To the Editors:
I am astonished that a publication as devoted to quality and excellence as The New Criterion could offer in the guise of serious criticism so transparently personal and vicious a diatribe as Creighton Gilbert’s “Sienese Storytellers” (April 1989). I am personally offended that Professor Gilbert’s long wait for an opportunity to vent his spleen with John Pope-Hennessy should end with the pretense of reviewing “Painting in Renaissance Siena,” an exhibition and catalogue with which John had no direct involvement, notwithstanding Professor Gilbert’s aberrant contention that “the very many citations to him in the catalogue substitute, in effect, for those by the curators.” (I am here guessing at Professor Gilbert’s very unclear meaning.)

It would appear that Professor Gilbert is equally content with the opportunity to disparage Keith Christiansen, the curator of the exhibition, who is contemptuously not once referred to by name in his “review.” Neither Carl Strehlke nor myself were “curators” of this exhibition; we collaborated on its catalogue. Furthermore, as a matter of correcting factual error, my doctoral dissertation was completed at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York under the direct supervision of John Pope-Hennessy (a role, I trust, he does not find the slightest bit “undignified”) and does not even peripherally concern “the visit by the outside painter Signorelli to Siena near the end of the time span of the exhibition.” It may now be customary to forgive errors of fact on Professor Gilbert’s part when he refers to works of