ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The Romantic reception of Old Master art is a story partly about what happens when markers of high culture become available to a wider public; it traces the shift from the elite eighteenth-century ambition to be recognized as a person of taste to the nineteenth-century democratization of art. The book examines the impact of Italian art in Britain during the war years. It overviews the eighteenth-century discourse on art, but places it within the wider context of the European competition for cultural supremacy and academic artistic production. The book explores the development of a critical vocabulary equally applicable to the visual arts and literature, which locates the value of a work of art in the physical, emotional and sexual responses that it invites, thereby minimizing the difference between text and image.
