Michelangelo
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Michelangelo

A study in the nature of art

Adrian Stokes, Adrian Stokes

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Michelangelo

A study in the nature of art

Adrian Stokes, Adrian Stokes

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About This Book

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences.
This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press.
Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1955 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781136443008
Edition
1
Part I
Introductory

1
General Introduction

IT is wise to introduce the reader with affability to an author's didactic purpose. In the present case, however, Michelangelo will hardly be mentioned: unfortunately, the introduction must help to shed on the further subject-matter a light which the book itself was designed to radiate. I must start with the dim light of abstraction, whereas the text that follows is at least more robust.
It was said before Freud that the child is father to the man. No one will have objected to so vague an insight. Similarly to-day, under the pressure of Freud, some of our more successful intellectuals have been crying Angst, Angst, making homely a content that could otherwise lead them to the unfamiliar. Their generalizations will appease or banish detail: and so, our compliance with the present actuality of infantine, crucial images will be no less unfamiliar than before.
Such matters do not disturb the reader in the sections that follow this. Part III discusses certain aspects of Michelangelo's poetry in the light of arguments developed in Part II which treats of Michelangelo's works in visual art. Part II is the difficulty, where I outline a theory concerning attitudes that determine the creation of form in the arts. The idea is simple: however, it is coupled with psycho-analytic conceptions both unfamiliar and subtle, though I do not attempt to convey their system, nor their refinement except occasionally with regard to the matter in hand. (I can only hope I have not subjected them to distortion in this way.)
Thus, this theory of form is tied up with psycho-analytic attitudes that may seem to have no bearing on art. Yet the alliance between some of the conclusions of this science and aesthetic experience has not occurred abruptly. Indeed, for more than twenty years I have emphasized the 'otherness' which now appears again, the 'out-thereness' of the work of art. A generic distinction I made between carving and modelling (1934 and 1937) has close connections with the present theory. It is possible that the carving-modelling distinction was already associated with the lengthy experience and study of psycho-analysis: if so, the influence was not overt: the one department of experience has not been applied summarily at any time to the other: on the contrary, aesthetic appreciation and a modicum of psychological awareness have gradually become inseparable; they mingle in the present book at the instance of Michelangelo's works. In the light of his art, I offer also some remarks about his life.
Having warned the reader, I must assure him that this is a book of aesthetic appraisal devoted to Michelangelo and humanist art, to an unique quality of humanist art. Unfortunately, it is impossible for me to attempt to support beyond the immediate text, to argue the validity of the psycho-analytic conceptions—some of them hotly disputed among analysts themselves—that are implicated. The reader with sufficient interest must refer to the literature of the subject, in particular to Contributions to Psycho-Analysis by Melanie Klein (1948) and to Developments in Psycho-Analysis by the same author and others (1952). (Melanie Klein, Dr. P. Heimann and R. Money-Kyrle are the editors of a compilation entitled New Directions in Psycho-Analysis (Tavistock Publications), to which I have contributed a tentative paper on form in art, presenting the theory of this book in more specific terms.)
I have needed in rare instances to use psycho-analytic terminology. The following are the principal terms employed.
It is almost a common, though perhaps regrettable, usage to speak of 'guilt' in indicating the sense or feeling of guilt whether justified or unjustified . . . I have occasionally mentioned 'depressive anxiety' and 'persecutory anxiety'. The latter refers to the anxiety of being persecuted, the former to the anxiety caused by fear that what is good or loved may be endangered or lost, leading possibly to depression. (Fear of our own aggression is the prime factor in both cases.) The wide application of these alternatives originated in the work of Melanie Klein who traced them to the early months of infancy, to the first weeks in the case of persecutory anxiety. . . . It is possible that the word 'object' when applied to persons is a psychological usage: the expression 'internal object' or 'internal person', however, which I must use, requires brief comment. The feeding infant incorporates in fantasy both the objects that give him satisfaction and those that give him pain, as soon as he is aware of anything in the world to be outside. Thus there are built systems, corporeal in origin, of what is 'good' and what is 'bad', the mirror of our own inextinguishable hate and aggression: the well-known concept of the super-ego is based upon this complicated and enduring process of incorporation or introjection, alternating with projection. . . . I think that is all, except I now use descriptively Freud's adopted phrase, 'the oceanic feeling', the sense of oneness with the universe, which he derived, in one instance, from the feeding infant's contentment at the breast. . . .
