1863), Mi
Cloudy Mountains (u4os), and Sean Scully's A Bedroom in Venice (1988),
paintings from the Musee d'Orsay, the Metropolitan, and the Museum
of Modern Art, New York, we would expect some explanation of how
these seeming disparate works ofart are connected. You might enjoy these
masterpieces without seeking to relate them. But when seeing them in
one gallery, it would surely be natural to seek visual connections. Knowmountains
were for Mi Yu-jen "an auspicious symbol
ro the concept ofgood government" and
ing to a Turner, shows ideal harmony, suggests how to construct a unifying
narrative.4 All three painters are political artists. But here we return
to the essential tension that has motivated our discussion of museum
skepticism. In a museum, you may focus on one work of art in visual
isolation without looking at nearby paintings. But when you do look
around, then it is natural to relate that one picture to others. Museum
narratives thus need to be accompanied by what we have called,
ing Wollheim, an "envelope," some "theory of art" explaining the visual
connection of these objects.
Michel Foucault described his amusement at Borges's fable describing
a Chinese encyclopedia dividing animals into those "(a) belonging to the
Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous,
(g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied,
drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera,
the water pitcher, (n) that 'from a long way off
look like flies.''' 5 Imagine art museums organized in equally eccentric
ways displaying paintings according to size, from smallest to largest; according
to color, grouping Chinese, Indian, and Italian pictures with red
together; or according to birthdate of the curator responsible for acquisition.
An effective installation inspires us to see connections between art
on display. By contrast, these imaginary classifications do not suggest any
ART MUSEUM NARRATIVES 93
interesting visual principles of ordering. Museum hangings based upon
such classifications are unlikely to be employed.
The easiest way to make the case for museum skepticism is to observe
that modern installations dramatically change how we view individual
older paintings. By presenting works ofart in a historical perspective, museums
dramatically transform our visual thinking. "Meaningful
positions can be made as part of the museum's program," Sherman Lee
points out.6 But then there is an obvious conflict between focusing on
individual works of art valued for their own qualities and as items in a
historical survey. Wollheim writes, "It has been, over the centuries ...
within the tradition ofthe West, a natural concern ofthe artist to aid our
concentration upon a particular object by making the object the unique
possessor of certain general qualities." 7
When paintings are set in a historical
narrative, as illustrations of the development from the
cento through to the baroque and the rococo, then to some we
treat them as examples ofperiod styles. "In the Western tradition," Ernst
Gombrich writes, "painting has indeed been pursued as a science."8 In
the Uffizi, for example, you walk from the Cimabue and Giotto, to the
Uccello, and on to the Raphaels, Titians, and the Caravaggio seeing a
story of progress. And the same story is told with different paintings in
the state museums at Berlin, Florence, London, Paris, Stockholm, and
Vienna.
Nowadays churches containing masterpieces function as museums.
But when art tourists at Assisi discuss the frescoes in loud voices, the
Franciscans remind them that they are in a place of worship, not a museum.
Giulio Lorenzetti's Venice andIts Lagoon devotes thirteen pages to
S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, telling the story of the building, fa<;:ade, and
interior, and walking the visitor to the many paintings and sculptures by
the various altars. That church has become like a museum. On
Assumption (fig. 13), described byLorenzetti:
With this work, superb for its daring conception and dimensions, for its
vibrant colouring, its rhythmical balance of mases and lines, Titian has
reached one of the highest expressions of that heroic, ideal transfiguration
of classical rhythm, which he too sometimes drew his inspiration from.
WALL TO THE R.: on a sham-leather fresco background ... appears
the splendid mass. of the MONUM. to DOGE FRANCESCO FORCARI. •••
i
,J
94 ART MUSEUM NARRATIVES
WALL TO THE L.: against a red drapery fresco ... the MaNUM. TO
DOGE NICOLO TRON.9
But there is no historical narrative in this display. Art in churches
remains in its original setting. Typical museums, by contrast, change
hangings regularly. As Kirk Varnedoe has said, "Because we believe that
there's a story to be told doesn't mean we believe that there's one story
graven in stone that one will always understand."10
Literary critics discuss the ways in which our experience of literature
and history are informed by the literary structures ofthis writing. Just as
words form sentences whose sense and reference depend on their components,
so too visual works of art set together have meanings that they
do not possess in isolation. As Mieke Bal puts it, comparing a museum
installation to a statement, "the utterance consists not ofwords or images
alone, norofthe frame or frame-up ofthe installation, but ofthe productive
tension between images, caption (words), and installation {sequence,
height, light, combinations)."ll We may attempt to restrict ourselves to
what Clement Greenberg called tunnel vision, focusing on one painting,
occulting our observation of the art surrounding itP Doing that is
valuable, sometimes even necessary. But Bal identifies our more typical
experience when she asks, "What happens ... when one painting, in a
particular museum room, ends up next to another, so that you see
one out of the corner of your eye while looking at the other?"13 What
happens, of course, is that you see the grouping of paintings as defining
an implied narrative sequence.
Alternate displays then project different interpretations. In the I960s,
installed at the entrance to the second floor galleries of the Museum
of Modern Art, New York, Guernica told an episode in the history of
modernism, leading you toward Abstract Expressionist art. Today in the
Reina Sofia, the Madrid museum of modern art, a short distance from
the Prado, where Goyas The Third ofMay is on display, Guernica is part
ofanother story. Sometimes a contrast is made between neutral settings,
which show art as it really is and hangings projecting interpretations
