Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image
"A strangely moving book to read. . . . Surely our desire to experience a kind of privileged timelessness before images—or our satisfaction with signification of any kind—has something to do with the consciousness of our own historicity; surely the challenge of art history, the challenge posed by the deep fascination of old art—or those faces from the past, so similar to our own, yet not our own—is like an encounter with the uncanny, with that otherness in which we discern our own end. A critical art history—like philosophy, like psychoanalysis—ought to take implications of that encounter seriously."—Robert Williams, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 21, No. 2, 1998