Modern Theories of Art 1
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Modern Theories of Art 1

From Winckelmann to Baudelaire

Moshe Barasch

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eBook - ePub

Modern Theories of Art 1

From Winckelmann to Baudelaire

Moshe Barasch

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About This Book

This is an analytical survey of the thought about painting and sculpture as it unfolded from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. This was the period during which theories of the visual arts, particularly of painting and sculpture, underwent a radical transformation, as a result of which the intellectual foundations of our modern views on the arts were formed. Because this transformation can only be understood when seen in a broad context of cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical developments of the period, Moshe Barasch surveys the opinions of the artists, and also treats in some detail the doctrines of philosophers, poets, and critics. Barasch thus traces for the reader the entire development of modernism in art and art theory.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
1990
ISBN
9780814723357

1
The Early Eighteenth Century

I. INTRODUCTION

Students of letters are apt to balk at drawing sharply demarcated lines between periods. Such students, particularly when they have historical leanings, know better than most that, as a rule, the past persists in the present, and that what now seems the typical expression of the present has often been anticipated in the past. History is a constantly moving stream, and in this dynamic complexity the attempt to find, or establish, watertight compartments is almost a desperate one. This banal truth is valid, of course, also for the history of reflection on the figurative arts, that is, the theory of painting and sculpture. Particularly when we come closer to modern times, where the clarifying effect of historical distance offers us less support than in the case of the more remote past, the difficulties of periodization become more manifest. No wonder, then, that few will venture to suggest a precise date at which modern art theory begins. And yet students of our subject cannot help feeling that around the middle of the eighteenth century some events occurred that, small as they may seem, indicate a dramatic turning point in the tradition of aesthetic reflection on the visual arts, and thus can be taken to announce a new age. I should like to mention a few of these events. To most of the developments mentioned we shall have to come back in different contexts for more detailed discussions. Here I shall list them only in concise form. The crowding of these dates within the short span of fifteen years may indicate the profound transformation that becomes manifest at the middle of the century.
Precisely at mid-century, in 1750, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, a student and teacher of Latin rhetoric and poetry, published a voluminous book bearing the word Aesthetica on its title page (after he had already used that term in the dissertation he had composed fifteen years earlier). Aesthetics, he said, denotes a special domain of cognition, namely the domain of sensual cognition. To be sure, in the hierarchy of cognitional modes sensual cognition occupies a lower rank than cognitions based on pure ideas of logical derivation, but it is recognized as a domain in its own right, with a distinct character. In Baumgarten’s presentation the domain of aesthetics is not clearly and firmly outlined, but it was only a short time before the term he coined came to denote what we now understand by it. Though originally not intended primarily for use in the discussion of the arts, it soon proved an excellent conceptual framework for such a discussion, and, as one knows, it has remained so till this very day.
Shortly after the publication of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica the attentive reader must have felt that he was witnessing a kind of eruption. The year 1755 proved particularly abundant in expressions of aesthetic thought. In that year Moses Mendelssohn published his Briefe ĂŒber die Empfindungen, trying to define the philosophical status of aesthetics. Since beauty is an “indistinct image of a perfection,” he believed, God can have no perception of beauty; this is a particularly human experience. In the same year a young and hitherto unknown schoolmaster and librarian, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, published a slim pamphlet, Thoughts on the Imitation of the Greek Works of Painting and Sculpture. The little treatise achieved a surprising success; the rich echo it found clearly shows that the ideas suggested in it were in the air,” the generation waiting for them to be expressed. When only eleven years later Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who in literary history is perceived in the role of Moses who led his people out of French servitude toward the promised land of Deutsche Klassik, published his Laocoön (1766), he argued energetically against some of Winckelmann’s assertions, but he clearly treated the ideas expressed in Thoughts on the Imitation as generally known and authoritative. Two years before that date, in 1764, Winckelmann, who in the meantime had moved to Rome, published his History of Ancient Art. It was the first work to use the term “history of art” as a description of a field of study, and the first to employ it in the title of the work. One can say that, in an important sense, the year 1764 is the year in which the history of art was born as an academic discipline.
The year 1755 proved crucial in still another respect. In that year began the more or less systematic archaeological excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The impact on arts and letters of what these excavations brought to light was not uniform, but it was vivid and almost instantaneous. Already, a year before the beginning of the systematic excavations, Charles Cochin fils and J. Bellicard published their Observations sur les antiquitĂ©s de la ville d’Herculaneum (1754). In this work they tried to come to terms with the little that was as yet known about the city, and they actually rejected the testimony of what had been found, considering it a marginal phenomenon. In our next chapter we shall have occasion to describe how this attitude changed. The great folio edition of Le AntichitĂ  di Ercolano began to appear in 1757 (the seventh volume was published in 1779), and its impact was immediate. It is now generally accepted that, beginning about 1760, developments in the visual arts, especially the “classicist” trend, were accelerated by the new archaeological publications, particularly by engravings after the paintings in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Both artists and patrons (among them successive ministers of Louis XV and Louis XVI) were imbued with a new spirit and found authoritative legitimization in what could be learned from the ancient paintings revealed. But it was not only on painting that the great new discoveries imposed themselves. Theoretical reflection on the arts could not neglect the revelations mediated by what was discovered. The themes of art theory were enlarged by the results of the excavations. In the Renaissance and Baroque periods the impact of the classical tradition was largely determined by the sculptural remains so generously present in Rome. Now, with the treasures of Pompeii becoming known, it is increasingly painting, color, and vivid illusion that form the image of Antiquity.
