But the new barbarian is no uncouth Desert-dweller; he does not emerge From fir forests; factories bred him; Corporate companies, college towns Mothered his mind, and many journals Backed his beliefs. He was born here.
—W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety
It is still deemed civilized to believe in European civilization.
—Matthew Craske, Art in Europe 1700–1830
In the issue of the London Times Literary Supplement for March 6, 1996, readers of that venerable journal were given a remarkable account of the kind of intellectual license which is now commonplace for scholars in high places to impose upon objects of art-historical study. For those who had not yet fully awakened to the implications of the postmodern assault on the history and criticism of the fine arts, it must have come as a rude shock to discover just how far this bizarre mode of discourse had advanced in its task of deconstructing the great artistic achievements of the European past. For anyone who was already alert to the depredations of the postmodernist juggernaut, this review in the TLS was yet another melancholy reminder of how much ground has been lost to its malign imperatives.
The occasion was the publication by the Yale University Press of a book called The Making of Rubens. The author of this work —Svetlana Alpers—is a professor of the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley, and an influential eminence in her scholarly discipline. Among