description. The National Gallery, London, juxtaposes a sacred scene,
altarpiece, and a portrait by Giovanni Bellini and Cima da Conegliano.
<~ a visitor," Nicolas Serota argues, "one is conscious that grouping in
this way places a curatorial interpretation on the works, establishing re­
13· The marble iconostasis, through the arch the high altar with Titian's
A)~'umption, fifteenth cemury. S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice.
Photo: Erich Lessing! Art Resource, N.Y.
~
,J
ART MUSEUM NARRATIVES
could not have existed in the minds of the makers of
Since they are near contemIJlUUiiUlY
these rpbtion!>hins were aooarent to these Venetian
artists The curator's Serota adds, "must be to generate a
condition in which visitors can experience a sense ofdiscovery in looking
at particular paintings ... in a particular room at a particular moment,
rather than finding themselves standing on the conveyer belt of history."
Butonce paintings are in a museum, howcan we avoid experiencing them
in a historical sequence? Just as there is no neutral way of describing art
just as it really is, so no hanging does not project some interpretation.
Ovid tells Tereus's story. Hungry, he ate food provided by his wife
Procne, not knowing that she, avenging his rape of her sister Philomela,
was feeding him the body of their son Itys. We can describe such tragic
situations by use of narrative sentences, sentences which "refer to at least
two time-separated events though they only describe (are only about) the
earliest event to which they refer." 15 Narrative sentences provide true descriptions
ofevents that are unknown to the participants, identifying the
ultimate consequences of actions that are as yet unknown when they
act. Tragedy, Danto adds, "is often generated by the fact that agents lack
a piece of knowledge the author of a tragedy . . . will disclose to the
audience, whose feelings are engaged by the realization that they know
something the character does not." The food that seemed tasty to Tereus
became repulsive as soon as the vengeful Procne identified its source.
"In 1869, the greatest twentieth-century French painter was born": noknew
that until when Henri Matisse's importance became
obvious. Describingone moment of history in terms known only at some
later point, narrative sentences are the spine of history writing.
16
T. J.
Clark says that Jacques-Louis David's Death ifMarat (1793) marks the
origin ofmodernism. "Mycandidate for the beginning ofmodernismwhich
at least has the merit of being obviously far-fetched-is 25 Vendemiarie
Year 2 (16 October 1793, it came to be known). That was the
day a hastily completed painting by Jacques-Louis David, of Marat ...
was released into the public realm."17 Herewe find another narrative sentence.
In 1793 it was too early to be aware that modernismwas beginning.
Michael Fried offers yet another narrative sentence when he writes: "In
a series of remarkable paintings made by staining thinned-down black
paint into unsized canvas in 1951, Pollock seems to have been on the verge
ART MUSEUM NARRATIVES 97
entirely new and different kind of painting.. .
developed the new synthesis
sketched out in Pollock's stain paintings of 1951 was Morris Louis."18
"In 1951, Pollock anticipated Morris Louis's stain paintings": in 1951, no
one could have seen that. And Gombrich employs a narrative sentence
when he places Constable's Wivenhoe Park in the history of landscape
painting. A generation earlier, he writes, Gainsborough declined a similar
commission, finding "the mere imitation of a real view unworthy of
the artist who is concerned with the children of his brain, the language
of the imagination."19 "Gainsborough inaugurated the tradition of English
landscape painting": that statement could not have been understood
in Gainsborough's era. Narrative sentences identify causal connections.
Historians write narrative sentences, making their proposed causal
connections explicit. And museums make such connections implicit in
their hangings. An imaginative curator could illustrate Clark's commentary
by presenting Death ofMaratas the first painting in a history ofmodernism.
And an exhibition called "Constable's Sources" could include a
Gainsborough.
In the old-fashioned hangings of the Wallace Collection, London, or
the Musee Conde, Chantilly, the Poussins are near paintings by other
earlieror later artists from outside France. These museums do not employ
historical hangings. In the Metropolitan Museum, bycontrast, the Poussins
are next to the pictures by Claude Lorrain and Sebastian
other who worked in Rome during the seventeenth
Poussin is set in the historyof French art. But Poussin
not paint for such settings. On July 25, 1665, during the visit to Paris
on which Bernini presented his unsuccessful proposal for a new Louvre,
he visited Paul Freart de Chantelou. That collector owned eleven Poussins,
including the second version ofthe Seven Sacraments.When Bernini
entered the room, only Confirmation was uncovered. The pictures were
unveiled and moved near to the window. He said that Extreme Unction
was like "a great sermon, to which one listens with the deepest attention
and goes away in silence while enjoying the inner experience." Bernini
studied these pictures for an hour, looking at Baptism "for a long while
sitting, and then again ... on his knees, changing his position from time
to time in order to see it better." 20
Like Piero's The Baptism ofChrist, Seven Sacraments have moved re­
98 ART MUSEUM NARRATIVES
peatedly. Put on the art market during the French Revolution, in 1798
they were acquired by the Duke of Bridgewater, whose descendants have
loaned them to the National Gallery ofScotland. When I first saw them
in Edinburgh around 1990, they were in a haphazard hanging. Then at
the Poussin retrospective in Paris, 1994, Seven Sacraments illustrated
stylistic development. Now in Scotland they are alone in a small gallery
with floor tiles imitating those depicted in the paintings with a bench
like that in the paintings. Few viewers devote as much attention to the
individual pictures as Bernini did-and no one normally sees them one
one. In the present dramatic presentation with the floor in the represented
scene extended into the gallery, they function as installation art.
Although they were not intended to be installed in that way, showing
Poussin's paintings in this sequence is a useful way to identify their distinctive
features?l
Philip Fisher notes the important analogy between viewing sequences
of works of art and reading art history: "That we walk through a museum,
