What is Art?

Note: The author makes no claim to having answered the question posed in the title of this article; what follows is meant for discussion and is not intended to be definitive. Also, in this essay the words 'art works', 'art objects', etc., are understood as forms of artistic expression such as paint on canvas, board or wall, drawing, etching and other modes of art printing, in short, 2D forms; they also encompass sculpture in its various traditional manifestations, as well as architecture - although, not all are referred to specifically.

L'Incredulità di San Tommaso (Doubting Thomas), detail, 1483, approx. life-size bronze
by Andrea del Verrocchio (c.1435-1488), Orsanmichele. (photo: the author)

What is Art? This question was raised as a sarcastic and rhetorical 'road-block' about a comment I'd made on another site dealing with art. In fact, this question is an annoying one for me as, in most cases, people seem to know what is meant when they hear the word 'art'; defining it however becomes a complex philosophical problem, tied up with culture, history, taste and so on. And, in reality, the person asking another to define art is, I believe, not really interested to know the - or any - answer: they ask the question to put an end to an argument about taste, among other things, principally because their interlocutor has disturbed their own concept. So, in this essay, I attempt at least, to put some form around a possible answer or, some possible considerations. I don't think it is necessary to be able to answer that age-old question to be able to love, appreciate and be critical about art. It should be born in mind that for many people, including contemporary 'artists', their knowledge of art begins with perhaps, Impressionism; perhaps not even as far back as that. I believe that much art teaching, given over as it is in many cases to a kind of propaganda about the present, is where the root cause for the paucity of any kind of profound knowledge, not to mention comprehension, of the art of the past lies. This is important I think, because contemporary art has not come out of nowhere and an ability to make informed observations about it depends on a knowledge of what came before. If that is not the case, then let's not talk about 'art' at all and simply express our (uninformed) opinions! (see discussion 1 below) 

So, here goes; a quiet attempt at a definition to begin and then some elucidation. 

Art is: The successful translation of an artist's intellectual perception and/or emotional reactions into a new physical object, usually manufactured by the artist him- or herself, which then takes on an independent existence of its own; its condition invites contemplation. Art names those objects now in the world which previously existed, or originally came into being, only in the artist's mind. Such objects function in a physical form as communication of the artist's perceptions, and to a greater or lesser degree - as they are more or less successful - continue to 'insist' on their own existence, very often in spite of the eclipsing of any original material function they may also, or even primarily, have had (e.g. as religious objects).

The inclusion of the word 'artist' is not casual and so, to some extent, this definition depends on how 'artist' itself is defined. As we know, many objects which have little or no claim to be 'art' - e.g. an unremarkable, mass-produced chair - are made by individuals not called artists. It is interesting to note that, sometimes however, such objects are so 'beautiful' that people call them 'works of art' (the Concorde or a Lamborghini for instance). The question of how to define 'artist' will be dealt with later. (see discussion 2 below)

Art, like most things and activities, is subject to a gradation or variation from good to bad, and to a susceptibility to manipulation and distortion. A critical quality of art is that it is visual but this apparently benign and mundane quality makes it however, prone to being misunderstood, mis-read, abused and belittled. This often occurs amongst the visually illiterate - the visually un-schooled or uncultured. High-level visual art, to be properly comprehended, requires intellectual schooling. Proper comprehension has little or nothing to do with whether or not someone likes a given object but rather, refers to an at least general awareness of the historical/social/artistic context in which the particular object was produced.

This situation implies that there are different 'levels' or 'qualities' of art and arguments often arise due to differing opinions as to why one object is 'good' and another 'bad', or 'successful' or less so; this invariably leads to a (rhetorical) demand for a definition of art, with the accompanying smug self-assurance that one cannot be given; the game is concluded at this point with the assertion that Person A's opinion is just that, a mere opinion, and no better than Person B's. The obvious but frequently omitted rejoinder is that, while we may be discussing opinions, that of Person A (possibly) happens to be a cultured, intelligent one, while that of Person B may be based on little or no fundamental knowledge of how to read works of art (a skill incidentally for which a definition of art is not necessary).

