It is improbable that more nonsense has been written about aesthetics than about anything else: the literature of the subject is not large enough for that (Clive Bell)

Index

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The Index is found here
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Saturday, November 30, 2013

Gombrich: The Quest for Spirituality

Gombrich: - The Quest for Spirituality


This is Chapter Four of E.H. Gombrich's "Preference for the Primitive"

Quoted text is in YELLOW. Text quoted from other authors is in GREEN *************************************************************************** ****************************************************************************




Rogier Van Der Weyden, Adoration from the Columba Altarpiece, 1460




Chapter Four is more about writers than painters, and 'spirituality' as a topic for secular philosophy rather than theology.


According to Gombrich, in the early 19th there were those "who alleged that indulgence in sensual pleasure was a direct consequence of loss of spirituality........and imported this concern with the spirit into the historty of art.  To find the origin of this preoccupation we are not likely to go wrong if we look to the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel"


And so we begin with  Hegel's lectures on aesthetics (1818-1829) - though more concerning his taste rather than his philosophy.


Here is what he had to say about the Dukes of Bergundy, as depicted above in the role of Magi:

In these figures we see that they are something else beyond praying and that they have other business. It is as if they go to Mass only or Sundays or early in the morning, while in the rest of the week, or the day, they pursue their other concerns. Especially in Flemish or German pictures those who commissioned them appear as pious knights, or God-fearing housewives, with their sons and daughters. They are like Martha who goes about the house, careful and troubled about many things external and mundane, and not like Mary who chose the better part.Their piety does not lack heart and spiritual depth, but what constitutes their whole nature is not the song of love which should have been their whole life, as it is the nightingale’s, and not merely an elevation, a prayer or thanks for a mercy received.











These figures, including the Duke, page, and onlooker, do feel anxiety ridden,
and not especially pious




Jan Van Eyck, "Madonna of Chancellor Rolin", 1435



Nor does Chancellor Rolin feel like he is overwhelmed by divine love.
It feels like he could leave the divine presence, walk over to his office, and immediately negotiate rents on a ducal property.





Fra Angelico, San Marco Altarpiece, 1440, detail



As opposed to this contrite donor,  depicted by an Italian painter at about the same time.


Concerning such Italian painters, Hegel  had this to say:

Italian painting did not arrive at the standard of perfection from the outset; to reach it it had to travel a long road.  True, the pure and innocent piety, the grand sense of the whole conception and the unselfconscious beauty of forms and soulful inwardness are frequently most manifest in the works of early Italian masters, despite all their technical imperfections. In the last century  these early masters were not much appreciated, but rejected as awkward, dry, and poor.  Only in recent times have they been rescued from oblivion  by scholars and artists, only to be admired and copied with an exaggerated bias that wanted to deny that further steps were subsequently taken towards more perfect conceptions and representations, ant this was bound to lad to opposite errors.



I wonder why donors were depicted so differently in Burgundy than they were in Florence -- and why this depiction was so problematic to Hegel.

Gombrich does not offer  much else about his aesthetics.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tells us he believed that:

The principal aim of art ... is to allow us to contemplate and enjoy created images of our own spiritual freedom—images that are beautiful precisely because they give expression to our freedom. Art's purpose, in other words, is to enable us to bring to mind the truth about ourselves, and so to become aware of who we truly are.


It feels to me that  Rogier and Jan were depicting the Dukes of Burgundy as real men of their status might be -- while weaving those depictions into  breath-taking-beautiful visions. .  So the Dukes might not be experiencing divine love, but we can experience it when looking at them. Would that  meet the above requirement ?



Correggio, Madonna of St. Jerome, 1528




Here's a direct quote from the translation offered here


Still greater were Correggio in the magical wizardry of chiaroscuro, in the soulful delicacy and gracefulness of heart, forms, movement, and grouping, and Titian in the wealth of natural life, and the illuminating shading, glow, warmth, and power of colouring. There is nothing more attractive than the naïveté, in Correggio, of a grace not natural but religious and spiritual, nothing sweeter than his smiling unselfconscious beauty and innocence.

The perfection of painting in these great masters is a peak of art which can be ascended only once by one people in the course of history’s development.




Correggio,"Madonna with St. Jerome", 1523



Correggio,"Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine", 1526

Hegel does not mention of any specific paintings in his discussion of  Italian painting, but I assume the above would fit the bill, and perhaps he saw the second one when he visited Paris.

I am bothered by  a feeling of cuteness-smallness-sweetness-brokenness in Corregio's paintings. They seem to be half-way between Leonardo Da Vinci and the sentimental, collectible plates from the Franklin Mint.   Perhaps that's because the ones in American museums are inferior.  But still I'm doubting that Hegel had a taste for the kind of pictorial power that distinguishes Titian, Tintoretto, and Tiepolo -- as well as so many leading painters of the 19th and 20th centuries.

And ideas of 'perfection' and 'history's development' seem outside the unique  individuality of both making and experiencing a painting.

But since it appears that his aesthetics emphasize beauty in the human form -- I'll have to return to his lectures at some later date.


Fra Angelico, from the "Annunciation", 1437-46


Gombrich then introduces us to Alexis-Francois Rio (1797-1874, a devout Roman Catholic who became an enthusiastic writer about  religious art from the Italian Quattrocento.


