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Abstract Abstract I 'What's in a name?' Juliet's rhetorical question expects the answer that both roses and Romeos can be renamed without any detriment to their essential qualities. And, for the most part, the history of art tends to confirm the view that paintings and other works of art fall within the same category. Titles of paintings are liable to be tendentious, going beyond what the artist perhaps intended to tell us. What everyone knows as The Arnolfini Marriage is very possibly not a marriage at all, and all that Van Eyck felt moved to tell us about the ceremony depicted is that he was there at that particular date: 'Johannes de; Eyck fuit hie 1434'. Titian's Three Ages of Man may appear to forestall dispute about the precise correspondence between an iconographical scheme and the title which identifies it. But a glance at Vasari shows that one contemporary commentator, at any rate, refused to baptize the picture in this way, and spoke of its components on a quite different level of analysis. 1 This list of titles which predicate, and prejudge; a specific type of interpretation could be multiplied almost indefinitely. Moreover, th,ere are also paintings which contrive to keep more than one. title, as a sign of the different constructions that have been, and still are, placed upon them. When Norman Bryson reproduces a fine Vermeer on the cover of a recent bqok, he identifies it as The Artist in his Studio. When Svetlana Alpers reproduces and discusses the same work in another recent study, she calls it The Art of Painting. It could be argued that each author has chosen the title which suits their general argument best. And that would certainly be true in my own case, where I use the same picture on the front of a book of historiographical essays: the title required in this case, which foreshadows the invocation of Clio, Muse of History at the outset of the work, is Allegory of Fame.
Stephen Bann (Mon,) studied this question.