Books by Moshe Barasch

Shows how, once an art work is seen and understood, communicative function is effectively added to the work. This book also shows a range of language in art - from the magical to impious, from the ambiguous to the didactic, from the scientific to the propagandistic. It includes over one hundred illustrations as an integral part of the discussion.

Barasch details the radical social changes in the creation, presentation, and reception of art and explores new ways in which critics as well as artists conceptualize paintings and sculptures.

Over the centuries, European debate about nature and status of images of God and sacred figures has often upset the established order and shaken societies to their core. This book focuses on these historical arguments, from the period of Late Antiquity up to the classic defenses of images by St John of Damascus and Theodore of Studion.

Surveys the development of modernism from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, which saw a radical transformation in theories of painting and sculpture and laid the intellectual foundations for our modern views on the arts.

Blindness explores the fascinating paradoxes in the Western representation of blindness, revealing the ways in which the idea of absence of vision has been central in the history of visual culture.

Barasch expertly guides the reader from the interwoven traditions of antiquity, through the aesthetic values of the Middle Ages, to the branching out of art history, art criticism, abstract aesthetics in the late Renaissance.