At this point the competence of those who are  vulgarly called "connoisseurs" comes to an end.  The particular organ needed for the appreciation  of the kind of works of which we want to speak  is not the same as that which is able to judge ordinary works of art.  Mysticism is to painting what ecstasy is to psychology.... only those who have a strong and profound sympathy with certain religious ideas are able to understand mystical paintings..... Francois Rio, "L'Art Chrétien", 1861-7



Beyond the details of his personal life, and an error in his chronology of painters, we're not told much else about Rio except that he adored Fra Angelico and preferred the painters of Sienna and Umbria to those corrupt pagans of Florence.  He extolled the efforts of Savonarola to "stem the tide of sensuality and worldliness""--presumably including his persuasion of Botticelli to burn many of his paintings.


I'm not sure that Rio deserves the contempt that Gombrich hardly conceals for one who wrote about art history as an enthusiast instead of as a professional historian.  (his income was earned on the marriage bed rather than in a university classroom).  Can he be credited with  introducing 15th C. Italian painters to many art lovers in northern Europe ?  Did he make astute observations concerning  specific paintings?




Then we meet a Protestant writer, Lord Lindsay (1812 -1880) who had this to say about the age of Giotto - or what he called "The Age of Youth":


There is in truth a holy purity,  an innocent naivete, a child—like grace and simplicity a freshness, a fearlessness, an utter freedom from affectation, a yearning after all things truthful, lovely and of good report, in the productions of this early time, which invests them with a charm peculiar in its kind, and which few even of the most perfect works of the maturer era can boast of and hence the risk and danger (which I thus warn you of at the outset) of becoming too passionately attached to them, of losing the power of discrimination, of admiring and imitating their defects as well as their beauties, of running into affectation in seeking after simplicity and into exaggeration in our efforts to be in earnest in a word, of forgetting that in art, as in human nature, it is the balance, harmony and coequal development of Sense, Intellect and Spirit, which constitutes perfection. ...Alexander  Lindsay, from "Sketches of Christian Art", 1847




Gombrich notes the ambivalence here.  Cherishing, on the one hand, the "innocent naivete"  - but critiquing, on the other hand, the "defects".

Unfortunately we're not shown any specifics about those 'defects' -- and I wonder where Lindsay found them.








Filippo Lippi, St. Stephen's funeral, 1453-61


Continuing on the theme of medieval Christian purity versus pagan sensuality,
Gombrich then excerpts these lines from Robert Browning's poem, "Fra Lippo Lippi" (1855):


The Prior and the learned pulled a face
And stopped all that in no time. "How? what's here?
Quite from the mark of painting, bless us all!
Faces, arms, legs and bodies like the true
As much as pea and pea! it's devil's-game!
Your business is not to catch men with show,
With homage to the perishable clay,              
But lift them over it, ignore it all,
Make them forget there's such a thing as flesh.
Your business is to paint the souls of men — 
Man's soul, and it's a fire, smoke . . .






















For whatever reasons,  piety-versus-sensuality is no longer a burning  issue in the discussion of 15th C. Italian painting.




John Ruskin, portrait of Rose La Touche, 1960


Gombrich then introduces John Ruskin, who critiqued Lord Lindsay's book, and even his piety-versus-naturalism controversy is no longer debated. It had not occurred to me how conflicted he was on this issue.  On the one hand, as with  "Stones of Venice", he was nostalgic for  faith driven art.  But on the other hand, he was still committed to  truth to nature. Above he achieves a compromise not far removed from Filippo Lippi.

Paolo Veronese, "Solomon and Sheba", 1580 (detail)


Above is a fragment from the painting before which Ruskin suddenly realized that he was no longer a Christian.


"the painter saw that sensual passion in man was, not only a fact, but a Divine fact; the human creature, though the highest of the animals, was, nevertheless, a perfect animal, and his happiness, health, and nobleness depended on the due power of every animal passion, as well as the cultivation of every spiritual tendency"


Which is a curious choice -- because I doubt that anyone would select it as Veronese's  most gorgeous work. (a full color reproduction can still not be found on the internet). Perhaps it was just  the final feather that tipped the balance.


Edwin Landseer, "The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner", 1837




And here's another piece which Ruskin greatly admired-- probably not so much because he loved dogs, but  because of its sincerity - a quality which he thought was absent from so much art after the 15th C.









In the first decades of the 15th  Century a new spirit entered Western painting. Remaining in the service of the Church, painting still was to develop principles which stood in no relation to the tasks set by the Church. In one respect the work of art now offers more than what is demanded by the Church; apart from the religious meaning it now offers an image of the real world; the artist becomes engrossed in the study and rendering of the outward appearance of things ... Beauty hitherto striven for and also frequently achieved as the highest attribute of holiness, now gives way to significant characterization ... but where it still breaks through it is a newborn sensual beauty which must have its full share in the earthly and the real since it would not find a place otherwise within the world of art.

In this respect the work of art now offers less than the Church demands or might demand. The religious content cannot thrive without claiming exclusive dominance, and that for a simple reason which is not always clearly admitted: it is that this content is essentially of a negative kind and consists in excluding anything reminiscent of worldly life. As soon as this life is deliberately drawn into the sphere of art as happened at that time the picture will no longer look devout. It is worth reflecting how few are the means by which art can directly arouse devotion; it can depict exalted calm and grace, it can express dedication, longing, humility and grief in heads and gestures, but these are all elements which are part of general humanity and are not limited to Christian emotions......Jacob Burkhardt, 1855


Gombrich  shared the above quote to exemplify the "Progressive Bias" that ran counter to the "taste for the primitive"


Above it, I've posted  a fragment once attached to Rheims Cathedral to exemplify   non-devout Christian art from an earlier century.  So I'm not buying Burkhardt's argument that a heightened concern for the "outward appearance of things" stood "in no relation to the tasks set by the church" -- though maybe that statement would be better applied  before the 12th Century.




