by Jon Lackman | 19 May 2007 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Renaissance
David Packwood laments the installation of Craig Clunas as chair of History of Art at Oxford University: “Nobody is better qualified than Clunas to bring a fresh perspective onto the programmes at Oxford University; he has written trenchant books and articles on Chinese art and culture and is admirably suited to ‘join up the dots’, by which he means link Chinese art with artistic developments in Europe in order to see that continent and its culture in new ways [...] but, like the Art Newspaper who make much of the fact that this appointment marks the end of a Renaissance/Baroque presence at Oxford, I wonder what it suggests about the feeling towards Renaissance studies in this country.”
The Art Newspaper notes that “the faculty of art history at Oxford is small — it only started teaching undergraduates three years ago because previously the academic consensus was that it was more appropriate as a postgraduate course.”