Art is an immensely complex and varied phenomenon, one which has manifested through all history (in fact, even in pre-history!), and in all parts of the world. The question might be put: how is it possible therefore, to describe these myriad forms with the one word, Art? And yet, many, many of us can agree on assigning the denominator 'Art' to examples of work, to objects, as diverse as a central-Australian 'dot' painting, an Egyptian tomb fresco, a Hindu carving, a sculpted saint on the portal of a Gothic cathedral, a Renaissance altar-piece, a 19th century Japanese wood-block print, etc., etc., right up to a composition of the early twentieth century of straight lines and primary colours forming geometric shapes!

Is the artist's reverie, his or her absorption in the activity, i.e. the clear emotional and technical involvement of the artist - which is conveyed through the object to the viewer - a marker of something's 'art' status and quality? Perhaps! But the fact of this absorption itself does not necessarily imply that all objects so produced are therefore successful as art: the many flawed attempts of art students all over the world, every year, are witness to that. This would seem to imply that art is in part the successful transmutation of idea or concept into a physical object, and not merely an adherence to an 'art' manner or process.

But, a characteristic observation (even if left unstated) made about great art objects of the past for example, is that the artist was truly and fully involved with a given piece (see, for instance, the biography of Benvenuto Cellini). Of course, the same observation can be made about objects which might more readily have been classified as 'craft', especially prior to the mid-twentieth century. Very often, such objects (many of which incidentally have no pretensions to be considered as 'art') are on the border-line, so to speak, between craft as such, and art; this because, the obvious high level of emotional involvement of the craftsman or woman exists here also, but is inextricably enmeshed with his or her skill, understood as pure ability and independent of any, so to say, poetic expression. It should be noted that, for a very long time, artists were in fact considered as craftsmen, i.e. not as 'artists' as we think of them today (see below); this has meant of course, that the 'craft' aspect of any work of 'art' is one of the main criteria for its criticism.

An example of such an object could be an expertly hand-crafted dining table; such a table may be of extremely refined sensibility, extremely well-made, and serve its purpose admirably. In fact, such a table is initially appreciated for the same reasons we enjoy a lot of 'art' objects, and that is, for the sense of beauty it induces in us, through our eyes. The initial attraction usually leads to a desire for the tactile experience possible with such an object, and we will then run our fingers or hands along the surface of the table to also enjoy that experience or element of the object. People interested in the mechanics of the construction will then look under the board of the table to try to understand how it was made, how it was constructed!

But here already we have two elements not usually associated with what used to be called 'pure art': the desire for the tactile experience - a real, physical one - and the desire to know and understand how the thing was made. These two elements are usually not associated with 'art' objects as such; to take the example of a Vermeer painting in which might be represented an Eastern carpet of some kind: what we appreciate about Vermeer's carpet is how well he has rendered the colours, the light, the weight and the texture. I imagine that only a tiny number of people - if any - would feel the impulse to run their fingers over the painted carpet so as to experience the texture and weight as a tactile sensation. Almost everyone would be sufficiently satisfied and even stimulated by the information arriving at their eyes, and subsequently processed by their brain.

Here we have entered into another area characteristic of art objects and that is, illusion. The real, craftsman-made table actually exists in the same 3D space that we do, it actually occupies a space in the room we, as a result, cannot occupy - aside from sitting at the table, or standing around it. In a representational painting for instance, although the painting now exists in our real space as a, usually, 2D object, normally hung on a wall or being part of the wall, like a fresco, the carpet represented in that painting does not occupy our space - in fact, the 'carpet' doesn't exist: it's an illusion of a carpet! Our eyes are so accustomed to this kind of illusion that, although we happily describe a painted object in a painting as, for instance, a carpet, we also know full-well and simultaneously, that we are discussing an illusion, and not the physical fact of a 'real' carpet.

To want to understand how a painted illusion of a carpet was done is a natural part of our curiosity to comprehend things, particularly when an illusion is so convincing that our logical mind finds it difficult to 'compute' both the illusion itself and the knowledge that it is an illusion. In the case of the table, it is possible as mentioned, to get under the table and examine the structure and to understand the rational relationships in the engineering, as it were. In the case of the illusion of an Eastern carpet, naturally a skilled painter or teacher could explain how the artist might build up his image in such a way that the overall finished ensemble of colours, tones, light and shade produces the effect of a heavy carpet; but it remains however, an illusion. And without getting tangled up in Cartesian philosophy, the table is not an illusion, but an actual, tactile object occupying our real space.