Fra Angelico, detail for Orvieto Cathedral, 1447


But like Lindsay and Ruskin, Burkhardt was ambivalent about the older, Gothic style of painting.

"Anyone who is altogether repelled by Fra Angelico is unlikely to have a true understanding of ancient art"

He noted the "Celestial purity, intense devotional feeling"

And he singled out the above depiction of prophets asking " whether any work on art on earth, Raphael not excepted, could so represent silent devout adoration"














The tenderness, the humility, the haunted reveries of his pensive Virgins"...Hippolyte Taine


The noted literary critic, Hyppolyte Taine, is introduced as an anti-clerical proponent of 'immature' sensuality of Botticelli. (note: Burckhardt describes a painting in the Uffizi,  similar to the above, as Botticelli's most beautiful - though, in general, he "never quite achieved what a strove for. He desired to express life an emotin in violent movement, and frequently merely represented uncouth haste" )

The mysticism of the cloister and the philosophy of the schools have peopled the heads of these master with abstracted formulas and exalted emotions... the physical shape hardly interests them... Hippolyte Taine

I can't imagine a more blindly ideological response to pre-Renaissance painting -- but it seems to have become canonical within that progressive narrative of art history that eventually leads to the liberation achieved in the 20th C..





Botticelli, "The Birth of Venus", 1486











Unlike Leonardo's "Leda" or Raphael's 'Galatea"  Botticelli's type seemed virginal, indeed somewhat gawky, and all the more seductive for appearing to be innocent.  Spirituality is, after all, only one ideal with which to oppose sensuality, innocence is another.






Botticelli’s apotheosis came a mere four years after the publication of Taine’s assessment, in the famous essay which Walter Pater devoted to his art in The Renaissance, published in 1873. Pater, too, identified the Renaissance with ‘the outbreak of the human spirit’, its ‘care for physical beauty, the worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which the religious system of the Middle Ages imposed on the heart and the imagination’.


We need not follow Pater into his dreams of what these Madonnas are feeling, nor need we quote the whole of his appreciation of Botticelli’s Venus, where again he stresses the ‘quaintness of design’ which he considers ‘a more direct inlet into the Greek temper than the works of the Greeks themselves ... Botticelli meant all this imagery to be altogether pleasurable; and it was partly an incompleteness of resources, inseparable from the art of that time, that subdued and chilled it ..


The complete text of Pater's critique of Botticelli can be found here - and it comes off as much more thoughtful than Gombrich's excerpts might suggest.

I do wonder just what pieces of Greek art Botticellil might have seen in 16th C. Florence - but how else might one account for the remarkable difference between Botticelli's Venus and those nudes by Raphael and Leonardo?   It's just so weird to have the Goddess of Erotic Love appear to be innocent of it -- even if she's just been born -  although I wouldn't  impute that innocence to the artist himself.  Haven't men, worldwide, always been willing to pay extra for the services of a virgin ?

And it is surprising that even Pater feels that Botticelli is lacking something in comparison with Leonardo and Michelangelo -- and feels that he may sometimes offer a " naive carelessness of pictorial propriety" and may have been handicapped by " an incompleteness of resources, inseparable from the art of that time


Then we're introduced to another literary critic, and sometime poet and Gay activist, John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) who wrote a 7-volume history of the Italian Renaissance.  As Gombrich notes, he reprises the Hegelian approach with:

 ‘The first step in the emancipation of the modern mind was taken thus by art, proclaiming to men the glad tidings of their goodliness and greatness in a world of manifold enjoyment created for their use. Whatever painting touched, became by that touch human; piety, at the lure of art, folded her soaring wings and rested on the genial earth. This the Church had not foreseen’.



Likewise, he cannot imagine piety, Christian or otherwise, being anything but opposed to the sensual -- and judges that Botticelli somehow comes up short : "The very imperfection of these pictures lends a value to them in the eyes of the student, by helping him to comprehend exactly how the revelations of the humanists affected the artistic sense of Italy"




Botticelli, "Venus and Mars", 1483












Here's what Symonds  had to say about this painting:

This combination or confusion of artistic impulses in Botticelli, this treatment of pagan themes in the spirit of mediæval mysticism, sometimes ended in grotesqueness. It might suffice to cite the pregnant "Aphrodite" in the National Gallery, if the "Mars and Venus" in the same collection were not even a more striking instance. Mars is a young Florentine, whose throat and chest are beautifully studied from the life, but whose legs and belly, belonging no doubt to the same model, fall far short of heroic form. He lies fast asleep with the corners of his mouth drawn down, as though he were about to snore. Opposite there sits a woman, weary and wan, draped from neck to foot in the thin raiment Botticelli loved. Four little goat-footed Cupids playing with the armour of the sleeping lad complete the composition. These wanton loves are admirably conceived and exquisitely drawn; nor indeed can any drawing exceed in beauty the line that leads from the flank along the ribs and arm of Mars up to his lifted elbow. The whole design, like one of Piero di Cosimo's pictures in another key, leaves a strong impression on the mind, due partly to the oddity of treatment, partly to the careful work displayed, and partly to the individuality of the artist. It gives us keen pleasure to feel exactly how a painter like Botticelli applied the dry naturalism of the early Florentine Renaissance, as well as his own original imagination, to a subject he imperfectly realised. Yet are we right in assuming that he meant the female figure in this group for Aphrodite, the sleeping man for Ares? A Greek or a Roman would have rejected this picture as false to the mythus of Mars and Venus; and whether Botticelli wished to be less descriptive than emblematic, might be fairly questioned. The face and attitude of that unseductive Venus, wide awake and melancholy, opposite her snoring lover, seems to symbolise the indignities which women may have to endure from insolent and sottish boys with only youth to recommend them. This interpretation, however, sounds like satire. We are left to conjecture whether Botticelli designed his composition for an allegory of intemperance, the so-called Venus typifying some moral quality.


