Keith Moxey. The Practice of Persuasion: Paradoxes and Power in Art History.

Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 200l. xii + 146 pp. illus. index. n.p. ISBN: 0-8014-8675-0.

This important book consists of philosophical essays on the crucial relation between contemporary theory and the discipline of art history. Whereas Moxey argued in The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), that the positivistic assumptions of his discipline must be reformed in light of the new methodologies pioneered elsewhere in the academy, he now contends that art historians, though they purport to embrace the doctrine of pluralism, must engage in a heartfelt and thoughtful critique of the epistemological premises informing their current interpretative practices. His chief case study is the history of northern Renaissance art, a field still largely determined by the historiographic principles implicit in Erwin Panofsky's The Life and Art of Albrecht Durer (1943) and Early Netherlandish Painting (1953). Moxey offers a cogent analysis of the logical paradoxes pervading these foundational texts, inviting us to consider how Panofsky folds theory and method into truth claims based on empirical study in the physical sciences, but also on the Hegelian tradition deeply embedded in German art-historical scholarship. His larger aim is to show that historical interpretation is perforce rhetorical rather than veridical, involving techniques of persuasion that confer meaning on the past, even as they reveal how the meaningful past is constructed rather than discovered.

By making his own hermeneutics clearly visible throughout The Practice of Persuasion, Moxey gestures toward an ethics of transparency. Writing from the position of an engaged subject formed by the epistemological regime he desires to reconstitute, Moxey invokes Michel Foucault (as well as Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, and Joan Scott), avowing that the production of knowledge originates in discursive practices that are culturally embedded and constitutive of cultural meaning. He therefore situates himself outside the tradition of German critical history, so ably discussed in Michael Podro's The Critical Historians of Art (1982): Moxey asks us to acknowledge that verba give a rhetorical shape to res, rather than revealing the inevitable connection between the historian's narrative and the events it orders, between the self-aware mind and the things that are seen to manifest the mind's relation to the material world.

Since Moxey frequently writes himself into his text by differentiating the methodological claims he endorses from those of Panofsky, I focus in this review on the three chapters in which Panofsky figures large. Chapter 1 demonstrates how Panofsky's authoritative account of the canonical masters Hans Memling and Hugo van der Goes consolidates the Hegelian criteria of naturalism and genius, enshrined in the nationalist scholarship of Max Friedlander, Wilhelm Worringer, and Max Dvorak, among others. Because Memling fails to embrace the representation of nature, he is accused of impeding the progress of art toward an ideal of individuated self-realization; Hugo on the other hand, though his late paintings are anti-realist, embodies the teleological principle that genius secures progress by trumping cultural expectations, giving expression to new stages of human consciousness. Naturalism and genius operate as a kind of Hegelian thesis and antithesis, marking stages in an historical narrative that chronicles the development of style. By insisting that we recognize Panofsky as a product of the Hegelian tradition, Moxey encourages us to admire him as an exponent of strong interpretation, while also disputing his belief that the historian discerns the "immanent meaning of history" (40), precisely correlating historical texts with the events they narrate.

Having shown that Panofsky writes under the sign of Hegel, Moxey devotes much of chapters 3 and 4 to the positivistic ideals interwoven with his idealist philosophy of history. He examines the essays "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline" (1940) and "Perspective as Symbolic Form" (1925), the latter revised and republished as the introduction to Early Netherlandish Painting. In the methodological essay of 1940, Panofsky embraces the possibility of a truly objective history of art freed from every sort of cultural and affective projection. Shorn of subjectivity, art-historical interpretation underscores the primacy of a canon whose authority is self-evident to the aesthetic judgment of the human subject as defined by Kant. In the perspective essay, Panofsky avers that the one-point system perfected in Florence, and assimilated by northern masters, is an artificial construct--a mode of visual representation creating the illusion of space--that doubles as a true model of sight. By a complex system of analogy, linear perspective thereby serves to guarantee the naturalism of early Netherlandish painting and the truth of the art historical text: as linear perspective is both the representation of visual experience and the structure of vision, so history both represents and is the past; or put differently, as perspective is vision, so history is knowledge. Moxey emphasizes the beauty and absurdity of this "metaphoric use of perspective as the warrant for the work of the historian" (100), concluding that Early Netherlandish Painting, like the discipline it epitomizes, is an index of cultural values that must be brought to the surface.

WALTER S. MELION

Johns Hopkins University