Is it possible then, that illusion of 'reality' is one of the characteristics of art objects, even if that illusion may vary from extremely 'realistic' to little more than symbolic? Well, only in so far as those objects are figurative representations, in the case of paintings; if they are abstract, is illusion still operative? And of course, Michelangelo's David is not an illusion in the same way at all as Caravaggio's painted David is. Michelangelo's David is an actual, 3D object which we can walk all the way around; so it's not an illusion in the sense that Vermeer's painted carpet is. Nevertheless, it is an illusion in other senses: that it is neither the historical David, nor is it a real human being! It is a 3D representation of an idea, as opposed to Vermeer's or Caravaggio's 2D representation. Neither the painted nor the sculpted illusion is 'reality' in the day-to-day sense, although both exist as acceptable, man-made illusions which make up part of our everyday existence! Works of pure abstraction do not easily fall into the category of 'illusion'; very often, they in a way deny illusion (of physical reality) and assert their existence as 'independent' new realities. Yet, in a particular way, pure abstraction functions in the same way as 'in-the-round' sculpture does, that is, as a 'concrete' manifestation of the artist's idea; in that sense, it remains an illusion, given that is is not the idea itself.

And I think that here we may be approaching the beginning of a response to our question, what is Art? Most rational people would agree I think, that objects generally accepted as art in the Western tradition may be found at any point from the period of ancient Egypt (just to start somewhere) right through to today. Most people would agree that Nicola Pisano's reliefs are art, that Rembrandt's portraits are art, that Impressionist paintings are art - and so on, and so on. Nevertheless, what has been acceptable as art has been a subject for discussion and argument for centuries; change in opinions about what was and what wasn't acceptable, over those same centuries, led to the destruction or, at least, covering up of many fine works of art (e.g. Giotto's frescos in Santa Croce in Florence) subsequently rehabilitated as opinions swung back the other way. What all these things had in common, quite separately from style, form and content, was that they dealt in some kind of (visual) illusion.

Quite a lot of 'contemporary art' does not treat illusion, much less another quality - much maligned from the early-twentieth century onwards - beauty. I have previously mentioned beauty only once in this essay because it is much more variable, much more open to questions of taste and culture, than is the measurable, observable fact of illusion. I happen to believe that beauty is an important aspect of what we call art but, as history and time have revealed, beauty, while not so much ephemeral, is extremely problematical and, as such, may be treated as a separate issue, perhaps as a quality of art while not being a defining one. 

Another characteristic of certain kinds of contemporary endeavour is, often, its ephemeral quality: while being of its day, timely so to speak, as the world moves on to the latest political or social drama, the 'art' of the previous matters tends to 'date', almost immediately. This is relevant because another quality of Art, understood in a more general, historical sense, is in fact, its longevity. Highly successful art has about it a timelessness which seems to transcend even culture: many people from diverse cultures, once informed (schooled) about the aesthetics and the broad historical context of any given type or period of art, are able to participate to a large extent in the experience of that art.

It is also worth pointing out I think, that although artists certainly made objects which served given functions, be they religious, propagandistic or documentary, they also made objects which were decorative and often as well, objects whose only purpose was to please the eye. Objects which seemingly do nothing but please the eye could, by some, be described as useless, since they serve no apparent utilitarian purpose; frequently today, art is seen as a luxury and certainly not as a necessity (Aristotle is supposed to have remarked: "Culture is an ornament in good times, a refuge in bad"). The apparently useless art object, perhaps in part due to that very 'uselessness', provokes careful looking, in turn contemplation, to be followed by sometimes, a stimulated mind and an enlivened spirit. An object sitting on the table or hanging on the wall is a still object (unless it's a Calder mobile!) and that stillness is a quality which goes back at least as far as the ancient Egyptians. Art of this type has the quality of 'statement', not of any point of view per se, but of its own existence. Needless to say, I do not share the view that art is useless; for those who love art, it is one of the most useful, and least transient, aspects of a sound life.

