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.
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.
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).
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.
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| 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 |
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| 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).
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