Renaissance Dreams

Family, marriage, and sex—although it seems to me that the sequence is uncertain—are naturally interrelated in life but not always so in art or, for that matter, in art history. While family and marriage have been much discussed in recent years by historians, they have received very little attention indeed from art historians. Sex, on the other hand, we have always had with us. And while all of one's work is self-referential to some extent, whether one is an artist or an historian of art, it may be that this psychological truth carries a particular danger when one is dealing with matters that are so intimate as family, marriage, and sex. Moreover, there is another issue involved when one is concerned with works of art, at least in the Renaissance or in any period when art was made for patrons, and that is precisely the presence of another psyche in the mixture, in addition to that of the artist himself and that of the historian-observer.