The present extraordinary expansion of the history of art has meant that greater interest is being taken in aspects of the subject that were previously only rarely explored. The decided taste for a sociology tinged with Marxism, no less typical of our time, has spread to writing about art. Inquiries concerning patronage and the nature of taste are now properly considered valuable in assessing the arts at any given period. Of course, the investigation or elucidation of such matters in the end counts for little in the evaluation of a work of art per se.

One fillip in the study of the vagaries of taste has been the numerous revaluations of past periods that have occurred during the last quarter of a century. Mannerist and Baroque art, the Victorian narrative painters, the Pre-Raphaelites, the once famed Barbizon School and the Symbolists have returned to favor in varying degrees. This is due to a combination of factors: genuine admiration for their artistic values, commercial acumen and enterprise, and, not least, the desire of successive generations of students to make their names with the study of something new.

One of the major growth industries has been that in nineteenth-century American painting. In The Rare Art Traditions, Joseph Alsop draws attention to the recent meteoric rise in value of the paintings of Frederick Edwin Church and the Hudson River School and to the decline in popularity of the once celebrated Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican. His book appears