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List of illustrations

  • Baptism of Christ
  • Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler
  • The Forth Bridge, detail of steelwork
  • The Forth Bridge
  • The Forth Bridge, tube and lattice girders
  • The Forth Bridge, central pier and its S. cantilever
  • The Forth Bridge, central pier and its S. cantilever
  • The Forth Bridge, view S. from top of N. pier
  • The structural elements of the Forth Bridge
  • The Forth crossing at Queensferry
  • Alternative projects for the Forth Bridge
  • Sketch of a Tibetan bridge
  • The structural principle of the Forth Bridge demonstrated by members of Benjamin Baker's staff, after a contemporary photograph
  • Study for "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"
  • Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
  • Nude with Raised Arms
  • Study
  • Dryad
  • Head of Fernande Olivier
  • Still Life with Pears
  • Brick Factory at Tortosa
  • Portrait of Ambroise Vollard
  • The Guitarist
  • A cantilever of the Forth Bridge under construction
  • Photograph of Kahnweiler
  • Sketches after Chardin in "Livret" of the 1769 Salon
  • Excerpt from "Jugement d'un Amateur sur l'Exposition des Tableaux"
  • A Lady Taking Tea
  • Excerpt from "Catalogue des Ouvrages"
  • Picasso in his studio, beneath a figure-drawing of summer 1910
  • A room in the house of Leo and Gertrude Stein, with six paintings by Picasso and six by Matisse
  • Portrait of Jacques Nayral
  • Portait of Albert Gleizes
  • Portrait of Apollinaire
  • Still Life with Jug and Fruit
  • Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses)
  • Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, detail
  • Rephotograph of "Portrait of Ambroise Vollard," detail with blurred focus
  • Cadaquès, detail
  • A Lady Taking Tea (Une dame qui prend du thé )
  • A Lady Taking Tea, detail
  • The Eye
  • A Woman Scraping Vegetables
  • A Woman Scraping Parsnips
  • A Lady Sealing a Letter
  • Happy Union
  • David
  • The Cellar Boy (Le garcon cabaretier)
  • Girl Reading a Letter
  • Excerpt from "Dissertatio Optica De Visu," with three corollaries on the painter's use of color
  • Playing Children Before a Statue of Hercules
  • Engraved plate illustrating centralized distinct vision
  • Engraved plate illustrating consequences drawn for composition
  • Drawing for an engraving in William Smellie's "Sett of Anatomical Tables"
  • Muscula Pl. IX
  • Excerpt from "La Theorie et la pratique de la coupe des pierres et de bois … "
  • A Potter's Wheel
  • The Schoolmistress
  • Baptism of Christ
  • Baptism of Christ
  • Discovery of the True Cross, detail with view of Arezzo
  • Baptism of Christ
  • Baptism of Christ, detail
  • Baptism of Christ
  • Battle of Constantine and Maxentiu, detail of river
  • Baptism of Christ, detail of angels
  • Angels addressing the Eucharist, from the predella of an altarpiece
  • Virgin and Child with Angels
  • Virgin and Child with Angels
  • Reverse of the Medal of Giovanna Tornabuoni, with the Graces
  • Angels from the Second Cantoria of Florence Cathedral
  • Piero della Francesco's "Baptism of Christ," with indication of halves and thirds
  • Baptism of Christ, detail of plants and landscape
  • Baptism of Christ, detail of plants and landscape
Free
Description: Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures
THIS BOOK is a revised version of a series of Una’s Lectures in the Humanities — lectures endowed in memory of Una Smith Ross — given at the University of California, Berkeley, in April 1982. My draft for the lectures was longer than would have been decent actually to deliver in the lecture-room: I have restored here a number of sections which I then cut, but I have not tried to modify or disguise the informality of the spoken argument.
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00091.001
Free
Description: Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures
Table of Contents
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00091.002
Description: Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures
WE DO not explain pictures: we explain remarks about pictures — or rather, we explain pictures only in so far as we have considered then under some verbal description or specification. For instance, if I think or say about Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ (fig. 1) something quite primitive like ‘The firm design of this picture is partly due to Piero della Francesca’s recent training in Florence’, I am first proposing ‘firm design’ as a description of one aspect of the …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.1-11
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00091.003

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Description: Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures
ONE IMPLICATION of all this is that, given such odd objects of explanation, the relation of the art historian to historical method is likely to be a Bohemian one. The theory of historical explanation has tended to divide into two camps — the nomological (or nomothetic) and the teleological (or idiographic). On one side the nomological people argue that it is possible, at least in principle, to explain historical human actions within quite strictly causal terms as examples covered by general laws …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.12-40
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00091.004

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Description: Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures
A WORD must be said about ‘intention’, I suppose. I have declared an interest in addressing pictures partly by making inferences about their causes, this both because it is pleasurable and because a disposition towards causal inference seems to penetrate our thought and language too deeply to be excised, at least without doing oneself a quite disabling mischief. But since pictures are human productions, one element in the causal field behind a picture will be volition, and this overlaps with …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.41-73
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00091.005

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Description: Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures
IN WHAT follows now I want to do several things which will lead to a different texture, a closer focus and a smaller grain. First I have to provide something that is questionable, in a sense and for reasons I shall be returning to later. Secondly, it is time to address a piece of detail. The account of Picasso in 1910 was very schematic and general: it had to be, because I was trying to block in a general scheme in relation to an already existing account of early Cubism. But art criticism …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.74-104
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00091.006

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Description: Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures
FOR SOME time two related issues have been hanging around this discussion of intention. One is the question of how far we are really going to penetrate into the intentional fabric of painters living in cultures or periods remote from our own. The other is the question of whether we can in any sense or degree verify or validate our explanations. I shall discuss these in order. But it will be better to work to an example culturally more distant from us than Picasso or even Chardin, and I shall …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.105-137
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00091.007

Access to this content is only available to subscribers. If you are at an institution that currently subscribes to the A&AePortal, please login to your VPN before accessing the site. If you have already purchased an individual subscription, please sign in to your account to access the content. Learn more about subscriptions.

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Description: Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures
General Index
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00091.008
Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures
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