The crucial decade between 1750 and 1760 saw still another major departure in the annals of theoretical reflection on the arts. In 1759 Denis Diderot began to publish his critical reviews of the Salons, the biennial exhibitions of contemporary French painting. Art criticism was not invented by Diderot—he had forerunners; but it was only with him that this branch of art literature became institutionalized, and attained the significance we now assign to it. As one follows Diderot’s successive reviews one can actually observe how art criticism emerges and takes shape. The movement was rapid, and the leaps were wide. The review of 1759 is still modest in size and conservative in taste; the critic here follows the publisher Grimm and his personal attitudes quite closely. The exhibition of 1761 is reviewed at greater length, with an analysis of details and considerable background to the discussion of the individual paintings. Diderot at this point hesitates much less in pronouncing his personal judgment. With the next review (discussing the exhibition of 1763), it has been said, began the great period of Diderot’s art criticism. Now he was on familiar terms with the artists; he had visited them in their ateliers. Perhaps the most striking sign that art criticism had come of age was that Diderot spoke not only of the paintings and the artists who produced them, but also reflected on the virtues and limitations of criticism itself. With the review of 1765 the transformation of art criticism into art theory is completed: in addition to the criticism of that year’s exhibits, and intimately interwoven with his critical judgments, Diderot presented his “Essay on Painting,” a theoretical consideration of the basic elements of that art. As the history of art had come of age with Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art of 1764, so did art criticism with Diderot’s review of the Salons of 1763 and 1765.
What was achieved in the roughly fifteen years between Baumgarten’s Aesthetica and Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art or Diderot’s “Essay on Painting” was not only the establishment of aesthetics, the history of art, and art criticism as important disciplines for which the future held great developments in store. More than this, one may safely say, the whole approach to the visual arts was altered, its very foundations radically transformed. No wonder, then, that there was a change in the scope and character of theoretical art literature, both with regard to the audience addressed and the aims the authors set out to achieve. It is only logical also that a shift took place in the actual themes discussed in art theory. These transformations were so radical and comprehensive that one can well understand historians who, notwithstanding their natural hesitation, chose 1750 as the date symbolically marking the beginning of a new age.
Yet it is equally clear, I hope, that this momentous transformation that burst into the open within the narrow confines of a decade and a half, could not have taken place had it not been evolving—hidden from sight, as it were—over a longer period of time. What, one feels compelled to ask, brought this change about? What made it possible? How are we to understand that some formulations, suggesting rather than fully expressing ideas that were revolutionary for their time, had such a profound and instantaneous impact? Not much effort need be expended to convince the student that an analysis of the generation or two preceding the crucial dates I have just listed may yield interesting results. It is our present task to undertake such an analysis. We shall try to discuss (as far as possible within the limits of a single chapter) pertinent developments in the first half of the eighteenth century. It is of course not our intention to provide an exhaustive picture of intellectual life in this half-century, even if limited to reflection on the arts. Whatever we shall talk about, we shall do so with one question in mind: what prepared the revolution of the mid-century?
In the course of the chapter we shall look at three groups of authors who approached the problem of the visual arts from quite different points of departure. Though one cannot hermetically isolate one group from the other (an individual author may well belong to two groups at the same time, or at different periods of his life), one can safely claim that these groups differed in both background and aims. Yet one will see, I hope, that in spite of their disparateness they have some constituent elements or orientations in common, and thus fit into an overall picture both of the age as a whole and of the specific problems (and formulations) of reflection on the visual arts.
The first group to be considered are the philosophers. In the early eighteenth century the term “philosopher” is not as clear—or so at least it seems to the modern student—as it was in the age of Plato and Aristotle, or even in that of Descartes. Not only are there no towering figures in the thought of the first half of the eighteenth century; the very scope and nature of a philosopher’s subject matter is obscured. Frequently therefore we shall have to ask whether a certain figure is a philosopher or whether he should rather be classified with the critics, the historians, or some other group. In the present chapter, then, the term “philosopher” should be taken with even more caution than is usually necessary. In speaking of philosophers I have in mind those thinkers who dealt mainly with general problems and whose contribution to the study of the arts is usually detached from the consideration of specific works of art or particular techniques.
Another type, altogether different from the philosophers both in the kind of material they studied and in the frame of mind they brought to that study, are the antiquarians. In the first half of the eighteenth century they attained notoriety, and became an important and characteristic feature of the intellectual life of the time. Usually avoiding high abstraction, and often afraid of any kind of generalization, they did not contribute directly to the study and interpretation of art as such or to the theories about it. Yet their variegated activity and ample legacy had an important, if often roundabout, effect on the various attempts to reflect theoretically on what the painter and sculptor do. A careful study of how the antiquarians looked at their objects, and of what they tried to find in them, can help us better understand how that seemingly sudden revolution that burst forth in the middle of the century was being prepared for behind the scenes.
The artists themselves are the last, though obviously not the least important, group whose testimony is to be considered in this chapter. There is no dearth of sources. Some of the painters who lived in the first half of the eighteenth century actually spoke at great length about their art. But the analysis of their literary legacy poses, as we shall see, particularly difficult problems of interpretation. If one accepts the readings here suggested, then artists’ testimony may be found to shed a particularly interesting light on what was going on—perhaps hidden from most of the authors themselves—in that transitory period, the first half of the eighteenth century, preparing the coming of a new age.

