For some of us, artists in particular I imagine, art works take-on or have, as it were, an animated personality: that is to say, they become almost like a kind of living being. It is a commonplace that certain artists - not all - regard their artistic products as though they were their children. This idea of the particular personality of art works was reinforced for me on becoming aware of a common Latin phrase used by medieval and later artists when signing their work: so-and-so "me fecit": 'so-and-so made me'. In this manner, it is the artwork itself which is speaking to us - and continues to speak over the centuries! It is also the joining of the verbal onto the visual; the image exists, conveying the content it is supposed to represent - a visual content, whether painted or sculpted - and then, as if to give it the 'breath of life', the artist claims it by having the work itself state the artist's authorship. Very often, these few words, and others similar, are hidden, inconspicuous; they are certainly not meant to distract from the principal significance carried by the image.
In relation to medieval or Renaissance art particularly, as well as more generally, it has been my experience that, wherever they might be, certain images seem to 'communicate', as it were personally, as one walks by or, more likely, as one stands to admire them. It is as though a figure or personage, possibly one out of many, had expressly decided to address a particular viewer! Obviously, the figure does not actually speak; the sensation one has is of a feeling that that figure possibly has some kind of personal significance; a riddle of course, especially so as this normally happens only with an individual figure - and which is more likely to occur when one is alone in front of the particular work. Needless to say, this effect was, at least in part, a desired one: that the holy figures (if the work be a religious one) should 'touch' us, as though personally; but the same thing can happen with secular images too1. At other times however, it would seem to be the artist him- or herself who 'communicates' in this mute fashion, again a kind of riddle. In this case, perhaps it is the utterly convincing nature of the image - the formal and textual coherence - which 'carries' so much of the 'anima' of its creator that it manages to 'speak' - so to speak!
The artist is however really speaking to us in the sense that art is a language and, as such, it is probably no surprise that we sometimes have the sensation that we are being personally addressed. In making art objects, artists are 'speaking' to the future viewers of that object through the vocabulary, grammar and syntax of the particular 'art language' they happen to be using. In certain respects, this effect may be taken as a sign of the artwork's - that is, the artist's - success; a given function of art is to communicate and so it follows that in communicating, it fulfils this basic function (what exactly is being communicated is, naturally, another topic). This is a generally recognized function of art but what I am referring to is, as said, a personal or individual contact established by the artwork with particular viewers and not perhaps with whomsoever happens to pass by. The question arises as to whether it is in fact the artwork that is doing the communicating, or whether it is the viewer reading something into the experience of studying the artwork; that is, is the viewer 'projecting' some special quality onto or into the specific art object, is it the viewer who is 'animating' the object beyond any objective criteria? Or, is this especial 'communication' perhaps really the result of understanding the 'language', of being schooled or instructed in not only the language itself, but in its interpretation?
In this relation, I have recently been fortunate enough to have been reading two particularly interesting texts 2 and unfortunate enough to have been subjected to another (thankfully short) which, in terms of 'art literacy', could be termed the polar opposite of the other two! Given the very low level of appreciation - not to say knowledge - and the general confusion of the latter piece (whose details I don't wish to publicise), it could be taken as an example of why it is that so often, the untutored mind misses the point, that is, people like this often miss altogether or don't understand what is being communicated by a given artwork. On numerous occasions, the sight of crowds of people filing past some of the most important, not to say sublime, works of art, in major art galleries, has saddened me, knowing that with even a small amount of interpretive knowledge or learning, some more at least of these people would get so much more out of their experience.
A related obstacle, ironically, is, as the proverb goes, 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing'; by this I mean that often it seems that the reaction to certain works of art is conditioned by the fame of the artwork. People will bill and coo in front of, for instance, a Raphael or a Michelangelo or a Picasso because they know it was made by that artist, but will be absolutely cold before the (possibly very good) work of someone they've never heard of. This suggests that what they are doing before the Raphael etcetera is exactly what they've been conditioned to do (and what they think they should do); when however, they are confronted with a work for which they have no yardstick (no fame, no verbal commonplaces), they are unable to form an independent judgement or opinion and remain silent - or worse, criticise the hapless work from the shallowness of their unschooled appreciation. 3
For me at any rate, whether this communication is a 'real' phenomenon or simply my mind fancifully projecting into the object is not of the greatest importance; what is important is that this effect continue to occur, to take me into a condition one might say of privilege, of individual dialogue with another person's thought and 'anima'.
1 My own experience is that, normally, the effect I am writing about occurs in relation to figurative works and, more exactly, works in which there is the representation of human figures, of people; the effect is not so strong nor so common with landscapes or still-life for instance, or with over-sized work, and perhaps even less so with regard to abstract pieces (no criticism implied). The phenomenon is completely absent when viewing 'installations', performance 'art', conceptual art and so forth (criticism implied)!
2 The two particularly interesting texts referred to are: Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, Oxford, originally 1971, and Lorenzo Ghiberti, I Commentarii, Giunti, 1998 (Introduzione e cura di Lorenzo Bartoli).
3 This condition, that is, of some people's appreciation of art being in some way conditioned by their expectations as opposed to being a reaction to the art per se, has been remarked on for some time. While preparing this article, I came across a reference to Francisco de Hollanda's (1517-85) Roman Dialogues (c. 1550 manuscript only) in which he imagines or recounts a conversation between Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo in which she asks him his opinion of Flemish painting; Michelangelo replies, "Flemish painting pleases the pious better than any Italian style ... This is not due to vigour or merit in the painting but is entirely the fruit of pious sensibility". Although he goes on to a more detailed formal criticism of Flemish painting, Michelangelo here makes an observation concerning the fact that some people's preferences are based not on an appreciation of any given painting on its own terms, but rather on the power of the (in this case) religious sentiment it carries; the formal success or otherwise of the artwork in question, for viewers like these, is almost irrelevant and probably not understood. Reference and quotation found in The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, Lawrence Gowing (Ed.), 1978, Vol III: 'Michelangelo', footnote #35 (p348).
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