It's interesting to note that this painting had only entered the National Gallery in 1874, while Symonds' book was written between 1875 and 1886.

Regarding this painting's interpretation, I would go with satire, given it's supposed original placement as the headboard of a bed.  This is gentle  bedroom humor. The gallant young man who would play the role of Mars except that he's been exhausted on the battlefield of Love -- and the patient, alluring young woman who's waiting for him to yet again wield his mighty lance -- while the little putti try to recall him to  duty.

Only a Victorian would speculate that Venus was typifying "some moral quality", and that the image was "grotesque"


Aby Warburg


This chapter ends with the arrival of Aby Warburg (1866-19269) who was typically , as shown above,  more interested in the written record of cultural history than in looking at paintings.




The Warburg Institute

The heir of a wealthy German-Jewish  banking family, he founded a library, the Warburg Institute, that eventually relocated to London and was directed by Gombrich himself from 1959-1976.

As a young exile in Florence he had plenty of opportunities to listen to the reactions of enthusiastic travelers to the art of his favorite masters, Botticelli an Ghirlandaio, and he filled his notebook with expressions of disgust. What enraged him was the conviction that the work of these masters represented an attitude of innocence, an expression of naive enjoyment, which many found irresistible.





Warburg's predecessors might be accused of projecting their own issues of spirituality/sensuality onto paintings as they experienced them. Whereas this website tells us that:

Only by referring to a variety of sources, like classic literature, contemporary coins and medals or medieval wallpaintings, Warburg can trace down the hidden meaning of the painting’s elements and solve the riddle. This is what turns the complexity of Botticelli’s paintings, though strange in their composition and simple in their overall object (the admiration of a woman), into high art worthy of a noble patron. Warburg’s study on Poliziano as the „programmer“ in Lorenzo’s service and Botticelli as his servant was in itself a concept and an idea that required a different type of a library and should survive in an independent institution"



And so  Warburg collected books instead of paintings - and is much closer to being a 20th C. professional art historian than those enthusiastic aesthetes of the 19th Century.

I care less about whether "The Birth of Venus" was programmed by Poliziano - than I do about  how various  widely experienced and articulate  art  lovers have responded to the painting itself.

But I do wish that Burkhardt, Pater, Symonds etc had been more cautious when moving from writing about art  to writing about whoever made it.






Saturday, November 16, 2013

Gombrich: The Pre- Raphaelite Ideal

Gombrich: - The Pre- Raphaelite Ideal


This is Chapter three of E.H. Gombrich's "Preference for the Primitive"

Quoted text is in YELLOW. Text quoted from other authors is in GREEN *************************************************************************** ****************************************************************************




Raphael: "The Entombment", 1507














Raphael: "Disputation of the Holy Sacrament", 1509-10























Raphael, "Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple", 1511-12














Raphael: "Transfiguration", 1516-1520



















When it [painting] first began to revive after the terrible devastations of superstition, and barbarity, it was with a stiff lame manner, which mended by little, and little till the time of Masaccio, who rose into a better taste, and began what was reserved for Rafaelle to complete. However this bad style had something manly, and vigorous; whereas in the decay, whether after the happy age of Rafaelle, or that of Annibale one sees an effeminate, languid air, or if it has not that it has the vigour of a bully, rather than of a brave man: the old bad painting has more faults than the modern, but this falls into the insipid.
---- Jonathan Richardson (1667-1745)




There were, no doubt, many collectors and eccentrics with antiquarian interests who gladly would have swapped the most interesting piece in their collection for a work of Raphael, who was still considered the prince of painters.

But which Raphael?

This crucial question arose among the foreign artists who foregathered in Rome to absorb the standards of perfection embodied in the works of the great masters, that very perfection that had always been seen to be uneasily poised between strenuous effort and culpable decadence. The question of where the line ought to be drawn between the ascending and the descending curve of art became a matter of acrimonious debate, particularly in relation to Raphael. Once more it may have been Vasari himself who had prepared the way, by distinguishing three manners in Raphael’s development: his early works, when he was still a follower of the style of Perugino; his learning period in Florence, and his mature achievement that owed much to the example of Michelangelo. We hear that not all artists were willing to accept this reading of Raphael’s development. Some of the earlier works, notably the Entombment and the Disputà seemed to them more pure and more lovable than the works of his last years, such as the Heliodorus and the Transfiguration.






The quote from Richardson belonged to the previous century, but I've pulled it into this chapter since it bears so strongly on Gombrich's discussion of Raphael.



Jonathan Richardson, self portrait



BTW - Richardson was  a formidable character -- a tradesman who became a leading portraitist of his time, a major collector of old master drawings, as well as the author of the first book of art theory in the English language.

