Editor’s Note: New Baggage for Old Masters

“Most people look at a painting with their ears,” runs the old Chinese proverb, although I suspect this is actually a bit of cynical Yankee wit of the P. T. Barnum variety, disguised as a pearl of ancient oriental wisdom. Those of us who teach art history know very well how difficult it is to persuade students to abandon what they have already been told about a work of art, replacing this inherited sagacity with the evidence of their own eyes and the discoveries of their own research. Perhaps we have good reason to be thankful that so many of these students come to our classrooms with zero prior knowledge of the subject, possessing the unbiased innocence of the “transparent eye-ball” that Emerson experienced only in moments of transcendental ecstasy.