In relation to this, in describing the dining table earlier, I used the phrase 'refined sensibility'; although some people are apparently born with a high sensitivity to aesthetic matters, many others are not and therefore, may benefit from education. Awareness and perception need to be taught, how to 'read' works of art requires schooling, not to mention how to interpret them from a historical/social point of view. And, in art matters as in all others, some people 'get' it more easily and profoundly than others do; given this, it is obvious that the observations of such individuals will be more pertinent and perceptive than those of more modest capabilities; to some extent, hence the problems with finding a definition.

La Madonna del Parto (1455-56?), fresco by Piero della Francesca (c.1412-1492)
Monterchi. (photo: the author)

1) Why is this a problem? Much of today's verbose discourse on art has been taken over by supporters of various special-interest groups, turning what was once 'Art' into a mere medium for ephemeral social issues; this results in a kind of intellectual vacuum, or, a kind of closed circuit where political/social comment has replaced the making of 'timeless' objects. One quality of art is that, although the product of its time - the time of its production - it nevertheless overcomes that temporal limitation, at least as far as the 'art' part is concerned (if not the content). Today, transient, trite points of view, often involving little if any manufacture as such on the part of the 'artist', have insinuated themselves into the intellectual space formerly occupied in culture by art (without the intellectual part, that being supplanted by an incomprehensible 'art-speak', a type of self-propagating parasite). Criticism of certain elements of the status quo, bland socio-political comment, an often neurotic desire for celebrity, and a ceaseless need for novelty now substitute for intellectual enquiry, contemplation and simple sensuous enjoyment.

2) An attempt to define 'artist'.
Originally, a maker of objects, or a decorator, an artisan, very often anonymous; an individual however, whose 'occupation' was the fabrication of art objects as distinct from simply utilitarian ones. In 15th century Italy, theorists began to assert the autonomous individuality of the artist (as we would call him or her) over and beyond that of the simple craftsman. Artists continued to be craftsmen of course, but their high ability in their chosen craft together with their informed creative or imaginative faculty, set them apart from the type of craftsman who merely - no matter how well and beautifully - executed the ideas (drawings) of someone else. An example of this difference is that between a stone-mason and a sculptor (even if, in earlier times, they might have been one and the same): it is obvious that a highly-skilled stone-mason may nevertheless lack imagination or creativity, and be quite content to earn his living manufacturing objects according to the designs of others.

Although it had occurred from time-to-time following the demise of the classical period, that artists extended or developed a given iconography, most artist-craftsmen tended to repeat styles and forms deriving from someone else's successful model. In other words, by and large in Europe, from the end of late antiquity through to about 1250 or so, artisan-craftsmen were expected to repeat what was already established, and not to go too far away from those examples (it must be admitted that this point is moot since more recent sympathetic studies have shown a notable variety amongst many medieval artists).

Again in Italy, by the time of the Pisanos, Cavallini and Giotto amongst others, i.e. the late-Medieval or Gothic period, artisan-craftsmen were beginning to see things differently, to want more in the way of form and space, and to diverge from the norm of repetition (an artist-led change). All this however, needs to be seen in relation to the much earlier classical Roman period of painting and sculpture which was derived largely from Greek models. We do in fact have the names of some of the most famous and sought-after individuals, whose work was not only widely-known in their own lifetimes, but was written about, eulogised and, especially by the Romans, copied. It is due in no small part to these same Roman copies that we have physical examples (the copies) of some of the great Greek sculptors' works, and, to a lesser degree, those of some of the painters. Quite a number were extremely famous and revered artists but, with the decline of the Roman empire and the rise of Eastern Christian art forms, Roman classical models were gradually modified, evolving into what is now referred to as Byzantine art.*

With the spread of Byzantine art and power, artists' names eventually - not entirely however - became less important, to the point where the makers and creators of Western art became largely anonymous. In many respects, we have amongst others the Italian art historian and writer (and artist and architect), Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), to thank for the revival of the fortunes of the artist as an independent, creative individual - and for our modern concept of the artist as such. Not only much of what we know about many of the great artists of the time is owed to him, but also Vasari's awe-struck devotion to some of his peers, and most notably to Michelangelo, as well as to earlier artists, was a form of recognition of and respect for artists which we still observe in the 21st century!