So when he speaks of a "manly, vigorous" style, as opposed to an "effeminate, languid air", this is a distinction that we may believe he has lived by.

Regarding the late and earlier periods of Raphael, I would have to agree with Vasari that Michelangelo seems to be the difference. The  dynamic, expressive masses of the figures depicted in the  Sistine Chapel seem to inhabit Raphael's "Transfiguration".  The artist became less lyrical and more dramatic over the two decades of his career. But on the other hand, I would agree with those who found the earlier work more 'lovable'. His "Transfiguration" does not seem to be a good fit for his temperament and makes me wish that Michelangelo had painted it




Beauty, what a wondrously strange word. First invent new words for every single artistic feeling, for every single work of art. Every one of them glows in a different colour and for each of them there are different nerves in the structure of man. But you apply the artifice of reason to weave out of this word a strict system and you want to force all men to feel according to your rules and precepts ... We, the children of this century, have been granted the advantage of standing on the peak of a high mountain so that many countries are spread out to our eyes all around and our feet. So let us make use of this good fortune and let our eyes roam with a friendly gaze over all the ages and all the nations intent on sensing in all this variety of feelings and creations what is human in all of them. -- Wilhelm Wackenroder (1773-1798)



Most of Gombrich's text, so far, has been  related to ideas about art rather than specific examples, so I've been skipping past it.

But I can't ignore the Romantic young Herr Wackenroder whose attitude so much resembles my own. Gombrich calls it the first formulation of Malraux's "Musee imaginaire". (though we must note that Gombrich would probably  not consider this a positive contribution to the discipline of art history)

Preferring neither the 'primitive' nor the sophisticated, he scans "all ages and all nations".

Unfortunately, Gombrich also relates that "Wackenroder, to put it crudely, knew little about art and probably did no care for it all that passionately. What mattered to him  was to find an argument with which to comp;bat - and if possible, to rout - the rationalism of the Enlightenment"

Not only was Wilhelm not really a monk -- he wasn't really an art lover, either.   Ouch!














 Thomas Stothard, "Pilgrimage to Canterbury", 1806









William Blake, "Sir Jeffrey Chaucer and the Nine and Twenty Pilgrims", 1809




There is a letter by John Hoppner which well sums up this ideal of a neutral style of representation, allegedly free of all period character. The subject Stothard’s composition of the Canterbury Pilgrims, about which Hoppner writes in 1807: 


‘In respect of the execution of the various parts of this pleasing design it is not too much praise to say that it is wholly free from that vice which the painters term manner and it has its peculiarity, besides which I do not remember to have seen in any picture ancient or modern that it bears no mark of the period in which it was painted, but might very well pass for the work of some able artist of the time of Chaucer. This effect is not of any association of ideas connected with the costume, but appears in a primitive simplicity and a total absence of all affectation either of colour or penciling.



Nobody who looks at Stothard’s painting today is likely to endorse the verdict that it is entirely free of manner, and indeed of a period style. Thus Hoppner’s opinion only confirms the truth that the ideal of an art without artifice is a will—o’—the-wisp. If that were not the case, two artists as utterly different as Stothard and — as we shall see later — John Constable could not be connected with the same ideals. Nor could they be joined with yet another contemporary of even stricter views,William Blake.

It is somewhat ironic that it was precisely Stothard’s painting of the Canterbury Pilgrims that is associated in our minds with the accusation of plagiarism levelled against it by William Blake, who claimed — probably rightly — that be had thought of the subject before, and blamed the engraver with having commissioned Stothard to supply the invention. In exhibiting his rival scheme 

 Blake presented his own artistic creed: ‘Clearness and precision have been the chief objects in painting these pictures ... The Venetian and Flemish practice is broken lines, broken masses, and broken colours. Mr. Blake’s practice is unbroken lines, unbroken masses and unbroken colours. Their art is to lose form, his art is to find form and keep it’.


I'm a bit surprised at Blake's succinct assault upon the "Venetian and Flemish practice" that I far prefer to his own. Presumably his critique of "broken masses and broken colours" would also apply to Stothard's work which appears to be a thin, clumsy variation of Titian, Rubens, Tintoretto etc..

Gombrich presents the two as exemplars of "the increasing popularity of outline drawing" that reflects the "pious innocence and the absence of showmanship" of the new "Romantic ideal".






Domenichino, 'Saint Agnes", 1620











Domenichino, "Diana" (detail), 1616-17







Guido Reni, "Toilet of Venus", 1622







I only respond to early painting, it is this alone which I understand and can grasp, and this alone about which I can speak. I do not want to talk about the French School and all the later Italians, but even in the school of Carracci I very rarely find any painting which means something to me ... I must confess that Guido’s frigid Graces  have nothing very attractive for me, and that the flesh of Domenichino , with its rose and milk tints, cannot charm me at all. When we come from the French, Flemish or quite modern works, the style of these paintings appears to us to be grand and noble. But coming from the contemplation of early Italian and German paintings it is difficult to linger in front of them. I cannot judge these painters, unless you would call it a judgement that painting in their time had ceased to exist. Titian, Correggio, Giulio Romano, Andrea del Sarto etc., these are the last painters for me......Karl Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829)





Sebastiano del Piombo, "Martyrdom of St. Agatha", 1520



Schlegel does not explain why the Reni and Domenichino paintings are  not attractive to him, but since the above piece was singled out for his highest praise, I am mystified - unless it's just that he prefers a more seriously dramatic subject.