walk past the art, recapitulates in our act the motion ofart history
itself, its restlessness, its forward motion, its power to link. ... In so
as the museum becomes pure path, abandoning the dense spatial rooms
of what were once homes, or, of course, the highly sophisticated space
of a cathedral, it becomes a more perfect image of history." 22 Earlier I
made a similar, but less general daim: "In the 1970S ... the very layout
of the Musetun of Modern Art, which took me from Cezanne
Monet through cubism to abstract expressionism, iHustratedArtandCulture.
... The 1984 redesign of the museum reflects a changed estimate of
Greenberg."23 A walk in an art museum is a historical narrative under another
name, for you need but describe what you see as you walk to write
a history. And just as you may momentarily put down a book between
chapters, so too in museums a resting point is desirable. Stepping out
of narrative in the galleries, you momentarily stop before continuing
your historical march. Alexander Sokurov's exhilarating film Russian~
Ark, a continuous visual narrative set in the Hermitage, illustrates this
experience.
1he museum's derivation from the Renaissance palace may influence
hangings. Rosalind Krauss notes, "One proceeds in such a building from
space to space along a processional path that ties each of these spaces
together, a sort ofnarrative trajectory with each room the place ofa sepaART
MUSEUM NARRATIVES 99
rate chapter, but all of them articulating the unfolding of the master
plot." 24 Whatever the plausibility ofthis historical analysis, the analogy
between walking through a museum and reading art history is very suggestive.
In museums, as in books, individual works of art are presented
in a narrative. Ivan Gaskell speaks of "how meaning might be generated
by the juxtaposition of" works of art. "No object," he rightly notes, "is
perceived in isolation and that how any given object is perceived is
affected by its juxtaposition to other objects is a truism ofcuratorial practice."
25 But of course not all hangings are successful interpretations. At
the Louvre in fall 2000 you had to walk through the gallery of Spanish
paintings to get to the rooms containing ethnographic art. And in fall
2001, the uptown Guggenheim in New York devoted the main gallery
to art from Brazil, with Norman Rockwell's paintings in a side gallery.
as an ill-ordered book is frustrating, so too a museum with poor
transitions is fatiguing.
Before the late eighteenth century, museums intermingled artifacts
found today in natural history museums-wondrous stones, fossils,
stuffed animals, and art from cultures without writing-with works of
art.
26
Indeed, in some museums built in the nineteenth century, the Carnegie
Institute in Pittsburgh or the GlasgowArt Gallery and Museum for
example, one large building still contains both paintings and stuffed aniOn
the first floor of the Carnegie, you walk past the small gallery
near the entrance, enter the hall ofsculpture with plaster casts, and then
see the minerals, gems, and fossils. In Glasgow you look down from the
old fashioned close hanging ofpaintings to view armor and firearms. By
contrast, Denon displayed painting and sculpture according to national
schools, separating art from the objects associated with natural history
museums.
27
Hegel described that practice, saying that he wanted the museum
to show not only the external history "but the essential progress of
the inner historyofpainting. It is only such a livingspectacle that can give
us an idea ofpainting's beginning ... of its becoming more living ... of
progress to dramatically moved action and grouping." 28 Most large
public museums follow this basic model.
Just as the acknowledgments ofa book set its tone, so a museum entrance
readies you to view the collection. "There is nothing more discouraging
to thewould-be museum visitor," an oldercommentaryclaims,
"than to arrive inside the door and find himselfconfronted bva seemingly
101
100 ART MUSEUM NARRATIVES
interminable flight of stairs which must be mounted before he attains
his object." 29 On the contrary, since museums originally were homes of
muses it is appropriate that upon entering you walk up stairs, as if
going into an antique temple or a church.What better place to learn the
history ofthe institution that you are entering? Detached from any utilitarian
function, in museums, art is set outside the everyday world. At
the entrance you usually find a free floor plan, which maps the displays,
restrooms, cafe, and shop (fig. 14). These little chartS deserve serious attention,
fOf they tell much about these institutions.
5o
A museum ought
to have a transparentlyclear floor plan, making it easy to return to a work
of art.31
In Boston, Minneapolis, and Cleveland, the original entrances are replaced
by side doors opening into the modern wings, arrangements well
suited to contemporary art, which is more informal than old master
painting. Tadao Ando's Pulitzer Foundation, St. Louis, and its neighbor,
the Contemporary Art Museum designed by Brad Cloepfil, have
ground floor entrances, encouraging visitors to feel that theyare immediately
accessible. At most older institutions you ascend stairs to enter. You
come into the Prado, the National Galleries in London and Washington,
D.C., and the AItes Museum, Berlin by stairs outside the building.
Reversing this well-entrenched convention, some museums ask you to
descend. 1. M. Pei's main entrance to the Louvre takes you down through
the grand pyramid and then underground across the courryard, to come
up in one of the three sections named after figures associated with the
building: Richelieu, Sully, Denon. And you enter the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Los Angeles, through a courtyard, going down stairs.
When you are in the galleries, the artificial lighting and absence of windows
remind you that you are underground, a perverse arrangement in
a city famous for its sunlight.
Once you enter a museum, then usually you choose what narrative to
\follow.
The uptown Guggenheim Museum in New York is a spiral, but
even there you can either walk up or to take the elevator directly to the
top and come down. Shelley Errington argues that the linear strUcture
makes it "difficult to organize, display, and therefore for the viewer to
conceptualize the history of art as anything other than an illustration
of conventional art history's enabling assumption, which is more or less
'one of art influences another.' "32 And in the Sheldon Memorial
'­
1+ Screen shot from the "Visitor Information" section of the 