But early writers on art (in Italy at least) certainly had some very clear ideas about not only what an artist was, and what he or she did, but also of levels or grades of ability and success. Not all things were art, and not all art was of the same standard (Vasari, while usually generous in his comments, was quite capable of discerning the better from the less able, not sometimes without his own prejudices however). The modern-day lack of clarity, of deliberate wordy obfuscation, would have been entirely foreign to a man such as Vasari, who knew not only what to look for in 'art', but how to evaluate what he was seeing (notwithstanding that people then and now may disagree with him). Of course, in his day - not to mention in earlier times - and in fact up until relatively recently (the last 200-odd years or so), art fulfilled comparatively definite roles in European societies, principal among which were those of illustrating religious dogma and representing both temporal and religious power.

An artist's self-expression, so highly prized in the late 19th and the 20th centuries, was achieved, as it were, by default: some artists expressed their own personalities almost incidentally while painting or sculpting the fashionable styles of their times. It seems that, with the advent of the Renaissance proper however, artists had achieved and were allowed to express much greater individuality than in earlier periods (partly due to a shift in focus from God the Maker to man the maker). Close study of the art from almost anywhere will however reveal, usually, the different personalities at work; an artistic personality can be manifested even in the most humdrum or clearly stylised production. The point here is that, until the general period Vasari chose to write about, the individuality of an artist was not a primary concern, and neither was his or her particular expression (bearing in mind nevertheless, that certain artists were chosen for certain commissions while others were not).

So, what is an artist? It is a person capable of expressing visually, through some kind of object, his or her perceptions, in such a way that other members of the society are induced to see in like manner, very often concerning indefinite but generally-agreed consistent realities of the state of being human or of human perception. Sounds like what Art is really!

* See André Grabar, Les origines de l'esthétique médiévale, 1992.  Éditions Macula, Paris.

I would very much appreciate comments about this essay, helpful ones of course, as I don't pretend to have the final word. It would be very nice however, to build up a rough definition together!

Reflections on the writing of art history

 In the research for the articles which appear in this blog, it has gradually become clear that there are two basic types of writing approaches in the studies I read, particularly in relation to the exegesis of the life and work of Piero della Francesca. The one may be typified by a most important monograph (on Piero della Francesca) written by the great Italian art historian, Roberto Longhi (1890-1970) and first published in 1927; the other, by the innumerable texts whose aim, apparently, is to accumulate, in ever more minute detail, more and more 'facts'; naturally, the idea behind this is to surround the artworks in question with better and deeper study, regardless of its irrelevance to the 'inspiration' of that artwork. That is to say, a kind of clinical 'post-mortem' analysis aimed at explaining, no matter how fancifully, every detail of any artwork, with the apparent a priori belief that such analysis unlocks the 'mysteries' behind picture-making.

Longhi's volume, later revised and reprinted, also in English, has been described by other equally erudite authors as 'poetic' ("... a brilliant, poetical volume ...", John Pope-Hennessy [1913-1994])1. Another Englishman who also contributed to the appreciation of Piero was Kenneth Clark (1903-1983); earlier than both was the naturalized American, Bernard Berenson (1865-1959). What these historians (and others) have in common, amongst many other things including their love of Piero della Francesca, is in a broad sense their writing style, or perhaps better, their approach to writing art history. This difference - different because not the same as the highly academic approach taken by other significant 20th century authors - was brought home to me by a couple of comments made in Pope-Hennessy's little but indispensable book, The Piero della Francesca Trail. His statement, "I am no friend of iconographers, ...  "(p21) helped to confirm my own impression of a particular aspect of 'the other' type of writing, viz. that in its laborious and, to be frank, seemingly quite arbitrary piling-up of 'fact' on 'fact' - no doubt the result of diligent painstaking research - it can sometimes be crushingly boring and, worse still, actually obtrusive of not only enjoyment but even of comprehension - and especially so for the lay art-lover or the dilettante.