Here's what he prefers, in general:



No confused crowds of people, but rather a few isolated figures, but finished with that application that springs naturally from the feeling for the dignity and sacredness of the most exalted of our hieroglyphs, the human body. Severe, even spare forms in sharp outline in clear relief, no painting of chiaroscuro and dirt with gloom and cast shadows, but pure proportions and areas of colour with lucid chords, draperies and costumes which seem to belong to these people as simple and naive as they are in their heads where the light of divine artistic inspiration shines most brightly. I want to see ever where despite the necessary variety of expression and individuality of feature, everywhere and in all respects that childlike, kindhearted simplicity and confined personality that I am inclined to regard as the original character of man. That is the style of early painting, the style which, to confess my one-sidedness, pleases me alone, unless some great principle justifies an exception as in the case of Correggio and of Raphael.



As Gombrich points out,  Piombo's depiction of St. Agatha having her nipples torn off is hardly exemplary of "childlike, kindhearted simplicity" - but I can appreciate the difficulty, if not impossibility, of making generalizations about your own taste.  And it's good to let yourself be surprised and  contradicted -- because the world of art is very large --and one human mind is very small by comparison.




 Giovanni Bellini, San Giobbe altarpiece



Here's  another one of Schlegel's favorite painters.

And if I were standing behind these two tourists in the Gallerie dell' Academia this morning, I would probably get down on one knee and swear that I only like exactly this kind of painting, just as Schlegel has described it.













I feel like I'm in heaven!













But then when looking at this - 
or  any one of  thousands of other great paintings,
I would immediately forswear myself.

It's  important to note that in the above quotes,
Schlegel is not passing any kind of moral, historical,
or intellectual judgment.

He does  not speak like an art critic
of the 20th C.

He speaks as an art lover
telling us what he likes and what he doesn't.



Unfortunately, Gombrich does not share any more direct quotes,  he just tells us that Schlegel recommended that art students not follow the example of the later paintings by Raphael, like the "Transfiguration" (shown above) which was then temporarily hanging in the Louvre.




Thus the distinction which we find Schiegel making between the art lover, who can freely declare his preference, and the artist who has to acquire his craft from a master, is highly significant. For, after all, Schlegel was right. He was right at least as long as the imitation of nature was seen as a necessary skill. It goes without saying that, for societies in the eighteenth century, a painter was a person who could represent a human figure, a hand, a foot, with unerring accuracy, and / that if he were unable to do this, he would be considered a laughable bungler. This is the moment, in other words, to remember that the term ‘primitive’ is always relative to a skill. The time had not yet come when the scrawls of the untutored would be elevated into the realm of art under such designations as ‘art brut’. Hence the emotional attacks on the routine of the academies were bound to fail.


I find the above passage truly puzzling.

First because the art academies of the 18th C., like Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Royal Academy for example, were not just teaching "unerring accuracy" in the representation of human figures. They were teaching a set of narrative and compositional preferences that might be called a style.

Second, because Gombrich has not shown us where  Schlegel ever used a word like "primitive".

It is Gombrich himself who is equating "old school" with "primitive" -- leading him to tell us about the "scrawls of the untutored"




Ingres, "Madame Riviere", 1806










Yet Gombrich  then relates this quote from 1806:

Here, in another manner no less hateful  for being Gothic, M. Ingres endeavors nothing less than to push art back by four centuries to return us to its infancy and resurrect the style of Jan van Eyck. -- Chaussard

Gombrich notes that Ingres was known to study Flaxman not Van Eyck.

But even if Flaxman was a hero to a group that called itself "primitif", I'm wondering whether anyone applied that term to Ingres.


*****************



Moretto da Brescia, "St Giustina", 1530






Franz Pforr, "Rudolf Von Habsburg and the Priest", 1809

"..less primitive than awkward. The Emperor, in strict profile,  seems to offer his mount with a limp gesture to the priest, who looks at him with an expressionless stare"


I'd say it's limp all over, and appropriate only to illustrate a grade school history text book. But as we learn below, it was made to exemplify the qualities found in the painting shown above it as well as 16th C. German masters.


In 1808, two young artists in far-away Vienna proclaimed their conversion to the same ideal by founding the Lukasbund, the Confraternity of Saint Luke, as a challenge to academic teaching. Their names were Franz Pforr and Friedrich Overbeck ---  they were often repelled by the paintings of Tintoretto,Veronese, and even Correggio and Titian. Too often these revealed to them ‘cold hearts behind bold brushstrokes and fine colours’......

On the other hand, they could hardly tear themselves away from Pordenone’s Santa Giustina (today attributed to Moretto da Brescia).....


 ...but most of all it was the Old Masters of the German school who made them see the errors of their former ways. If they once regarded them as stiff and rigid, they now had to admit that their judgement had been warped by an overdose of paintings with exaggerated and ridiculously affected poses.



 ‘Their noble simplicity and their firm characterization spoke out loudly to our hearts. Here there was no bravura of the brush, no bold handling, everything stood there simply as if it were not painted but drawn, We remained in that room for a long time and left it with admiration and respect. Returning to their colleagues who were copying, they were more than ever repelled by their use of bold brushes and brilliant colours: since brushstrokes are only necessary evils and means to an end we found it ridiculous to boast of them and to attach any value to the boldness with which they are applied. We also found that only a lack of respect for the purpose of art can lead to this kind of abuse, since it will divert the beholder’s attention from the subject of the picture and wants him to concentrate on the cleverness with which a great subject has been played about with’



All this may sound familiar enough. What makes Pforr’s words remarkable is that he had the courage of his convictions. In 1809 he painted two scenes from the life of Rudolf von Habsburg, in which he deliberately seeks to recapture the simplicity of the early German masters.






