In this collection of essays, five previously published and three new in this volume, a western historian of Chinese art examines the received ideas of art history from the vantage point of another culture. On the premise that what we feel a need to explain and how we explain it alike depend on what we assume to be normal, the essays all adopt a comparative approach. Whatever body of material is taken as case study-Gothic churches, Egyptian reliefs, Chinese bronzes, insular gospel manuscripts-the problems addressed are of broad general relevance to the discipline. They include the nature of art history's styles and periods, iconography as explanation, the rationale for art historical description, technical studies and the artistic imagination, and histories of representation. Clear and accessible, this book will interest anyone concerned with the conduct of art historical scholarship and the origins and consequences of its practices.
"Since the late 1970s, the field of art history has been characterized by self-scrutiny that has, ironically, too often encouraged methodological self-satisfaction; these essays, in contrast, permit no intellectual complacency. The author does not hesitate to challenge fundamental concepts, principles, and practices, both those that have been explicitly articulated and those that have gone unquestioned. The criticisms he offers are neither trivial nor self-serving; they are often blunt, but they are justified. His book will engage all historians of art-professionals and advanced students-who are interested in the intellectual foundations of our discipline as well as scholars whose work involves more general intellectual history."
-A. A. Donohue, Rhys Carpenter Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology, Bryn Mawr College

The turn of the third century CE—known as the Jian’an era or Three Kingdoms period—holds double significance for the Chinese cultural tradition. Its writings laid the foundation of classical poetry and literary criticism. Its historical personages and events have also inspired works of poetry, fiction, drama, film, and art throughout Chinese history, including Internet fantasy literature today. There is a vast body of secondary literature on these two subjects individually, but very little on their interface.
The image of the Jian’an era, with its feasting, drinking, heroism, and literary panache, as well as intense male friendship, was to return time and again in the romanticized narrative of the Three Kingdoms. How did Jian’an bifurcate into two distinct nostalgias, one of which was the first paradigmatic embodiment of wen (literary graces, cultural patterning), and the other of wu (heroic martial virtue)? How did these largely segregated nostalgias negotiate with one another? And how is the predominantly male world of the Three Kingdoms appropriated by young women in contemporary China? The Halberd at Red Cliff investigates how these associations were closely related in their complex origins and then came to be divergent in their later metamorphoses.