Leo Steinberg in his book of essays is talking about the way the old masters have drawn attention to their work through different devices, illusions, radical color-schemes, certain details and proportions and the different ways of compositions. He also talks about the way this has changed in modernist paintings but seems to come back in post-modernist paintings. He argues that by doing that the old masters not only promoted their own work but also art in general and sucked the viewer’s attention towards art whereas with modernist paintings which is more about deconstructing art as we knew before and by postmodernism these virtues not necessarily consciously but seems to come back to practice.

Most of his theoretical work is focusing on paintings, in contrast with Richard Serra who is a practicing artist, a sculptor with big and robust works, industrial metal structures with little aesthetic appealing to people who are not proficient in arts.

In his private letter’s Serra also mentions the way the old masters have made work although he is more interested in the way their works are constructing and de-constructing the buildings they take place in.

While they are talking about two different things the two ideas are not fundamentally antithetical to each other, in fact, they have many common points. Richard Serra writes that the works of the old masters, their frescos, and namely the frescos on the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel have deconstructed the place, metaphorically destroying it’s walls and abolishing it as a construction.

It is easy to see how Steinberg’s statement applies to Serra’s ideas. By directing the attention to their paintings and creating illusions the old masters are essentially stealing the viewer’s attention. By doing that they distorting space making it into a strange little universe where walls and ceilings do not exist only illusions.

They smartly using the surface to bring out the best from their work, turning it into an interactive painting. The buildings are only buildings from the outside they ultimately function as a painting that you can enter and be a part of at any time.