INTRODUCTION

T
HE academy is visibly changing. Other humanities have not
suffered as much as the history of art from institutional inertia.
Literary studies, for example, has welcomed the unsettling that

pact of interpretation and criticism on literature departments in Framing

the expanded rhetoric of theory has generated. In his survey of the im-

the Sign, Jonathan Culler offers the hope that essays in the new "genre"
of theory will challenge and help reorient thinking in other fields "than
those to which they ostensibly belong because their analyses of language,
or mind, or history, or culture offer novel and persuasive accounts of
signification." 1 The growing awareness of theoretical horizons shaped,
for example, by class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and gen-
der, have compelled art historians to acknowledge our discipline's in-
separability from a larger cultural and ideological world. During the
past fifteen years or so, the ideas about which we think and write have
seemed at odds with the traditional canon in which many of us were
schooled. Within the academy itself, there has arisen a questioning of
all the values it once safeguarded. As scholars of art history, we can
no longer see, much less teach, transhistorical truths, timeless works of
art, and unchanging critical criteria without a highly developed sense of
irony about the grand narratives of the past.
In this larger political arena, wranglings over visual imagery from
the sixteenth to the late twentieth century may seem somewhat insig-
nificant; but those of us involved in the debates see the larger issue of
representation itself at stake and note the ways in which works of art
have always engendered rather than merely reflected political, social,
and cultural meanings. The essays collected here span a wide array of
historical and contemporary topics, but it seems fair to say that they are
all involved in the ideological rethinking that should be an inescapable
activity of all interdisciplinary and disciplinary activity in the last de-
cade of the twentieth century. To quote Culler again: "Indeed, theory
should be understood not as a prescription of methods of interpretation
but as the discourse that results when conceptions of the nature and
meaning of texts and their relations to other discourses, social practices
and human subjects become the object of general reflection." 2