I begin with a Gerhard Richter painting, and I intend to think backward to Leonardo and Dürer. The history of art lies behind us as a great and convoluted landscape, and our task is to deal with it not as its heirs but as its nonimperialist possessors.In this age of replication and of thinking machines, do we not long for a thoroughly secular authenticity? For example, a hatmaker in a northern Italian town who makes, among other things felucce for students, (...) the furnace man who apologizes for how much the new part costs, an unslick politician who can hug people warmly because he genuinely sympathizes with them? What Wordsworth called "genuine feeling," the opposite of the highly processed world of grant... (shrink)