A frequent method of this type of writer, as mentioned, is the endless accumulation of facts - by which is demonstrated their own erudition - which knowledge is then attributed to the artist they happen to be discussing, seemingly oblivious of, I should have thought, the obvious condition that most 15th and 16th century artists were not research assistants, let alone philologists: they were working men, and sometimes women, who relied on getting work done - frequently having to adhere to the time constraints of a legally-binding written contract - to put food on the table. When, according to this type of art history writing, were these artists supposed to devote the endless hours - not to mention the cost involved in travelling from place to place - to searching for documents and other material to include in their works? In fact, an answer to this question is supplied by the historians themselves, suggesting that it was the learned patrons who furnished the myriad of purportedly necessary details to these artists; this explanation is plausible (and occasionally supported by documents) but, even so, the punctiliousness of some academic historians in finding (or inventing) iconographical links within certain artworks is at best daunting, at worst oppressive. 

The impression one has is that the search for the documentary links in a seemingly self-perpetuating chain of cultural (sometimes, inter-cultural) references is an intellectual end in itself. The shift away from explication of the functioning of a given artwork - leaving aside the much more important job of showing how to look at art - to an 'academic' quasi-maniacal pedantry fills the pages of specialist art magazines. This attitude or direction I have recently discovered, permeates the approach taken by universities, to the detriment one might imagine of any genuine enjoyment the noviciate student may have walked in with. Although a clear distinction between uninformed opinion and cultured knowledge has to be inculcated at the beginning of a university degree, so that students learn that their opinion - contrary to what they have at school been taught to believe - is irrelevant until supported by knowledge, the very interest which probably most of those same students had in the first place must not be squashed under the mind-numbing weight of endless footnoting (that is, endless justification at the expense of appreciation).

Longhi himself commented tangentially on one of the dangers of this kind of malformed intellectual nitpicking when he remarked in his Piero della Francesca (1963, III edition, p161): 'Di fronte a un così disinvolto antistoricismo ... ' (Before such an unscrupulous anti-historicism [in the sense of treating things without regard to their historical context] ...); this is significant because, even then (1962), intelligent observers could see that historical fact was being intermixed with what amounted to personal crusades, not to say opinions, to the detriment of true historical enquiry. To my mind, what that (true enquiry) means is basing one's deductions or inferences on what is real and plausible, not to mention possible, and not, as so often happens today, both in academic and public discourse, retrofitting historical fact - in our case, the artworks themselves - with consequently mendacious (and confusing) overlays of pedantry or, worse still, political correctness.

In what do the styles of (for instance) Berenson, Longhi, Pope-Hennessy and Clark consist, in what ways are they different from the heavy-going manner of some other writers? I think the word  used by Pope-Hennessy to describe Longhi's writing is perhaps as good as any: in their writing, along with a rigorous academic culture, there is also 'poetry'; an often quite un-romantic poetry - similar to some of the painted passages of Piero della Francesca himself - which while acknowledging the impotence of attempts to 'translate' the visual into the verbal, nevertheless, we could say 'transmutes' that visual matter into a form adapted to an intellectual diffusion by means of print - or, to quote Longhi: ".. in opera d'inchiostro". There is in this manner of art history telling, a desire to stimulate in the reader a non-visual perception allied to or evocative of the original visual stimulus (the artwork), while at the same time implicitly respecting the utterly different characters of the two mediums (visual art and the [written] word). And while great art historians naturally attempt to discern the sources, which may or may not exist, of the content of certain types of artwork, they avoid, so to say, 'painting over' what is already there with their own pastiche of contemporary influences2. The unpleasant, extreme anti-poetical method of some historians somewhat calls into question their 'basic' comprehension, not to mention enjoyment, of art per se. 

