How Pictures Complete Us

The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Divine

Paul Crowther

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780804798587
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Despite the wonders of the digital world, people still go in record numbers to view drawings and paintings in galleries. Why? What is the magic that pictures work on us? This book provides a provocative explanation, arguing that some pictures have special kinds of beauty and sublimity that offer aesthetic transcendence. They take us imaginatively beyond our finite limits and even invoke a sense of the divine. Such aesthetic transcendence forges a relationship with the ultimate and completes us psychologically. Philosophers and theologians sometimes account for this as an effect of art, but How Pictures Complete Us distinguishes itself by revealing how this experience is embodied in pictorial structures and styles. Through detailed discussions of artworks from the Renaissance through postmodern times, Paul Crowther reappraises the entire scope of beauty and the sublime in the context of both representational and abstract art, offering unexpected insights into familiar phenomena such as ideal beauty, pictorial perspective, and what pictures are in the first place.

1

IDEAL BEAUTY AND CLASSIC ART

A Philosophical Vindication

Introduction

When Giotto was born, a painter was generally regarded as a craftsman. Less than two hundred and fifty years later, Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor, not only visited Titian’s studio but picked up the artist’s brush for him after he had dropped it. The change of status revealed in this anecdote is in no small way concerned with the role of ideal beauty in giving painting the highest cultural legitimation. The origins of ideal beauty—in both practice and theory—are found in classical antiquity. It is hardly surprising, then, that the notion of “classic art,” as such, is usually identified with visual practices that draw in some way on classical antiquity’s exemplifications of ideal beauty.

I

In the Republic, Plato holds that the only way one can assess the excellence, the beauty, or the rightness of an implement, living thing, or action is by reference to “the use for which it was made, by man or by nature” (601d).¹ It is this that makes art such a problematic notion for Plato. In his philosophy, art’s essence is mimetic. But mimesis, in his terms, involves the copying of sensory things and states of affairs. These, however, are themselves only the earthly appearances of the relevant Forms. Hence, the product of artistic mimesis is a copy of a copy and thus twice removed from the authentically real.²

On these terms, even if art achieves beauty, the use that is its basis tends to distract us from the contemplation of truth. While Plato is officially dismissive of art’s focus on appearance, he nevertheless has an interesting understanding of what its beauty involves. In the Republic, for example, he resorts to painting as an analogy in explaining how philosophers should create a legal constitution. The first stage is like a “painting-board” that is wiped clean. In the next stage,

by selecting behaviour patterns and blending them, they’ll produce a composite human likeness, taking as their reference point that quality which Homer . . . called “godly” and “godlike” in its human manifestation. . . . And I suppose they’d rub bits out and paint them in again, until they’ve done all they can to create human characters which stand the best chance of meeting the gods’ approval. (501b–c)³

Socrates’ interlocutor Adeimantus then observes that this “should be a very beautiful painting” (501c).⁴ In all these remarks it is clear that, whatever his reservations about the mimetic outcome of painting, its beauty in realizing this goal involves a selective intervention on the appearances it deals with. It involves idealization.

If Plato does not consider the full implications of this, his great follower Plotinus does, by way of a sculptural example:

Suppose two blocks of stone lying side by side: one is unpatterned, quite untouched by art; the other has been minutely wrought by the craftsman’s hands into some statue of God or man, . . . or if a human being, not a portrait but a creation in which the sculptor’s art has concentrated all loveliness. Now it must be seen that the stone thus brought under the artist’s hand to the beauty of form is beautiful not as stone—for so the crude block would be as pleasant—but in virtue of the Form or Idea introduced by the art. (5.8.1)⁵

Plotinus draws a vital conclusion from this, specifically, that the arts “give no bare reproduction of the thing seen but go back to the Reason-Principles from which Nature itself derives, and, furthermore . . . much of their work is all their own; they are holders of beauty and add where nature is lacking” (5.8.1).⁶ This is a key step forward. The artist’s selective intervention on appearance is not just a creating of composite appearances; it strives to remedy defects in appearance through being based on the artist’s idea of reality. Plotinus’ approach thus resolves some inconsistencies in Plato. The artist’s idea is something that nature is made to answer to, through the use of natural materials transformed into a new existent.

