Anne Hollander begins with the great masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—Van Eyck, Durer, Bruegel—and progresses through the history of European art to the advent of film in the modern era. She explores the interconnectedness of painting, prints, and film as modes of art that in comparable ways depict moments in the narrative flow of human life. Moving Pictures offers a new way of assessing the artistic, emotional, and psychological power of paintings and pictures—and of understanding our own deepest responses to them.

Film, like the printed imagery inaugurated during the Renaissance, spread ideas – not least the idea of the power of visual art – across not only geographical and political divides but also strata of class and gender. Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History examines the early flourishing of film, from the 1920s to the mid-1960s, as partly reprising the introduction of mass media in the Renaissance, allowing for innovation that reflected an art free of the control of a patron though required to attract a broad public. Rivalry between word and image, between the demands of narrative and those of visual composition, spurred new ways of addressing the compelling nature of the visual. The twentieth century also saw the development of the discipline of art history; transfusions between cinematic practice and art historical postulates are part of the story told here.