After studying art history for a while, it becomes obvious that, at least in some periods and especially in the Renaissance, more or less subtle (and sometimes occult) references to various cultural antecedents - be they Greco-Roman, pagan or Christian, western or oriental and so on -  contribute in ways more or less importantly to the 'iconography' of a given work. To a large extent, the job of extracting and interpreting, almost in an archeological fashion, the elements contained in any particular artwork is a major and refined part of the occupation of the art historian - together with the situation of that piece within its own historical milieu. To find relationships between artists working at the same time in the same or different places, and parallels between the products of those and other artists, to trace the development of artists, schools and periods, to try to explain the inevitable changes which occur with the passing of time, to discover who supported different artists, who commissioned them and why, these are some of the principal concerns of the art historian; all of which should be put forward in a way which enlightens the viewer of art and not in a way which overwhelms and discourages that viewer. As suggested earlier, some supposed erudition in the end seems more fanciful or arbitrary than real, especially when read by a painter (and I dare say, any kind of artist)!

The spoliation of artwork, and in particular of pictures, brings to mind the Oscar Wilde story of The Happy Prince (1888): one has the sensation after reading the disquisitions of certain historians that a much-loved picture is now little more than the basic substructure, resembling that unhappy prince at the end of his travails, denuded of all his fecund beauty. Or, to place it more specifically within the area of visual art, although interesting in themselves, the 'sinopie' (sketched drawings) revealed underneath detached fresco pictures are not the finished product as left to us by the artist; the deliberate search for beauty by artists of the past cannot simply be ignored in the analysis of artworks. Proving that a particular arch or capital depicted in a picture was inspired by a particular real arch or capital illucidates only one aspect of that picture and ignores the overall 'poetry' which holds the whole thing together.

Dead Christ with Angels, c.1447  by Andrea del Castagno, (c.1419-57)
Detail of detached and restored fresco, in the Cenacolo di Sant'Apollonia, Florence 

The sinopia (detail) found under the fresco (above) when it was detached from the wall for restoration.
Andrea del Castagno's sinopia drawings are very beautiful examples of Renaissance drawing and, partly for that reason, are displayed alongside the detached and restored frescos. Cenacolo di Sant'Apollonia, Florence.
(Both photos: the author)

Roberto Longhi, in discussing what art criticism should be3 (broadly, poetical and not philosophical) made this comment: "Nulla di estetizzante, dunque, sia ben fermo, è nell'esigenza qui espressa di riconsegnare la critica, e perciò la storia dell'arte, non dico nel grembo della poesia; ma, certamente, nel cuore di una attività letteraria, che, ne sono sicuro, non potrà mai essere 'letteratura di intratrattenimento'." (Nothing to do with aestheticism therefore, let's be clear, is in the necessity here expressed to return criticism, and so as well art history, I don't say to within poetry; but, certainly, into the heart of a literary activity, which, I'm sure, can never be a 'pastime literature'). A call therefore for art criticism and art history to be done in a way sympathetic with the artworks they describe, that is with the visual 'poetry', and not weighed down by dry analytical theory. In other words, the work of art is both the essential starting point, and the finishing point (the Α and the Ω), and doctrine per se is antithetical to that sympathy. With the rider however that (serious) art writing is not simplistic or merely for amusement!

In the same place (pp 29-30), Longhi points out that, whereas Dante did comment on painting and painters, the great poet Petrarch did not because it was a language, a language which he didn't understand ("... per il grande poeta che non intendeva quella lingua ... "). Language therefore, both that of the artwork itself, and that of the words (literature) used to explain it, are interdependent4, the latter stimulated by the former; but the former has to be learnt. Earlier (page 24) Longhi uses the phrase: " ... in the choice of the work to illuminate." ("... nella scelta dell'opera da illuminare."): the poetic choice of the word 'illuminate' is telling as it expresses the idea that the role of the critic and historian is to 'shed light on' what is there, and by implication, not to tear it apart nor to adulterate it with superfluous erudition -  superfluous in the sense of speculative and even imagined influences. The use of words such as 'seems', 'is likely', 'may have', 'probably' and so on, read in context imply fact but are, rather, indicative of speculation ... and not of fact. Allowing for the, so to speak, setting of the historical scene, the historian's work is always to be circumscribed by the plain source before him or her, namely, the work of art itself.

