“This book is not about the history of art,” Freedberg begins. “It is about the relations between people and images in history.” Freedberg’s work provoked a reconsideration of how men and women engaged works of religious art, not by looking, but by being in relationship with the figures present in them and the enduring if at times subterranean influence of this inheritance on aesthetic experience.

[David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.]