ABSTRACT
The disciplines of History and Art History are more dependent than is readily acknowledged on often dubious patterns of analogizing. In trying to understand a contemporary event, for example, both mainstream media and more reflective historians resort not infrequently to comparisons. If in History there is a ‘Napoleon’ of almost anywhere and any situation, in Art History, ‘Picassos’ of this country or that medium abound. Anything but neutral, these apparently casual connections occur with such frequency that they have largely escaped critical attention. In this essay, Mark Cheetham explores the extent to which the many assumptions and mental shortcuts embedded in analogies surreptitiously write art history and history, what rhetorical mechanisms are used, by whom, in what contexts, and with what results. Arguing against visual exceptionalism, Cheetham claims that in art history, analogy is inevitably a potent amalgam of textual and visual thinking, one fully continuous with our creation of the past in the present across the humanities.