Metropolitan Museum ofArt Web site, specifically, ground floor plan 

at http://www.metmuseum.orgjvisitor/vi_H_ground_english.htm. 

© 2000-2005, The Metropolitan Museum ofArt. 

All riQhts reserved. 

Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska, Henry Hitchcock explains, "thevisitor is
offered a single path-or, at least, not more than one choice ofpath-in
moving through ... (the galleries), while, on the other hand, anyone of
them can be cut out from the circulation for rehanging without making
the other galleries unapproachable." 33 But most museums offer multiple
paths. Typical American art institutions have an original older building,
usually in a classical architectural style, joined to a more recent addition.
Some have rational plans, but most have grown by accretion. Only a very
few- the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is the most important
example-are rich enough to rebuild completely when remodeling.
Many visitors to rhe Metropolitan Museum go straight up the main
stairs to look at European art. But if you begin in the galleries ofAsian
art, European painting then looks different. At the main entrance, you
102 ART MUSEUM NARRATIVES
go left to view the Greek sculptures and vases or up the grand stairway to
the old master European art, the historical core of the collection. Going
to the left, you walk through a gallery devoted to prints to arrive at the
Islamic wing. On the far side, you enter the large new wing devoted to
modernist and contemporary art. And going down the stairs, you reach
the rooms devoted to the arts ofAfrica and Oceania. But ifyou go right
at the entrance and take the elevator down to the basement, then you
enter the new galleries presenting fashion. In the Frick Collection, New
York, you can turn to the left to head directly to the Fragonards, or walk
through the courryard to the long room containing ThePolish Rider, continuing
on to the Piero della Francesca Crucifixion. If you first look at
the early Renaissance religious paintings, Frick's sensual Fragonards may
look different. In the Louvre's Grand Gallery, walking west takes you to
the later art. And the basic arrangement of the Prado also is chronological,
with fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painting (and sculpture) on the
ground floor; seventeenth- and some eighteenth-century paiiIting on the
second floor, and eighteenth-century painting on the top floor.
Museum skeptics correctly identify ways in which moving old art into
museums can involve changes for the worse. But often placing art in museums
improves how it is seen. And once we are familiar with a hanging,
we tend to resist change. "Many pictures have now hung for far longer in
museums than in the churches or the palaces for which they were originally
designed. Their new associations clusteraround them as evocatively
as their old ones.... Bizarre juxtapositions which would have astounded
earlier patrons and collectors can acquire a new validity of their own."34
InVenice many paintings in theAcademmia come from churches. Bringing
together paintings originally set some distance apart makes it easier to
compare these Bellinis,Titians, and Giorgiones. And ofcourse museums
make it natural to do wider-ranging visual comparisons. In Cleveland,
a short promenade takes you from the Chinese scrolls to landscapes by
~
Claude and Poussin, encouraging reflection on the differences between
European and Chinese ways of representing nature.
Everyonewho visits museums is aware how are organized, but because
this information I present has not been formally analyzed, spelling
it out is important. As yet there exists neither a systematic collection of
museum floor plans nor a general history of museum hangings.
35
Mary
cJ
ART MUSEUM NARRATiVES 103
Anne Staniszewski points out that art historians "have rarely addressed
the fact that a work of art, when publicly displayed, almost never stands
alone: it is always an element within a permanent ortemporaryexhibition
created in accordance with historically determined and self-consciously
staged installation conventions."36 They have not taken much interest
in the history of hanging arrangements.37
"From Courbet on, conventions
of hanging are an unrecovered history," Brian O'Doherty notes.38
Ibat is unfortunate, for very often knowing a work's display helps us
understand visual art. As Andreas Beyer writes, "There is no doubt that
the sequence works of art, their distribution, their hanging or positioning,
even their illumination and wall color- in short, the manner of
their display-arc the essential preconditions to enable them to express
something." 39 Bur because ofthe division of labor between curators and
historians, only rarely is such information discussed.
Kevin Lynch's The Image ofthe City explains how urban dwellers orient
themselves: "People tended to think of path destinations and origin
points: they liked to know where paths came from and where they led.
Paths with clear and well-known origins and destinations had stronger
lut:mmt:s, helped tie the city together, and gave the observer a sense of
his bearings whenever he crossed them."40 Lucid museum displays,
analogy, allow visitors to find their place in the collection, but awkward
hangings leave us disoriented and frustrated. And just as it is unsettling
to find unpredicted material in a book, so it can be surprising to see an
out-of-place painting in a static collection. Once I was astonished to see
Poussin's Arcadian Shepherds on loan from the Louvre in the Frick Museum.
Mary Douglas posits, "Some symbolic scheme oforientations may
be necessary for people to relate to one another in time and space."41 Just
a~ painters often put the most powerful figure at the center, so museums
commonly give their most valued art privileged positions. At the Norton
Simon Museum, Pasadena, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's The Ihumph of
Virtue and Nobility over Ignorance is at the end of a very long sequence
of galleries devoted to older European painting. On the other side, in
the nineteenth-century galleries, Manet's The Rag Picker occupies this
position. On the first floor of the Prado, Spanish painting occupies the
central galleries, with Velazquez's LasMeninas at the far end ofthe largest
gallery offthe middle. And in the National Gallery, London, Piero's The
104 ART MUSEUM NARRATIVES
Baptism ofChrist is visible from a distance, reminding us of its importance.
Flanked by Piero's Nativity and St. George, this hanging stresses
links between Southern and Northern European art.
42
Everyone knows the interpretative language applied in art wClung to
individual paintings. Finding a vocabulary characterizing art in the museum
is, as yet, much more difficult. In his classic account ofthe Caravaggios
in the Cerasi Chapel, S. Maria della Popolo, Leo Steinberg remarks
on the difficulry of photographing the effect of walking in to view the
paintings at a glancing angle.43 Only in the late nineteenth century
the academic vocabulary for interpretation by description evolve, so it
is not surprising that as yet we lack ways to describe experiences in the
museum that we all know bur are not readily able to articulate. Rudolf
Wittkower explains howAnnibale Carracci's frescoes in the Farnese Gallery,
Palazzo Farnese, employ highly complex illusionistic effects: "Since
all this decoration is contrived as if it were real-the seated youths of
flesh-and-blood colour, the herms and atlantes ofsimulated stucco,
the roundels of simulated bronze-the contrast to the painted pictures
in their gilt frames is emphasized, and the break inconsistency therefore
