It’s a truism these days that there is no single way of thinking about the history of art, no single way of telling the story of what happened or of interpreting the visual evidence that has come down to us. The only constant is the fact that no work of art, no movement, no artist can be considered in isolation. Instead of a progression of clearly defined events or a coherent sequence of self-sufficient, more- or less- inspired individuals, the history of art is seen as a messy assortment of overlapping, sometimes confusingly interconnected phenomena. The closer we look, the more boundaries, both metaphorical and geographical, blur, even when we take into account the force of individual personalities or the powerful, unavoidable, defining characteristics of national style. It’s a tale not of logical cause and effect, but of unexpected cross-fertilizations and chance encounters, of chains of influence and reaction, of improvisation and innovati ...

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