I remember when Peter Schjeldahl, writing about Andrea Mantegna at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, called Northern Italian Renaissance painting, “the high noon of western painting.” Or something like that. I can’t find it on Google.

I am a painter and a writer who, consequently, writes about painting a lot. I’m uncomfortable with the term “art critic” being applied to my own writing since my “criticism,” such as it is, is mostly in the form of an appreciative inquiry into what interests me.