Art, I believe, as well as love, offers us some share in the oceanic feeling. Yet, with the phantasm of homogeneity, of singleness, the lover experiences in the beloved her singularity: she is the acme of emotive otherness, the essence of object. Now, this appreciation of the object's separate sufficiency united to a sense of identity with the pulse of things, prefigures, in my opinion, the sentiments that works of art in general stimulate in us, whatever their subject-matter or their occasion. 'An element of self-sufficiency'—I quote from page 66—'will inform our impression of the whole work of art as well as of turned phrases and fine passages. The poem, the sum-total, has the articulation of a physical object, whereas the incantatory element of poetry ranges beyond, ready to interpenetrate, to hypnotize. Or perhaps precise and vivid images, an enclosed world, fed by metre, serve a sentiment that is indefinable, permeating, unspoken. Space is a homogeneous medium into which we are drawn and freely plunged by many representations of visual art: at the same time it is the mode of order and distinctiveness for separated objects.'
The combination of these two kinds of reiationsnip with an object have special significance to the artist and to the aesthete. I refer on page 100 to Wordsworth, to his care for the singularity of primrose or peasant, for an enclosed constellation of feelings which, none the less, inspire in him sentiments of pantheism. (But the humanist artist alone has valued equally with the oceanic feeling, the sense of an object's actual particularity.) That instance is of subject-matter rather than of form: his devotion to Form influences, sometimes determines narrowly, the artist's preference in subject-matter. The distinction between them is not hard-and-fast but only convenient. I shall employ the term, Form (with capital), in order to indicate briefly those many sensuous aspects that distinguish art as the crown of other symbolic systems.
The reciprocity of parts, the 'inner working' that causes a painting, though viewed but formally, to be much more than the sum of those parts, is conveyed to us in terms primarily of our sense-perceptions, in terms of vision and touch. Such communication is so pleasurable that we may enjoy it, Clive Bell affirmed, without conscious perception of the subject-matter. All the same, formal value does not exist apart from a particular subject or sentiment or function of the object, even in music and in ceramics: moreover the significance of the formal value issues from its own content, its own subject-matter, one so general as to be common to all art. I think that reciprocity, plasticity, rhythm, design, etc., etc., are employed to magnify a self-sufficient object (notably other than ourselves even though it expresses also a narcissistic self-glorification): at the same time they are employed to surround us with a far different kind of object, to suggest an entirety with which we can merge. (All pattern stems from some identity in difference.) And, whereas it is obvious that texture, or the reciprocity of parts, primarily suggests the self-sufficient object, whereas the flow of rhythm or a giant plasticity may easily draw us into the homogeneous beatitude of the oceanic feeling, I think it is impossible to tie a formal quality—the isolation is itself artificial—to one of these functions to the exclusion of the other: a pervasive theme embodies more than one unity: each formal quality has further function in the pulsation of the whole. A doubling of roles characterizes the masterpiece by which we experience the sensation of having the cake and yet of eating it without destruction, surfeit or waste-product. Form harmonizes this contradiction: it is the setting for the evocative ambiguities, for the associative collusion, of imagery: while serving culture and affirming outward things, it both provides and facilitates the echoing in all art of those urgent voices, deep in the mind, whose opposite, unmodulated, tones are nevertheless of one piece, whose character of condensation, when thus in company with distinctiveness, may contribute to the aesthetically deft or neat.
But though it be impossible to make a sure division, there is no difficulty in appreciating where the emphasis lies in any instance, or in a style, a period: indeed the history of art might be written in terms of an ever-changing fusion between the love for the self-sufficient object, fully corporeal in essence, and the cultural disciplines for oceanic feeling.* Renaissance art, of course, is always characterized by the joyful recognition of self-sufficient objects ordered in space: yet in other books I have tried to show, with the help of terms not altogether dissimilar from those I now use, the difference, in the placing of these accents, between the architecture of Luciano Laurana and Brunellesco: on the one hand the emphasis upon objects, as if pre-existent, whose potentialities are uncovered in the guise of colour relationship, of surface texture and of the equal reciprocity of forms, to be valued for their inward glow like the distinct brother shapes which we discern in an evening light: on the other hand, movement, the suggestion of omnipotent flourish by means of a material that is itself no less subservient than clay, of an accent that cleaves us both from affinity and from separateness in order to recreate out of the material an all-inclusive stress with which we are one.