By transforming nature into the appearance of an idea, the artist exemplifies the metaphysical dynamic that is at the core of all things. This involves returning the soul—through contemplation and appropriate sorts of action—to the levels of being that sustain it. And while art is not for Plotinus the highest mode of beauty, its great merit is to transform brute matter into the overt embodiment of an idea. Indeed, as we have seen, this is far more than an image or copy. It arises from a forming principle that, through its selectivity, improves the appearance of that which it represents and indicates that there is more to it than mere appearance. The artist’s treatment idealizes how the relevant Form appears. By making the appearance beautiful, he or she facilitates the soul’s contemplation of that which is higher than nature. The soul is helped to return to its metaphysical sources. Overlooking the meanings of this in the immediate Plotinian context, the key general point is that—by linking art to the idealization of appearance—Plotinus has qualified the Greek notion of beauty in a decisive way. He has identified ideal beauty as basic to art. The beauty of art is based on both creating and improving appearance rather than copying it.

Interestingly, key aspects of the Greek tradition of ideal beauty are found in Alberti’s important work On Painting. In book 3, for example, we are told that “excellent parts should all be selected from the most beautiful bodies, and every effort must be made to perceive, understand and express beauty.”⁷ He goes on to note—with the highest approval—a strategy employed by the Greek artist Zeuxis. In Alberti’s words, “because he believed that all the things he desired to achieve beauty not only could not be found through his own intuition, but were not to be discovered even in Nature in one body alone, he chose from all the youth of the city five outstandingly beautiful girls that he might represent in his painting whatever feature of feminine beauty was most praiseworthy in each of them.”⁸

In these remarks, Alberti is identifying beauty with the outcome of a selective, idealizing process based on the study of relevant phenomena. Centuries later Schopenhauer claimed that the capacity to recognize such beauty involved a priori criteria. In his words:

We all recognize human beauty when we see it, but in the genuine artist this takes place with such clearness that he shows it as he has never seen it, and in his nature he surpasses nature. . . . He, so to speak, understands nature’s half-spoken words. . . . Only by virtue of such anticipation also is it possible for us to recognize the beautiful where nature has actually succeeded in the particular case. This anticipation is the Ideal; it is the Idea in so far as it is known a priori, or at any rate half-known; and it becomes practical for art by accommodating or supplementing what is given a posteriori through nature.⁹

On these terms, we all have a priori knowledge of the Forms of things and beauty so that we can recognize them when they appear. The artist, however, is gifted beyond this, insofar as he or she can complete what nature only suggests. This is possible through the clarity with which he or she comprehends the Form or Idea of natural things. Nature only provides material instances of such Forms, but the artist can discern their essence.

The kind of Platonist insight that Schopenhauer assigns to the artist has a certain naivety. For what the artist does is surely not the translation of some essential image from mind to canvas; it is articulated primarily in terms of his or her pictorial imagination—which is bound up as much (if not more) with the character of the relevant medium.

It is interesting that before Schopenhauer there was a champion of ideal beauty in visual art who offers a statement of it in philosophically quite sophisticated terms, namely, Joshua Reynolds, in his Discourses on Art. These didactic works are a collection of his annual presidential addresses to the Royal Academy between 1769 and 1790 (inclusive). Far from being of merely localized historical interest, Reynolds’ Discourses condense and give systematic justification to the idea of a necessary link between the “grand style” in art and ideal form. He makes the kind of connection between handling the medium and achieving the ideal that Schopenhauer neglects. Moreover, his ideas are a very significant development of the points made by Plato, Plotinus, and Alberti concerning the importance of selectiveness in how the artist articulates form.

II

The most straightforward aspect of Reynolds’ approach is his insistent practical advice. All artists should acquire a basic training in drawing, coloring, and composition and in particular should pay close attention to drawing from life. At the heart of this general orientation, however, a more specific (and interesting) strategy should also be in play, which Reynolds describes as “the accumulation of materials.” It is based on copying the works of the great masters—not, it should be added, in slavish terms but in a highly selective way based on a deep knowledge of tradition. The artist’s task is to identify and learn from those stylistic factors that are the particular strengths of individual artists, for example, Michelangelo for design, Titian for color, and Ludovico Carracci for a balance of the two.

Reynolds’ emphasis on selective interpretation is, of course, at great odds with those theories of artistic creativity that stress the importance of genius. For him, genius is more an achievement of rational mind than it is of inspiration. As he puts it, “invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory: nothing can come of nothing: he, who has laid up no materials, can produce no combinations.”¹⁰ The idea that rational study is at the basis of artistic achievement is one that—as we saw earlier—is already familiar from Alberti’s writings and the work of many other theorists. What is distinctive to Reynolds’ formulation is his grounding of it in an empiricist theory of perception and knowledge. Before looking at this in detail, however, it is important to comprehend the positive outcome of the selective “accumulation of materials”; such an outcome will be shown to be the very foundation of the grand style.

