II

    As long as people did not need to name an artwork, there was no necessity for giving it a title (in a wider sense, including a word or a phrase denoting a subject). Then, on what occasion was such necessity felt, besides at the time of ordering a work? We can readily think of two cases: when one wanted to draw up an inventory; and when one wanted to write about works and their creators. In fact, the above-mentioned 'title' of Bruegel's picture first appeared in the Prague imperial inventories of 1647-8: it read 'Ein landtschafft [sic.] Dedalo und Icaro'. Though the artist was not mentioned here, most art historians today think that this 'landscape' was by Bruegel, since the older 1621 inventories referred to 'Eine Historia vom Dedalo und Icaro vom alten Prugl [sic.]'. The painting now in Brussels was unknown before it was acquired by the Royal Museum from the London art market in 1912. Therefore, it is uncertain whether this picture is identical with the one mentioned in the 17th-century inventories. This identification is accepted by most scholars except a few who regard both the Brussels picture and its version in a private collection in New York as being later copies of the lost original by the master(Note:1).
    Be that as it may, it is certain that naming in this case was done by someone who drew up the list of items in the Prague collection in the mid-17th century, a whole century after the artist's death. And the descriptive character of the designation is typical of this age, especially with the genre of landscape painting which was a sort of innovation then. Since these early landscapes had traditional subjects from religious and secular histories as a pretext, it was most reasonable to describe them as 'A landscape by Paul Bril with the story of Psyche' or 'A landscape with the Flight into Egypt by old Bruegel'(from the Specification made in 1640 to advertise for sale the works of art from the late Rubens's estate)(Note:2). The title, 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus' ought to be understood in this context.
    Now let us consider the second case when naming became necessary. It is often said that Giorgio Vasari, the 16th-century Italian painter and architect, was the first art historian, because he wrote a series of biographies of the Italian Renaissance artists and some of their predecessors. In his Lives of the Artists (Florence, 1550; 2nd rev. ed. 1568) Vasari discussed life and work of each artist, referring to some representative products which he designated in various ways. The following passage is taken from the Life of Fra Angelico (the numbers are my insertion).

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