Franz Pforr  (1788-1812), self portrait, 1810


Here's a much more engaging piece by the artist. When he felt more free to express himself -- and wasn't challenged by the complexity of a multi-figure dramatic tableaux -  he did a pretty good job.





Franz Pforr, "Entry of Rudolf Von Habsburg into Basle in 1273", 1809


"...shows perhaps a little  more understanding of the virtues of German Renaissance art.  There is a certain awkward loquacity in this pageant which recalls the minor masters of the 16th Century, but of course, these masters did not live in the Middle Ages"


This one feels like the artist allowed himself to be decorative.
 Somewhere in between a good painting and a collectible ceramic plate.

Rather than an inability to paint sensually, perhaps he had followed an ideology that scorned it.

As Gombrich suggests,  16th C. painters also depicted scenes that feel Medieval to us,
and so did the designers of  tapestries.



The Unicorn Tapestry at the Met dates to 1495- 1505.
I was a bit surprised when I first realized that it was contemporary
with the youth of  Raphael (born 1482)




Peter von Cornelius, "Joseph Interprets Pharoah's  Dream",1816-7



Here's another German Romantic, one of the 'Nazarenes'.

The most effective, and I would say certain means to lay the foundations for the German art of a new and great age would be the revival of fresco painting as it was practiced from the time of the great Giotto, to that of the divine Raphael in Italy.  Since I have seen the works of those ages ... and compared them with those of our own ancestors, I have had to admit that ours were at least as exalted, true and pure, and perhaps even more profound in the original intention, but that that other ... developed more freely, more perfect and more grand in its own nature ... If my proposal were accepted, I think I could predict that it would become a flaming beacon on the mountain tops, raising the signal for a new noble rebellion in art. Schools would arise as in times of old, which would infuse their truly great art with effective power into the hearts of the nation and right into the people’s life to adorn it, till the walls of ancient cathedrals, silent chapels and lonely monasteries, of town halls, market halls, and even shops would be populated by figures from the old, familiar, national past, resuscitated to the full vigour of life, who could proclaim to the living in the language of fair colors, that the old faith, the old love and the old strength of their fathers had returned and that the Lord, our God, was thus reconciled with his people.... Peter von Cornelius


His painting feels so much like the stained glass windows in late 19th C. American churches. While his nationalistic religiosity seems to be marching straight into World War I.

Gombrich includes him in a discussion of the 'primitive' because he "rejects the development of the preceding 300 years" --  but were those Mannerist and Baroque paintings really any more sophisticated than the leading artists of the year 1500 ?


 Friedrich Overbeck, "Peter of Amiens Nominates Geoffrey of Boulon as the Leader of the Christian Army: Preparation for the Attack upon Jersusalem", 1825



Overbeck (1789-1869) was one of the sincere young German Christian artists who lived together in a secularized monastery in Rome and were fondly (or derisively?)  called the "Nazarenes" by their neighbors due to their unique dress and behavior.   They were commissioned as a group to decorate the Casino Massimo - a detail of which program is shown above.

Were they  the first  group of young artists to band together proclaiming some kind of ideal that ran counter to the established art practices of their day?



Albrecht Durer, "Adoration of the Magi", 1504





This seems to be the kind of painting that Overbeck was emulating - but without the visual sensuality that may have been a casualty of the Protestant Reformation.






By comparison, Durer feels so light and lyrical,
and much less didactic.









"Italy and Germany", 1811-1828

















But freed from history or great ideas, this portrait has a whimsical charm.





This family scene compares nicely with this one done by a Viennese artist a hundred years later.

The placement of the child feels very stiff and uncomfortable -
but given the infant mortality rates from that era,
such anxiety is understandable.




Johann Heinrich Meyer, "Goethe", 1794



All those who are concerned with the visual arts must he familiar with the prevailing passion among many valiant artists and intelligent art lovers for the honest, naïve, if somewhat uneducated taste that reigned among the masters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.This bias is bound to remain remarkable in the history of art since it must have important consequences; of what kind they will be, remains to be seen. Will it — as is the hope of those who favour the old, resurrected taste — will it make art flourish again? will its devout spirit rejuvenate and revive it? — or rather, as those opposed to it fear, by exchanging the style of beautiful forms for an attenuated, meagre manner, lucid and pleasing representations for abstruse and melancholy allegories, will not more and more of what is characteristic, robust and healthy be lost? ---Johann Heinrich Meyer, 1817





I stand corrected

Here's an artist/writer (and collaborator with Goethe) referring to the "naive, if somewhat uneducated taste that reigned among the masters of the 14th and 15th centuries." --- which seems synonymous with the word 'primitive'

But just what did he think were  the signs of an "educated taste" ?







 Franz and Joseph Riepenhausen, illustrations from "Genoveva", 1806




Gombrich tells us that Meyer spoke well of these Riepenhausen illustrations, but I'm not finding the "light and shade and pictorial effects" that apparently he preferred..











Apparently the Riepenhausen brothers greatly admired Raphael. Above is their depiction of the artist being received by Pope Julius II.




