David Freedberg

David Freedberg is a South African-born art historian and the Pierre Matisse Professor Emeritus at Columbia University. Educated at Yale and Oxford, he has worked across Dutch and Flemish art, seventeenth-century Italian and French art, and the history of science. He has also directed Columbia’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America and served as director of the Warburg Institute.

His writing asks what images do to people, and what people do to images. Psychological and bodily responses are central: fear, desire, empathy, worship, shame and the urge to destroy. This approach connects art history with anthropology, psychology and, in his later research, cognitive neuroscience. His studies of iconoclasm and censorship return repeatedly to the charged relationship between representation and belief.

The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, published in 1989, is his defining book. Other notable works include Dutch Landscape Prints of the Seventeenth Century and The Eye of the Lynx, an account of art, observation and natural history among Galileo’s intellectual circle. Freedberg is a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Begin with The Power of Images. It offers the clearest entry into his central argument: images cannot be understood solely through style, subject or historical setting; the feelings and actions they provoke also belong to their history.