2010 Articles

Choirs of Praise: Some Aspects of Action Understanding in Fifteenth-Century Painting and Sculpture

Freedberg, David A.

Did Jan van Eyck go to Italy? This is an old question about Van Eyck, and raises a number of important issues about his art. I do not intend to settle it here. Rather, I ask it because it casts into high relief a central issue in the ways we think about responses to art, and, more specifically, about the relations between observation and action imitation.