strengthens rather than disrupts the unity of the entire ceiling."44 A
good large color photograph makes it possible to understand this fresco.
But compare Wittkower's description of Francesco Borromini's S. Carlo
alle Quattro Fontane, Rome: "While the triads of undulating bays in
the diagonals are unified by the wall treatment- niches and continuous
mouldings-the dark gilt-framed pictures in the main axes seem to create
effective caesuras. Borromini reconciled in this church three different
structural types: the undulating lower zone ... ; the intermediate zone
of the pendentives . . . j and the oval dome." 45 No one picture could
adequately show the church. Describing an art museum is more like describing
San Carlo than the Farnese Carracci ceiling.
To explain a hanging you need to identify spatial relationships among
paintings, walking your reader through the gallery. In Cleveland, for example,
when stepping back to see Caravaggio's Crucifixion ofSt. Andrew
you look across to the next gallery. In the distance you view Poussin's
Holy Familyon theSteps. Poussin famously said that Caravaggio came into
the world to destroy painting. The hanging encourages reflection on this
rivalry.When you turn around you see Tintoretto's Baptism ofChrist and
so think about the importance ofCaravaggio's Venetian sources. And on
k.
l,.
ART MUSEUM NARRATiVES 105
the right side of Crucifixion ofSt. Andrew is a painting by his follower
Georges de la Tour. An interpretation of Caravaggio's place in art's
tory thus is implicit in the organization of this gallery. Well-organized
museums encourage such searches for apt visual conjunctions.46
Seeing art in a historical hanging often can influence commentary. In
his review of the 1931 Matisse retrospective at the Museum of Modern
Att, New York, Meyer Schapiro wrote:
In hanging the paintings of Matisse in chronological order, the directors
ofthe Museum of Modern Art have offered us a spectacle ofdevelopment
which is ofthe greatest interest. We see within the works ofa single man
the radical transformation ofart.... It has the character of ... two revolutions-the
first in the sudden turn from an impressionistic style to an
abstract, decorative manner ... the second, towards I917, in the return to.
naturalism.47
The hanging made it natural to develop this historical analysis of Matisse's
self-sufficient stylistic development. Displaying Matisse's Luxe,
calmeetvoluptein the Musee d'Orsay close to a painting it quotes, Cross's
L'Airdu soir(I894) makes a different point, showing a source for his original
art.48 And recently in an exhibition at the Kimbell in Texas juxtaposing
masterpieces by Matisse and Picasso, a different narrative was presented,
focusing on the rivalry between two near-contemporaries.49
Knowing the original site of a picture can be important. Piero della
Francesca's The Flagellation ofChrist remains in Urbino, an out-of-theway
town.50
To see it you enter the Palazzo Ducale, walk upstairs, and
proceed through the rooms leading to Guardaroba del Duca to enter a
small room. In London's National Gallery, a Piero is a foreign object, but
the Palazzo Ducale is in Piero's world, for the landscape around Urbino
looks like the background of The Baptism ofChrist and Piero's painted
architecture is similar to the doorframe of the palazzo. The West Lake,
Hangzhou, long an important center for Chinese art, is a subject
for painters working with ink brush on rice paper. Walking in the
summer rain, you realize how a long scroll captures the effect of moving
around the lake. And you learn that ink on paper is the perfect medium
for showing mists. Chinese scroll paintings in American museurus look
different after you visit China.
Where a picture is displayed often influences how it is written about.
106 ART MUSEUM NARRATIVES
The Raphael Sistine Madonna effectively changed "from Church icon to
museum picture" when in 1753 it was taken from a Piacenza church to
Dresden, where Protestants devoted much attention to this painting. "In
51
effect, the Germans created the work anew," Belting writes. The only
German-owned Raphael, it was discussed by many Protestant scholars
and admired by Winckelmann.52 The picture was important to Goethe,
Wagner, and Nietzsche-and to one of Freud's patients: "She remained
two hours in front of the Sistine Madonna, rapt in silent admiration.
When I asked her what pleased her so much about the picture she could
find no clear answer to make. At last she said: 'The Madonna.' "53 Saved
from the fire bombing of Dresden near the end of World War II, Sistine
Madonna is displayed in a setting that very consciously alludes to its
history of interpretation.
Who owned art also legitimately influences how it is interpreted. Much
can be learned about seventeenth-century tastes by studying the collection
of Charles I, who was that rare creature: an aesthete king. "The
absolutist form of government was felt to be an importation from the
Continent, even more so the culture of the London court. Voices were
heard saying that the king had been deceived to the detriment of the
country through gifts ofpaintings, antique idols and trumperies brought
from Rome." 54 For him, as for Louis XIV, art was a political tool. "The
humiliations experienced by the French monarchy during the Fronde
played a determinant role in its return to protection and political use of
the arts." 55 Sometimes our understanding of the political significance of
art depends on its fate after leaving the artists' studios. Impressionism,
T. J. Clark remarks, "became very quickly the house style of the haute
bourgeoisie, and there are ways in which its dissolution into the decor of
Palm Springs and Park Avenue is well deserved: it tells the truth of this
painting's complaisance at modernity."56 It is impossible to fully understand
Impressionist painting without some knowledge of its present day
" collectors.
And how art has been installed long before we view it can justifiably affect
our experience.57 Mina Gregori notes that Caravaggio's Amor Vincit
Omnia (1601-2), "Love Triumphant," sometime between 1629 and 1635
was "in a gallery so that it was the last picture a visitor would come upon,
and ... covered by a curtain, probably not only for reasons of decency
and morality, but also to enhance the surprise aroused in the spectator
""'
ART MUSEUM NARRATIVES 107
this provocative nude painted from life." 58 Since the claim that Caravaggio
made homoerotic pictures appears only in the modern literature,
that old hanging deserves analysis.59
In April 1997, Amor was still in the
West Berlin museum created after the war but with the rationalization
of the German museums after the unification of that country, that collection
is being redone. Vehizquez's venus with a Mirror, to consider a
related example, once hung "salaciously from the ceiling over its owner's
bed," according to Alexander Nehamas.6o
That knowledge changes how
we now see it in the National Gallery, London. Nicolas Poussin's late
EleazerandRebeccaatthe Well, in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, is
displayed without any indication of its provenance. But this picture was
long owned by Anthony Blunt, a fact that has inspired debate about the
attribution.61 Some critics think that his spying infected his art writing.
Temporary hangings also can be revealing. SeeingJackson Pollock's Autumn
Rhythm (Number 30) next to the famous photographs of the artist
at work by Hans Namuth at the recent retrospective at the Museum
of Modern Art, New York, was different from viewing it in its present
home, the Metropolitan Museum ofArt.62 In those photographs, which
