An historiographic contextualization of Leo Steinberg’s “Observations in the Cerasi Chapel

Abstract

In recent decades, Leo Steinberg’s 1959 article ‘Observations in the Cerasi Chapel’ has been variously characterized as brilliant, extraordinarily insightful, and classic, but its methodological origins and implications have never been studied in detail. A close look at Steinberg’s piece reveals relevant antecedents in the writings of several earlier German-language art historians and significant contemporary parallels in Anglophone art writing. But the article, written when Steinberg was better known as an art critic than as an art historian, also provocatively blurred the boundaries between those disciplines and challenged mid-century analytical models. Moreover, Steinberg’s emphasis upon mobile, embodied viewership was soon embraced in the practices of Robert Morris and Alice Aycock, both of whom he taught. An analysis of the contexts in which Steinberg developed his ideas and in which they were received thus complicates and enriches his own account of the genesis of his article, and reveals a complex course of methodological affinities and innovations.