II. THE PHILOSOPHERS

I. VICO

To begin an attempt at drawing a map of eighteenth-century theories of painting and sculpture with a discussion of Giambattista Vico may call for a word of explanation. At first blush, not much seems to recommend the evoking of Vico’s spirit in this particular context. He did not have an appreciable influence in his own period; he was “discovered” only in the nineteenth century. Most important, he was not concerned with art; his work is perhaps best described as a philosophy of culture; he has also been called “the father of sociology.” Though he devoted great attention to what he calls “poetics,” he did not cover the whole range of the arts, and what he has to say about the visual arts is next to nothing. Why then does a student of modern art theory feel impelled to invite his readers to immerse themselves in the teachings of this strange author, who seems to be marginal to our domain? In the following pages it will emerge, I hope, that Vico articulated the basis of one of the great trends in modern thought on art, including thought on the figurative arts of painting and sculpture. Some of the encompassing problems that have remained central issues in the theory of art were first projected by Vico onto the horizon of European reflection. If Vico, then, is not a productive “source” for the understanding of what his own generation believed and said, he allows us to glance into what was hidden in the depths of eighteenth-century thought.
The obscure conditions of Vico’s life have provided an attractive theme for modern historians. Born in Naples in 1668, the son of a modest bookseller, he spent most of his life in his native city, and died there in 1744. He held an inferior professorship in “rhetoric,” complementing his modest salary with all kinds of occasional jobs, among them the composition of other people’s inaugural lectures (some of which contain his most original ideas). A cripple all his life as a result of a fall in childhood, he lived in ill-fated family conditions and embittered poverty, his genius not recognized for several generations. This biography, some scholars suggest,1 is romantically exaggerated. We know that Montesquieu bought a copy of Vico’s book and that Goethe, during his trip to Italy in 1787, spoke of him with great admiration.2 But though his vita obviously needs correction in some respects, it remains essentially accurate. A philosopher out of place and born before his time—this rather stereotyped traditional verdict has more than a kernel of truth. Vico published several studies, but his central work, the Scienza nuova, exerted a magic spell on his life. After it was printed in a first edition (1725), he practically rewrote it for the second one (1730); he kept on adding to it, and when it was reprinted in the year of his death, it was again considerably enlarged and changed. Yet in spite of this continual struggle to shape his work, Vico’s style remained baroque, undisciplined, and often obscure. The eighteenth century, which so much admired clarity, punished him for his faults by forgetting him. Eventually, however, the abundance and originality of his ideas prevailed.
We are of course not concerned with Vico’s system as a whole, and shall look only at what may be of significance—even if not directly—for an understanding of modern theories of art. Among the great themes of Vico’s thought is a version of what we would today call aesthetics. Benedetto Croce, the Italian philosopher who did so much to revive Vico, believes that aesthetics should actually be...

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