Here, and in the pages ahead, visible, tangible objets d'art provide the examples of æsthetic activity. Yet in poetry, tor instance, image and metaphor similarly encompass mutual enhancement between sensuous units, culminating in a construction, in a Whole, that nevertheless refers beyond itself without breaking the entirety. This rounded aesthetic mode of treating subject-matter is employed upon a nexus of experience, of perception, thought and feeling, in the belief that the connections thus created are no less poignant than those which underlie this Form or mode itself. Poetic 'truth' is not, of course, truth, but it has its own precision, detachment and, above all, an immediacy that offers us a particular congruity joined with a wider sentiment; a pattern, in short, of experience in the terms of something sensuous or physical. The pattern, I submit, requires both for its creation and for its appreciation, the amalgam of attitudes to what is outside (and inside) us by which we merge with the world or contemplate what is other than ourselves. It is woven with the intertwined threads of these emotional relationships to objects: and thus, in the completed work, we view feeling as a full, sensuous, object containing a sensuous transcendent content: we are made aware once more of the primitive strength of the life-force in often harmonious union with the power of consciousness to define, to differentiate.
I apologize for, these abstractions.
Art is symbol: the sprawling empire of symbolism radiates from the dream-world. From the angle of the symbolism of its subject-matter, art has often provided material for psychoanalytic study. But my governing theme is not of such kind. This book attempts to substantiate, in the person of Michelangelo, the distinctive character of art as self-expression or catharsis, what is called the Form, the mode of treating each subject-matter. If Michelangelo's greatness is brought into nearer view, I shall not have entirely failed.
In discussing Michelangelo's relation with his father and brothers (Part I, Chapter 3), I have not referred to social and cultural values of the time. I am aware that even if the scholar of historical study cannot catch me treating as entirely personal to Michelangelo or to his family something which is better described in the terms of contemporary mœurs, he would still deprecate the abstraction and might invoke the incompleteness of our knowledge. Moreover, I select a small amount of evidence—it could be enlarged considerably without sharpening the point—from which wide conclusions are drawn. Having no belief in any novelist's inventions for behaviour and personality, I would fully share, for further reasons as well, the historian's distaste, were it not that I feel my summary of fact to be excused, and, in consequence, to be required, by a more massive appreciation of Michelangelo's art.
The achievement of an artist cannot be studied apart from the surrounding culture and the tradition in which he works. To-day more than ever, the scholarship of visual art is absorbed (at the expense of general appreciation or even of the comparisons such as I make with our own art) in fixing the derivations (if easily handled) for each plastic form and iconographic theme. An aesthetic effect contains a long line, perhaps many lines, of precise antecedents: this is a fact often neglected by those who come from other fields to the study of an artist: hence, it is no wonder that the manners of art scholarship have become more and more academic. On the other hand there is the worth (to us) whose interpretation, though it must be founded on this scholarship, cannot be pursued entirely in terms so narrow, whether we are considering the masterpiece or themes in which a masterpiece is embedded. The widest theme of all, the nature of art, has little attention now from those who explore most closely its manifestations. Whereas there are powerful excuses for the neglect both of aesthetic speculation and of unusual sensibility, the study of art history, it is obvious, cannot be secluded in every case from a present understanding of human needs. I must therefore hope that this (by no means sporadic) attempt to discover certain fantasies that are common ground in the projection of Form, and then to relate how the genius of Michelangelo more than matched the great opportunities implicit in his tradition and in his time, may not be considered by scholars ipso facto as offensive.
Michelangelo has been fortunate in many of his students: all lovers of art are indebted to unimpassioned investigators of so fervid a field of human experience. I trespass at times on this well surveyed ground which, as I hope, from other places of the book persists in the middle distance. In regard to Michelangelo's poems which are so much less well known, my locus is rather different.
* 'A portrait aims by definition at two essential and, in a sense, con-
tradictory qualities: individuality and uniqueness; and totality or wholeness.' (E. Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Art, 1953.) Whereas this judgment might belong to any epoch of art criticism, it cannot be said of other passages in Panofsky's book that are close to my theme. For instance: 'From the sheer sensuous beauty of a genuine Jan Van Eyck there emanates a strange fascination not unlike that which we experience when permitting ourselves to be hypnotized by precious stones or when ...

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