Here is Raphael's depiction of Julius II  -- and there's quite a difference between the painting done in 1511 and the homage done in 1836..

Raphael has given his subject anxiety  with an other-worldly tension -- while the Riepenhausen brothers have made a prim and proper story board, more fit, perhaps, for the rational ideals of the Enlightenment.





Bertel Thorvaldsen, "Hope", 1817




An impartial visitor to Rome in these years up to 1820 would have found an international community of artists, whok for all their different ideals, still strove after the same aim,  the aim for an art without artifice - what might be called a 'virtuous' style, free of sensuality and meretricis effect.....Thorvaldsen fell sufficiently  under that spell to create a monument in the style of the early fifth century entitled 'Hope'.  This piece goes about as far in the direction of the primitive as Overbeck etc in their most Nazarene  mood






Thovaldsen returned to the ampler forms of classicism in his series of Christ and His Apostles made for a church in Copenhagen, and yet even these Christian images reflect to the full the ideals and aspirations of the Roman colony of artists.


(an interesting discussion of this series can be found here )








Pedimental sculpture from the temple of Aphaia at Aegina,  c. 470 BC 






These must have been  the pieces that Thorvaldsen was restoring in 1816-1818





Surprisingly, it's hard to find good photos of them on the internet.  They must be poorly lit in the Glyptothek, Munich.





Here's one reconstruction  (that also happens to be better lit) - but I don't know who did it.

Thorvadsen's additions were removed in the 1960's.





This was the only female figure I could find, and it's quite different  from Thorvaldsen's "Hope"




The Aeginan pieces feel more vigorous - while Thorvaldsen's "Hope" feels as cool and delicious as lemon flavored Italian ice.







Houdon, "Diana", 1777









Thorvaldsen seems closer to Houdon, whose 'Diana' was done about 40 years earlier.
(but it's so hard to compare statues through photographs of them)



Antonio Canova, "Hebe", 1796






Canova has that same delicious coolness - but seems more interested in making the marble feel soft and fleshy.



Thorvaldsen, "Venus", 1805

Thorvaldsen also seemed more interested in soft flesh in this earlier version of a female figure.

And this pose is more relaxed -- settling inwards rather than pushing outwards -- and not as stiff as "Hope"




Thorvaldsen, "Apollo", 1805






Adonis





Bacchus

By way of digression ,  it's really in the young male nude that Thorvaldsen is in his glory.
These pieces feel quite distant from the Aeginean warriors

( it doesn't hurt that some of  them have been so well photographed)







Ary Scheffer



What I have called the 'virtuous' style, the style shunning artifice and sensuality, also demanded an avoidance of nudity, of violent movement or the extremes of dramatic expression  Figures characterized by the noble fall of drapery, and strangely enough, by the well groomed appearance of the head, with the long hair parted and falling over the shoulders...... unlike the saints and gurus of history, they were envisaged as having been careful of their appearance, always brushing their hair and trimming their beards.




This is the kind of Christian art most likely found in American churches - a consequence, probably, of a certain attitude towards religion rather than art.



Rembrandt, Hundred Guilder Print (detail)


Presumably this is the kind of scruffy appearance that Gombrich had in mind.



Caravaggio, "Supper at Emmaus", detail



But it's  not difficult to find Baroque examples of a well-groomed Christ as well.




Ary Scheffer
Dante and Virgil Encountering the Shades of Francesca de Rimini and Paolo
1835







And one might note that Scheffer could be more sensual with secular subject matter


In any case, we are entitled to remark that the search for an art without artifice that had sparked off the revolt against academic teaching has ended in a manner more stereotyped and more artificial than any it wished to replace


Except that pieces which feel "stereotyped and artificial" comprise the bulk of production in any style in any age, from the millennia of ancient Egyptian sculpture up through the last century of Dada.


..*********************************
***********************************
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood


Pre-Raphaelism has but one principle, that of absolute, uncompromising proof  in all it does, obtained by working everything down to the most minute detail, from nature and from nature only....John Ruskin, 1853




Carlo Lasinio  (1812) from Benozzo Gozzoli (1473) 




We are told that the artists were inspired to adopt their name - at first kept secret - when looking at Lasinio's prints of Benozzo Gozzoli's frescoes in the Campo Santo, Pisa.











Here is one of the original frescoes














... and here's details of other work by Gozzoli (in better repair)




William Holman Hunt, "The Hireling Shephard", 1851







Ford Madox Brown, "The Last of England", 1855




...no doubt his (Gozzoli's) attention to detail and is realism exerted a strong appeal, but it need hardly be said that Gozzoli would have been nonplussed  to see The Hireling Shepherd or  The Last of England.  Unlike some of Overbeck's compositions, these paintings are in no way reminiscent  of fifteenth Century art.  Nor do they express any preference for the primitive as yet.



Gombrich does not explain why Gozzoli would have been so "nonplussed".

Like Gozzoli, both Brown and Hunt offer a plethora of details that describe distinct objects that might satisfy the "proof" that Ruskin mentions above.

Though the paintings appear to be weighed down by all that stuff -- as opposed to lyrically rising above them as Gozzoli managed to do. (though less so in  Lasinio's engraving )

Instead,  they  have  melodramatic intensity.

Will the poor immigrants survive their desperate voyage ? Will the shepherdess succumb to the blandishments of her rustic Lothario ?

Gozzoli's painting is more like a decorative tapestry - Hunt and Brown are more like magazine illustrators.