I first met Edgar Wind when he was professor of art history at Oxford. He interviewed me for my Rhodes Fellowship at St Hugh’s College in 1969. The process for interviewing was different then, as the Rhodes Trust wanted to encourage women candidates, but had legal obstacles, so we were called Rhodes Fellows rather than Scholars. I was the first appointed by an Oxford College.
As an undergraduate in Melbourne, I had read Wind’s Art and Anarchy (1963) and Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958). I was thrilled to meet him. The examination took place in his library of sixteenth century-books, where we discussed exclusively primary documents in art history, prints and texts, in relation to Giorgione and other Renaissance artists. This concentration on primary sources has remained with me forever. When I begin a new subject, I always concentrate on original sources, whether visual or written, and only look at later theories when I have decided on a possible interpretation. After I had completed my doctoral dissertation on Giorgione, I edited two volumes of his collected works, The Eloquence of Symbols (1983) and Hume and the heroic Portrait (1986), which republished his earliest articles in art history, some from the first years of the Journal of the Warburg Institute (1937-1939).
