Abstract

Art teaches us not only what to see but what to be.Artists refashion stories with paintbrush and chisel. Their narrations reach back through time to the mysteries of cave painting at Altamira and Lascaux, over seventeen thousand years ago. We no longer know what stories the pictures on those walls were meant to illustrate, but we can try to imagine, even now.1Images speak a different language from words. They tell stories differently. Yet, for many generations, since art history was legitimized as a discipline in American academia, early in the twentieth century2 illustration has been treated with a measure of condescension. Bernard Berenson, among others, intimates, in his Italian Painters of the Renaissance..