Continuities in artistic form from the fourteenth century in Italy to the present are examined, with emphasis on two overriding tendencies: (1) the formalization of visual representations and their interpretations, and (2) the association of that formality with extreme individualism in the Western world. Challenges to the tradition struck only at certain aspects of it (such as strict perspective and the hierarchy of subject matter) but did not undercut such fundamental characteristics as the nature of a given visual space or harmony derived from concentration of elements rather than, for...