ABSTRACT
One of the abiding wonders of art history, intellectual history generally, is how ways of living, thinking, and working come together to create a moment. Paris in 1905, for example. In time, for reasons sometimes clear but usually opaque, the moment passes, and it becomes difficult, even impossible, to live, think, or work in that manner. The High Renaissance came to Italy and then went away, as Vasari noted more or less at the time, and Panofsky theorized several centuries later. Even while the past has never truly passed, accommodations will be made. People who experience such dissolutions often sense that they are losing a world, something that was and is now being felt to melt, becoming ever harder to articulate, as memories come to resemble dreams. And the sense of the emergence of what is next, the modern, often has a dreamlike quality, too, sometimes beguiling, sometimes terrifying.