had a significant effect on the conception of Pollock as an action painter,
we watch the painting being made. This work of art was made on the
floor, a radical act of experimentation. Today it is hung like a traditional
easel painting. A few years ago the Museum of Modern Art, New York,
hung together a small Jackson Pollock and a similar-looking painting
by Janet Sobel, whose name which does not appear in the usual survey
texts. The wall card read: "Back in 1944 ... [Pollock] had noticed one
or two curious paintings shown by Peggy Guggenheim's by a 'primitive'
painter,Janet Sobel [who was, and still is, a housewife living in Brooklyn].
Pollock (and I myself) admired these pictures rather furtively."63 The
museum expects some visitors to be erudite enough to recall Clement
Greenberg's essay.
The lesson revealed by these examples deserves spelling out in a general
way. Here our intuitive analysis may gain authority from appeal to
the literature ofphenomenology. How you see one painting can depend
in subtle ways upon what other art is in the room. How you view that
room influences what you expect to see when you walk further. And how
you look at works of art in other galleries, in turn, is aflected by the experience
ofentering the museum and, sometimes, bywhat you see in
108 ART MUSEUM NARRATIVES
streets immediately outside. Because this knowledge of hangings tends
to remain merely implicit, I aim to make it explicit.64
Edmund Husserl's account ofour horizon of expectations usefullydescribes
this way in which visual experience involves both seeing what is
here-and-nowand having an awareness ofwhat lies beyond the immediate
perceptual field. The identity ofany object involves "a series of intuitive
recollections that has the open endlessness which the "1 can always
do so again" (as a horizon of potentiality) creates. Without such "possibilities"
there would be for us no fixed andabiding being, no real and no
ideal world."65 Maurice Merleau-Ponty explains this point in a clearer
way: "I anticipate the unseen side ofthe lamp because 1can touch it-or
a 'horizontal synthesis'- the unseen side is given to me as 'visible from
another standpoint: at once given but only immanently.... the perceived
thing is ... a totality open to a horizon of an indefinite number
of perspectival views which blend with one another."66 Looking at the
front ofa building, you know that moving will reveal its sides. You would
see an indiscernible flat movie set differently. In a museum, to borrow
this phenomenological vocabulary, we may speak of a horizon both literally,
to encompass what we see when we walk beyond one picture and
also figuratively, to describe the very real influence of reading about that
picture.67
But after drawing extended attention to the influence ofmuseum floor
plans and the influence of these various hangings, I would not overemphasize
their ultimate importance. What is most remarkable about
Denon, Francis Haskell writes, "is not so much the scope of his collection
or the intellectual interest he showed in its historical importance as the
genuine feeling that he seems to have had even for thoseworks which least
conformed to conventional taste."68 Because the natural concern of the
artist is, in Wollheim's words, "to aid our concentration upon a particular
object by making the object the unique possessor of certain general~
characteristics," the ultimate goal of the curator is to have us attend to
the individual artifacts.69
Nothing prevents you from walking directly to
some favorite painting, taking little note of the museum flow plan. Nor
need you read the wall labels. And even when an exhibition is arranged
chronologically, it is usually possible to walk to the end and then view the
art in reverse chronological order. Perversely reading a book from back
to front takes effort, but refusing to follow the ordering imposed by a
\.
;oJ
ART MUSEUM NARRATIVES 109
curator is easy. After a few visits to the National Gallery, London, going
in chronological order, David Finn "got the idea ofwalking through the
museum in the opposite direction. It took an enormous wrench not to
begin at the beginning," he reports, but "it was as if 1 were seeing that
part of the museum for the first time."70 His instructive experiments remind
us that the historical hangings ofour museums influence- but do
not entirely determine- how we see the art they display.
238 NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR
things that appear identical (in one respect) are then observed to differ. (4) The
Ames rooms (lttelson, The Ames Demonstrations in Perception, 40): two rooms,
viewed with monocular vision from a proper viewpoint, "appear to be rectangular
and identical.... Both rooms present to the retina the same pattern that
would be produced by a normal rectangular room." But these especially constructed
rooms have distorted walls.lbe first has oblique floor and ceiling and a
real wall; the second, sloping walls between small floor and large ceiling. We see
these oddly shaped rooms as normal rectangular rooms because, in the absence
ofstrong contrary evidence, we believe that they are like the familiar rectangular
rooms we already know.
18. What may give support to this confused way of thinking is a misleading
formulation of Danto's argument. Instead of starting with two distinct things,
and explaining how they are different, someone might rather imagine that one
thing had two very different origins. See Carrier, "Indiscernibles and the Essence
ofArt."
19. Danto, Analytic Philosophy ofAction, 28.
20. Ibid., 29.
21. Fisher, Making andElfacingArt, 3.
22. The best-known account, Wiggins, Sameness andSubstance, has only brief
remarks about art.
23. Gadarner, The Relevance ofthe Beautiful, 19. In his sympathetic summary,
David Couzens Hoy speaks of how Gadamer's position "can be called contextualism,
for according to it, the interpretation is dependent upon, or 'relative to:
the circumstances in which it occurs.... Since no context is absolute, different
lines of interpretation are possible. Bur this is not radical relativism, since not
all contexts are equally appropriate or justifiable" (The Critical Circle, 69).
24. Holly, Panofiky andthe Fountutions ofArtHistory, 53.
25. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, IOI-2.
26. Truth and Method, 133. Gadarner is mistaken, however, to claim: "The
reconstruction of the original circumstances, like all restoration, is a pointless
undertaking in view of the historicity of our being. What is reconstructed, a
life brought back from the lost past, is not the original.... Even the painting
taken from the museum and replaced in the church, or the building restored to
its original condition are not what they once were- they become simply tourist
attractions." Art historians can often reconstruct these original circumstances.
27. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 267. In a shrewd commentary on this
issue, Baxandall, PatternsofIntention, opens with the example ofthe Forth Bridge
near Edinburgh. When looking at such a collaborative creation, what is meant,
he asks, by the creator's intention?
28. Wiggins, Sameness and Substance, I26.
29. In Other Criteria, 318, 320, Leo Steinberg argues that such contemporary
NOTES TO CHAPTER :FIVE 239
experience better equips us to understand art ofthe past; more recent commentators
tend to suggest that it is not so much a matter ofseeing that art as it really
was made as projecting our new interpretation upon it. See Carrier, "Panofsky,
Leo Steinberg, David Carrier."
30. Wind, ArtandAnarchy, 76.
31. Goethe, Italian journey, 343.
32 . Mead, "The Ebb and Flow of Mana Maori," 24. 

33· Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting, 146. 

34· See Soucek, "Nizami on Painters and Paiming:' 12-13.
35· Schapiro, RomanesqueArt, 23.
36. Barolsky, Michelangelo's Nose, 33.
37· Quoted in M. Miller, The Art ofMesoamerica, 202.
38. Nicholson with Keber, Art ofAztec Mexico, 40 . 

39· Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 1-2. 

40. Ibid., 12.
41. See Donoghue, Walter Pater, 28.
42. See Carrier, "On the Possibility ofAesthetic Atheism." 

43· Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 13. 

44· This argument is developed in Wollheim, Art and hs Objects.
45· Aht, "Museum, I, 7," 360.
Chapter 5= Art Museum Narratives
1. Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art, 8-I3.
2. Barolsky, Giotto's Father and the Family of Vasaris Lives, 20.
3· Zoffany made this picture in the Uffizi, "improving" that collection "to
make the selection of pictures gayer and livelier" (Millar, Zoffony and His Tri­
buna,22).
4· See Fong, Beyond Representation, 165, and Carrier, Sean Scully, II8-I 9.
5· Foucault, The Order of Things, xv.
6. Lee, Past, Present, East and West, 62. 

7· Wollheim, On Art and the Mind, III. 

8. Gombrich, Art and fllusion, 34.
9· Lorenzetti, venice and Its Lagoon, 597, 593.
10. Varnedoe, panel discussion, 51.
II. Bal, Looking In, 187.
12. Greenberg used this phrase in conversation with me. 

13· Bal, Lookingln, 161. 

14· Serota, Experience or Interpretation, 55.
15· Danto, Narration andKnowledge, 143, 351.
240 NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE
16. Here I extend Carrier, Writing about VisualArt, Chapter 4.
17. T J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 15.
18. Fried, Art and Objecthood, 229.
19. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 388.
20. Chantelou, Diary ofthe Cavaliere Bernini's Visit to France, 79.
21. See Carrier, Poussin's Paintings, 197n24.
22. Fisher, Making and Effacing Art, 9. Stephen Jay Gould makes a similar
point about natural history museums: "Most museum halls are rectangles with a
preferred linear flow ofvisitors in one direetion along the major axis. All the exhibitions
on the historyoflife that I have ever seen in any museum, anywhere in the
world ... use the bias of progress as a central principle for arranging organisms"
(Dinosaur in a Haystack, 251).
23. Carrier, Artwriting, 35.1 then gave too much importance to Greenberg and
too little to Alfred H. Barr.
24. Krauss, "Postmodernism's Museum without Walls," 43.
25. Gaskell, Vermeers wager, 86.
26. See Findlen, Possessing Nature.
27. See Rosenberg and Dupuy, Dominique-Vivant Denon.
28. Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:870.
29. Jackson, The Museum, 21.
30. See Carrier, "Remembering the Past."
31. The original source for this discussion deserves mention, for it helps exmy
reasoning. Frances Yates discussed the origin and development of the
memory theater, and Gombrich linked her account to the museum (see GomIdeals
and Idols, 204). At a banquet the poet Simonides, who recited a
poem in honor of the host, was called Ollt. During his absence, the roof fell in,
killing all of the guests. Because Simonides remembered where the guests were
sitting, he is able to identifY the bodies. "This experience suggested to the poet
the principles of the art of memory of which he is said to have been the inventor"
(Yates, The Art ofMemory, 2). The poet remembers by associating things
with places in some large building. Yates's tracing Ollt of the long uses of this
memory theater suggests that there might be some relationship between that
institution and the art museum. So far as I know, no concrete connection has
been established. Perhaps none exists, for by the time that historically organized
art museums were established, the memory theater had lost its once prominent
place in the intellectual culture and became merely a conjuring device discussed
in self-help books for people who wanted to improve their memory. But there
is an important conceptual relationship between these memory techniques and
the complex narrative orderings provided by our art museums.
32. Errington, The Death ofAuthentic Primitive Art, 22.
33. Hitchcock, The Sheldon MemorialArt Gallery, n.p.
NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE 24I
34. Haskell, "Museums and Their Enemies," 21.
35. One exception to this generalization is Hahnloser-Ingold, "Collecting
Matisses of the 1920S in the 1920S."
36. Staniszewski, The Power ofDisplay, xxi.
37. But see Waterfield, Palaces ofArt.
38. O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 24.
39. Beyer, "Between Academic and Exhibition Practice," 29.
40. K. Lynch, The Image ofthe City, 54.
41. Douglas, Natural Symbols, 11.
42. See Amery, The National Gallery Sainsbury Wing.
43. Steinberg, "Observations in the Cerasi Chapel."
44. Wittkower, Art andArchitecture in Italy, 66.
45. Ibid., 201, 202.
46. "On the surface, it appears that visitors do not spend much time looking
at works ofart. But visitors experience museums much more holistically than the
data indicate" (Schloder,Williams, De Bevec, and Mann, The Visitor's Voice, 76).
47. Schapiro, "Matisse and Impressionism," 289.
48. lowe this example to Wright, Identity Trouble, 162. 