Everything focuses on a metaphysical claim. Reynolds holds—with the authority of the classical tradition—that “all the arts receive their perfection from an Ideal beauty, superior to what is to be found in individual nature.”¹¹ He explains this in more detail as follows:

All the objects which are exhibited to our view by nature, upon close examination will be found to have their blemishes and defects. The most beautiful forms have something about them like weakness, minuteness or perfection. It must be an eye long used to the contemplation and comparison of these forms; and which, by long habit of observing what any set of objects of the same kind have in common, has acquired the power of discerning what each wants in particular. This long laborious comparison should be the first study of the painter, who aims at the greatest style.¹²

This strategy, of course, broadly parallels the selective procedure involved in the accumulation of materials. That general idea which the artist has developed through the study of the Old Masters is here used as an analytic tool in relation to phenomena per se. Reynolds next describes its application by the artist:

His eye being enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things, from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original; and what may seem a paradox, he learns to design naturally by drawing his figures unlike to any one object. This idea of the perfect state of nature, which the Artist calls the Ideal beauty, is the great leading principle by which works of genius are conducted.¹³

Reynolds’ doctrine of ideal beauty also moves in a further and more complex direction to encompass ideality of pictorial content as well as form. He holds, for example, that to attain the grand style, the artist must strip his work of contemporary cultural caprices and fashions so as to engage with factors that are of transcultural and transhistorical significance. Such factors take two basic forms. The first is the right kind of universally significant narrative subject matter and the adoption of a morally and aesthetically decorous way of presenting it. In Reynolds’ words: “There is a nobleness of conception, which goes beyond any thing in the mere exhibition even of perfect form; there is an art of animating and dignifying the figures with intellectual grandeur, of impressing the appearance of philosophick wisdom, or heroic virtue.”¹⁴

In order to achieve such a presentation, considerable artistic license may be involved. Reynolds notes that although historical figures such as St. Paul and Alexander the Great were of unimpressive physical stature, in his cartoons Raphael represents them in a “poetical” manner, and he is to be applauded for it. What is especially interesting are the grounds on which Reynolds justifies poetic license in this context:

A painter must compensate the natural deficiencies of his art. He has but one sentence to utter, but one moment to exhibit. He cannot, like the poet or historian, exhibit veneration for the character of the hero or saint he represents. . . . The Painter has no other means of giving an idea of the dignity of mind, but by that external appearance which grandeur of thought does generally, though not always, impress upon the countenance; and by that correspondence of figure to sentiment and situation, which all men wish, but cannot commend.¹⁵

In these remarks Reynolds underlines a key point of contrast between painting and literary art forms (a contrast, indeed, soon to be made much of by Lessing): that the latter are founded on temporal realization. In literary works a subject can be described at length through time, whereas in painting the subject is rendered through a single appearance or set of aspects with a fixed relation to the viewer. It is the constraints of the medium itself, therefore, that warrant the idealization of content in the sense described earlier. To do full justice to the heroic stature of the subject, narrative elements must be harmonized with properties that are inherent to the nature of the medium itself.

This process of idealization also involves a specific general attitude toward elements of pictorial content. Put briefly, it requires that the artist avoid stylistic touches that emphasize the particularity of the rendered subject. Such things as wild gestures or exaggerated facial expressions, as well as attentiveness to exact details of textures or drapery, are for Reynolds factors that inhibit the presentation of ideal beauty—even though they may not, in literal terms, be blemishes or imperfections. Similar considerations even hold for him in relation to details of color. All in all, the parts of a painting—whatever closeness they may bear to the “truth” of surface appearances—must be entirely subordinate to the overall principle of design and grouping. In Reynolds’ words: “The general idea constitutes real excellence. All smaller things, however perfect in their way, are to be sacrificed without mercy to the greater.”¹⁶ Indeed, “if deceiving the eye were the only business of the art, there is no doubt . . . but the more minute painter would be apt to succeed: but it is not the eye, it is the mind, which the painter of genius desires to address.”¹⁷

This distinction between art that merely addresses the senses and art that can engage the mind is, for Reynolds, the basis of a hierarchical conception of pictorial art, ranging from history painting—themes from classical culture, themes from scripture, heroic historical events (sacred or profane), and courtly scenes—through (in descending order of intellectual worth) landscapes, genre painting, portraits, and still lifes. Within this hierarchy, it is only the history painter who offers an authentic embodiment of the grand style. Such a painter is a figure of the highest intellectual stature, whose works are on a par with philosophy and indeed historical writing, as...