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Image and the Art of History

I offer the quotations above to remind our readers that art historians have been concerned as much with the historical cultural basis of vision as with the study of material objects and their production and hence will readily assent to Martin Jay's insistence upon "the cultural variability of ocular experience" (p. 9). On the other hand, most art historians will probably not find Jay's interesting and well-written book, Downcast Eyes, entirely congenial to their ways of thinking, for the view from his "high flying balloon" (pp. 70, 587), however thrilling at times, is too far above "the distinct historical manifestations of visual experience" (p. 9) to engage the concerns of such historically minded scholars, who may well find that the distance produces a flattening effect that obscures the very terrain they would rather see in shaded contours and differentiating relief. Jay is aware of the "totalizing" effects that his approach imposes upon his material (pp. 17, 86-87), and he acknowledges that the diverse claims about vision he documents and attempts to link together would reveal a "loose discourse about visuality" rather than "actual transformations in sensual practice" (p. 587) in early moder and modem Western culture, France in particular. But, indeed, it is precisely because Jay's analysis of discourse about the visual-"that being a corpus of more or less loosely interwoven arguments, metaphors, assertions, and prejudices that cohere more associatively than logically" (p. 16)-has no purchase on historically situated practices of image making and reception that art historians, and presumably other sorts of historians, may not be convinced that the discourse Jay constructs from his chosen texts (however "loose") has much substance. On the basis of what criteria has Jay selected his evidence of proand antiocular thought in the past and of the denigration of vision in modern times? Or