What is it to know visual art?

The book is published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. Editors are Margaretha Thomson, Professor Emerita of Art History, and Sonya Petersson, Associate Professor of Art History at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics.

The fundamental purpose of this volume is to explore how two interconnected but radically different spheres of knowledge and experience meet in the analysis of visual art: the epistemological rationality of scholarly methods and the experiential (visual and material) power and appeal of artworks. Examining medieval architectural spaces, contemporary video works, 19th-century prints, Antique sculpture, and paintings and drawings from the 17th to the 20th centuries, eight art historians strive to analyse knowledge processes and claims without reducing the expressive powers of the artworks.

From the department, the art historians Peter Gillgren, Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe and Mårten Snickare also contribute with texts. The other authors are Dan Karlholm, Lena Liepe and Nina Weibull.

–The book was Margareta Thomson´s idea. Art historians from Swedish universities met around one of the discipline’s basic questions: the meeting between scholarship and the visual art. The theme from the symposium later led to the book. The authors treat the same overarching question in relation to examples from their own areas of research. That is why the book offers a great and productive span between both the artworks and the ways to approach the question, says Sonya Petersson.

The volume is available as open access.

The website of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities