<p>This passage was written in 1971 by a woman who is a professor of art history. The question "Why have there been no great women artists?" is simply the tip of an iceberg of misinterpretation and misconception: beneath lies a vast dark bulk of shaky ideas about the nature of art and the situations of its making, about the nature of human abilities in general and of human excellence in particular, and about the role that the social order plays in all of this. Basic to the question are many naive, distorted assumptions about the making of art in general, as well as the making of great art. These 10 assumptions, conscious or unconscious, link together such male superstars as Michelangelo and van Gogh, Raphael and Pollock under the rubric of "Great," and the Great Artist is conceived of as one who has "Genius." Genius, in turn, is thought of as a mysterious power somehow 15 embedded in the person of the Great Artist. The magical aura surrounding art and its creators has, of course, given birth to myths since the earliest times. The fairy tale of the discovery by an older artist or discerning patron of the Boy Wonder, usually in the guise of a lowly 20 shepherd boy. has been a stock-in-trade of artistic mythology ever since the sixteenth-century biographer Vasari wrote that the young Giotto was discovered by the great Cimabue while the lad was guarding his flocks, drawing sheep on a stone. Cimabue, overcome with admiration for 25 the realism of the drawing, immediately invited t he humble youth to be his pupil. Through some mysterious coincidence, later artists were all discovered in similar pastoral circumstances. Even when the young Great Artist was not fortunate enough to come equipped with a flock of sheep, </p>
<p>The author uses the phrase "equipped with a flock of sheep" (line 29) to (A) satirize the conditions of rural life (B) downplay the importance of artistic instruction (C) evoke the pleasures of a bygone age (D) jeer at Cimabue's discovery (E) mock conventional biographies of artists</p>