A typical example of this superfluity and speculation is to be seen in a recent little video (available on You Tube) by the Frick Collection in New York in which a curator discusses a beautiful picture by the Dutch master Jan Vermeer (1632-1675). The painting is called Officer and Laughing Girl (1657?) and the curator duly discusses the salient elements of the painting arriving eventually at the large hat worn by the officer in the picture. Here there is a longish digression into how the material used to produce the hat - apparently beaver fur - was got from Canada; this led to comments about how the trade in beaver pelts caused great suffering amongst the indigenous people of Canada and some questions about how concerned Vermeer might have been about this fur trade. Apart from the painfully obvious irrelevance of this to our comprehension of this painting, what in fact, except for the now mandatory curtesy in the direction of political correctness, is the point of this information? Is this, at best tangential, 'fact' supposed to make us disapprove of Vermeer because of his inclusion of this particular kind of hat? Are we to take it as read that Vermeer, like all good politically correct artists nowadays, was aware of this 'fact'? The curator actually muses on this question! Should we now also question Vermeer's opinion about soldiering, about war in general and colonies in particular; and what was his stance in regard to the French colonies in Canada at the time? Where does all this nonsense stop? The girl in the painting is sitting on a chair of a type often seen in Vermeer's pictures: must we now wonder about the source of the wood used to make the chair - and naturally, from our god-like moral position, condemn him? Again, what is the point of such remarks? In a critique of such an image, in referring to the hat, one might have pointed out that its very dark tone helps to establish position by markedly contrasting with the bright lights of the window and with the middle tone of the bonnet worn by the girl: that is, the officer is closer to us than the girl, and since our eyes seek the light, subconsciously we bypass him and enter the fictive space of the room. Also, that the hat's obvious angle is balanced by a contrasting angle in the top of the map on the wall. What that hat is made of has nothing to do with the 'poetry' of this picture.

Officer and Laughing Girl, 1657?, by Jan (Johannes) Vermeer, Frick Collection, NY
(Image: Public Domain Fair Use, Wikipedia)

To a large extent however, whether or not a piece of writing, in art history or any other field, is congenial to its reader depends on its style, understood in the more general literary sense, and the personality of the particular reader. To a certain degree therefore, how a writer is perceived, not to say enjoyed, is dependent upon one's own personality and one's mood, receptive or not, when a given piece of writing is actually being read. That notwithstanding, assuming readers who are accustomed to a certain level of discourse, the presentation of an author's research may be dry and merely academic, or it may be - should be - still academic (understood as the result of rigorous research), but lively and inspiring: a style which leads the reader to want to read more, and indeed to savour this laying out of the writer's discoveries and conclusions. 

1 The Piero della Francesca Trail, 1991 by (Sir) John Pope-Hennessy, Thames & Hudson (1993), p13.

2 An unfortunate physical example of this kind of thing which later, fortunately, came to light, was the painting-over and eventual vandalising of some of Giotto's frescos in the beautiful Franciscan church of Santa Croce in Florence. Giotto's Scenes from the Life of Saint Francis (c.1325?) in the Peruzzi and Bardi chapels had, it seems, become 'old-hat' and were subsequently white-washed and, in one example, had had the supports for a wall-mounted funerary monument chiselled into the middle of it. The frescos were eventually rediscovered and restored but not without the positions of the holes made by the chisel remaining visible; needless to add, the effect of the white-washing on the colours can never be completely undone.
My comment of course may be challenged by the concept that all art is a product of its own time, and likewise all criticism; one of the pitfalls to be avoided by historians is precisely this problem, that is, the intelligent critic and historian must be as objective as possible and certainly not revise history by applying contemporary prejudices.

3 Proposte per una critica d'arte (Proposals for [an] art criticism), 2014 (reprint of an article which appeared in 1950 in Paragone, following Longhi's autograph corrections published later in 1985) by Roberto Longhi with a preface by Giorgio Agamben, pub. by Portatori d'acqua.

4 Ibidem (Proposte - Longhi), p44, quotes Paul Valéry: "... tous les arts vivent de paroles. Tout oeuvre exige qu'on lui réponde et une litttérature écrit ou non, immédiate ou méditée est indivisible de ce qui pousse l'homme à produire". (... all the arts live with words. Each work requires that it is responded to and a literature, written or not, immediate or meditated is indivisible from that which pushes man to produce).