49- See Carrier, "Picasso/Matisse." 

50. See Bucci and Torriti, II palazzo ducale di urbino, and Macadam, Blue
Guide, 381-83.
51. Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece, 52, 53. Chapter 2 is devoted to this
Raphael.
52. See Carrier, Principles ofArt History Writing, 240-41.
53. Freud, Standard Edition, 7: 96.
54. See von Holst, Creators, Collectors, and Connoisseurs, 127.
55. Schnapper, "From Politics to Collecting," I20.
T. J. Clark, The Painting ofModern Lift, 267-68.
57. The Getty Research Institute groups some books-catalogues raisonnes,
histories of collections, and the various indexes of painting published by the
Getty-in a special section, the Provenance Index. See Fredericksen, Corpus of
Paintings and The Index ofPaintings.
58. Mina Gregori, Caravaggio's Amor Vincit Omnia, 277.
59. See Carrier, "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace."
60. Nehamas, 'The Art of Being Unselfish," 63. Jose LOpez-Rey merely reports:
"I have been unable to identifY conclusively the room on whose ceiling
the painting was placed; it might have been a bedchamber" (Veldzquez, 452).
61. See Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt, 499.
62. See Karmel, "Pollock at Work."
63. Greenberg, Art and Culture, 218.
64. On the history of hangings, see Waterfield, Palaces ofArt.
242 NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX
65. Husser!' Cartesian Meditations, 60.
66. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy ofPerception, 15-16.
67. The concept of horizons, developed in phenomenology, can be formulated
within the framework ofArthur Danto's analytic philosophy.
68. Rediscoveries in Art, 84.
69. Wollheim, On Art and the Mind, III.
70. Finn, How to Visit a Museum, 23.
Chapter 6: Isabella Stewart Gardner's Museum
I. Tribby, "Body/Building," 158.
2. See de Grazia, Quilligan, and Stallybrass, introduction to Subject and Object
in Renaissance Culture. Classicists have explored "the importance of the art
collection in the creation of an image of the collector" (Vasaly, Representations,
109n 35)·
3. Muensterberger, Collecting, 255. American collectors were motivated, it has
been claimed, by the desire to imitate the banker-collectors (EinreinThe
American Art Museum, I).
4· Loltectmv. 7.
5. See Carrier, "Mrs. Isabella Stewart
Made Flesh, 7-45.
6. Goldfarb, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
and Barkan, The Gods
7. Hadley, The Letters ofBernardBerenson andIsabella Stewart Gardner, 55-56.
TIle Museum of FineArts, Boston, considered purchasing this painting, but ultimately
thought it too much ofa risk; see Morris Carter, Isabella Stewart Gardner
and Fenway Court, 158.
8. Ovid, The Metamorphoses oJOvid, 73.
9. See Mather, Venetian Painters.
10. Nash, Veiled Images, 60.
II. Hendy, European andAmerican 371.
12. Panofsky, Problems in Titian, 166.
13. Hills, Venetian Cowur, 224.
14. "Visitor Guide" and 'M Eye for Art," n.p.
15. In Diana Discovered by Actaeon, the hunter Actaeon's inadvertent
of the nude Diana causes his death. She turns him into a stag, and so his dogs
tear him to death. And in Perseus andAndromeda the nude Andromeda watches
as Perseus fights the monster that would kill her.
16. L. Adams, Art and Psychoanalysis, 233-54.
17. Vasari, The Lives oJthe Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 4:208.
18. Freedberg, Painting in Italy, 348, 505n7.
NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX 243
19· See J. Brown, Kings and Connoisseurs. Velazquez's painting, also about
metamorphosis, tells another story from Ovid. Arachne imprudently boasted
that she was superior to Pallas in weaving. Pallas challenged her, and after victory
turned Arachne into a spider. The Fable ofArachne shows Pallas in disguise,
Athena, and in the background is the portion of Arachne's tapestry showing
the rape of Europa. Copied (with minor changes) from Titian's painting, it "is
to Titian, public acknowledgment of an inspiration which is especially
evident in many of the latest pictures. . . . has made a rare, if not
use of Titian's favourite colour, the pure ultramarine; and it is contrasted,
as Titian loved to contrast it, with rose and (Hendy, Spanish Paint­
23-24). Wanting to outdo Titian, Velazquez shows the spinning wheel, preillusion
ofmovement not found in the earlier master's art. See Bedaux,
"Velazquez's Fable of Arachne."
20. Pater, The Renaissance, 24, 34, 50, 109.
21. See SteegmuIler, The Two Lives oJJamesJackson Jarves.
22. James, The American Scene, 252.
23· Pater, The Renaissance, 128. In Giorgione, Jaynie Anderson discusses his ico­
nography.
24. Pater, The Renaissance, 129, 134.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 139. Berenson shared this view, that an artist's "civic status
can be of interest onlv in the measure that it throws li2'hr on his artistic personHomeless
Paintin(1,
27. Ibid., 222.
28. Charles Eliot Norton, father of American art history and Berenson's
teacher, called The Renaissance a book "only fit to be read only in the bathroom"
(Kantor, "The Beginnings ofArt History at Harvard" r6I). On collecting of Italian
art in America before Berenson, see Steegmuller, 'M Approach to James
Jackson Jarves." In William and Henry Walters, the Reticent Collectors, William
Johnston gives an account of another pioneering American collector, who employed
Berenson.
29· Mallock, The New Republic, 27-28.
30. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 270. See also Carrier, "Baudelaire, Pater and
the Origins of Modernism."
31. Berenson, One Years Fun (I942); Pater, Marius the Epicurean,
105·
32. Pater, Marius the .t:.ptcurean, lI5.
33· Levey, The Case ojWalter Pater, 186.
34· See Schapiro, "Mr. Berenson's Values," and COUrt, "The Matter of Pater's
'Influence.' "
35· Pater, The Renaissance, 179.