"In this provocative book, Patricia Emison invites the reader to consider and reconsider how past thinkers - from Pliny and Alberti to Freud and Fried - have conceptualized the history of Western art." "What a book review attempts to be for a book, this extended essay attempts to be for several hundred years' worth of books in a field: an indicator of problems with the old attempts and hopes for the new ones. It is a defense of art history for those outside the field who question its reliability or even its importance; it is a critique of art history for those in the field who may have been preoccupied with looking at trees but who might be interested in trying to see the forest."--BOOK JACKET.