{"product_id":"the-melancholy-art-9780691139340","title":"The Melancholy Art","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWhy the art historian's craft is a uniquely melancholy art\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eMelancholy is not only about sadness, despair, and loss. As Renaissance artists and philosophers acknowledged long ago, it can engender a certain kind of creativity born from a deep awareness of the mutability of life and the inevitable cycle of birth and death. Drawing on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the intellectual history of the history of art, \u003ci\u003eThe Melancholy Art\u003c\/i\u003e explores the unique connections between melancholy and the art historian's craft. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThough the objects art historians study are materially present in our world, the worlds from which they come are forever lost to time. In this eloquent and inspiring book, Michael Ann Holly traces how this disjunction courses through the history of art and shows how it can give rise to melancholic sentiments in historians who write about art. She confronts pivotal and vexing questions in her discipline: Why do art historians write in the first place? What kinds of psychic exchanges occur between art objects and those who write about them? What institutional and personal needs does art history serve? What is lost in historical writing about art? \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Melancholy Art\u003c\/i\u003e looks at how melancholy suffuses the work of some of the twentieth century's most powerful and poetic writers on the history of art, including Alois Riegl, Franz Wickhoff, Adrian Stokes, Michael Baxandall, Meyer Schapiro, and Jacques Derrida. A disarmingly personal meditation by one of our most distinguished art historians, this book explains why to write about art is to share in a kind of intertwined pleasure and loss that is the very essence of melancholy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMichael Ann Holly\u003c\/b\u003e is the Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute and teaches in the Graduate Program in the History of Art at Williams College. Her books include \u003ci\u003ePast Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003ePanofsky and the Foundations of Art History\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Princeton University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50327170646290,"sku":"9780691139340","price":40.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_0d264c7b-3f2d-4f4a-8438-1c281c2342d4.jpg?v=1727710821","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/the-melancholy-art-9780691139340","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}