ALSO BY MARTIN KEMP

The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat
The Human Animal in Western Art and Science
Leonardo da Vinci: The marvellous works of nature and man
Leonardo
Christ to Coke: How image becomes icon

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

3 Holford Yard

Bevin Way

London WC1X 9HD

www.profilebooks.com

Text copyright © Martin Kemp, 2014

Original illustrations © Cognitive Media Ltd, 2014

COGNI+IVE

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Designed by Jade Design

www.jadedesign.co.uk

Printed and bound in Italy by L.E.G.O. SpA–Lavis (TN)

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 178125 3366

eISBN 978 178283 1020

Enhanced eBook ISBN 978 178 125 4110

The paper this book is printed on is certified by the © 1996 Forest Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient-forest friendly. The printer holds FSC chain of custody SGS-COC-2061

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1   THE ‘PROGRESS’ OF ART IN GREECE AND ROME

2   ‘GRAVEN IMAGES’

3   THE RENAISSANCE AND ‘PROGRESS’ AGAIN: 1300–1600

4   ACADEMIES AND ALTERNATIVES

5   CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CRITICISM

6   ROMANTICALLY REAL

7   MODERN LIFE – THE FRENCH DIMENSION

8   NEW EXTREMITIES

9   SOMETHING DIFFERENT

10 CONCLUSION

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FURTHER INVESTIGATIONS

INTRODUCTION

ART IN HISTORY

The artists and works of art in this book have transformed how art affects us. Over the ages, painters and sculptors have invited us to do radically new things.

To take just one example, we do not know how the first viewers of Diego Velásquez’s Las Meninas reacted to his mighty canvas, but we can be sure that they had seen nothing like it before. It is recognisable as a group portrait, but does not conform to the norm. The artist is there, but we see only a portion of the back of his painting. The young princess and her entourage have assembled in the grand room. But at whom are they looking? At someone more important than us, we imagine. The king and queen are visible in the mirror. But where are they? They are the absent subject of the picture. Velásquez, in common with other great artists, presents us with a field for interpretation in which we can all play our part.

Art in History concentrates on the triangular relationship between art, artist and spectator – frequently in the context of God and nature. This is how the present book differs from the numerous previous histories of ‘Western Art’. It looks at the varied historical notions of art and artists as categories within which art is produced and consumed. What art required of the spectator and what the spectator required of art changed radically over the ages. We will see the artist emerge as an individual who makes a distinct contribution to the development of art in ancient Greece and again later in the Renaissance. Subsequent centuries witness the evolution of the categories until they assume their modern meanings. The developments often embody the idea of ‘progress’, a powerful concept in the forging of modern economic and political systems. Indeed, every aspect of the rise of art and artists is deeply involved in material and conceptual shifts in society.

In setting art in history, a big question looms into view: is the maker of artefacts a subservient agent or an autonomous hero of creativity? Or to frame more subtle questions: how far is the art work first and foremost an expression of a series of social imperatives; and how far does it depend on the direct and timeless communication of human values from one individual to another? Can it be both of these things? I will argue that the power of images depends on both, in a wholly integrated manner.

How a work of art is embedded in history varies as widely as the works and the artists vary. A medieval Madonna and Child is directly concerned with a kind of spiritual beauty that lies beyond this world, while Goya’s painting of a contemporary massacre speaks of violent contention. What we call the ‘style’ of the work is integral to its effect. The suave grace and high polish of the Madonna would not serve Goya well. The violent colour contrasts and incendiary brushwork of Goya would not exercise the right effect on a medieval worshipper. All the works here demonstrate a compelling unity of style and content. Each of them posits their own special relationship with the spectator in the context of the society from which they emerged, and they ‘speak’ to us in a period voice. Although we can still hear them speak, we gain enormously from attuning our ears to their very varied accents.

We will be encountering our key works in a broadly chronological order, because what each artist does is articulated in relation to what went before, and affects our view of the past. As the great poet T. S. Eliot wrote in 1921, ‘what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it’.

Until comparatively recently, works of art that have emerged from the changing frameworks tell the story of big blokes – whether artists or their funders – and play to what is a familiar story of canonical masterpieces that stood at the centre of new developments in European and North American art. There are of course other stories, but the narrative I follow, looking at European and North American art, is a real and massive one, not least in terms of where the international art world is now, in China no less than in the USA. It is also the story that I am best equipped to tell but I don’t claim that it is definitely what the history of art is about. As one of the possible stories, not the least of its attractions is its focus on some of the most enriching works human beings have produced. It is also closely related to what we experience when we step into major galleries and museums.

1

THE ‘PROGRESS’ OF ART IN GREECE AND ROME

From the Natural History, c. 79 AD, by the Roman soldier and natural philosopher, Pliny the Elder:

Successive painters’ quest for nature and beauty
Apollodorus of Athens, in the ninety-third Olympiad [408 BC] was the first to imitate the appearance of objects, and the first who truly conferred glory on the painter’s brush … The gates of art now being thrown open, Zeuxis of Heraclea entered in the fourth year of the ninety-fifth Olympiad, truly destined to lead the brush … to the greatest levels of glory …

Parrhasius of Ephesus also greatly carried things forward, being the first to use proportions in his figures, the first to give animation to faces, elegance to the hair, and beauty to the mouth, and it is recognised by artists that he carried away the palm for contour lines. In painting this is the very highest subtlety. …To be able to create the boundaries and round them off is successfully achieved in art only rarely …

As to Timanthes, he was plentifully gifted with genius [ingenium], and some of the orators have with praise celebrated his Iphigenia, as she stands fatefully at the altar. He painted the grief of all present, and in particular her uncle; but having exhausted all the images of sorrow, he veiled the features of the victim’s father, unable adequately to represent his feelings … Timanthes is the only one in whose works something more is always conveyed than is actually painted.

It was Apelles of Cos in the hundred and twelfth Olympiad who surpassed all the other painters who came before or after. Single-handedly, he took forward painting more than all the others. Moreover, he published some volumes containing the principles of his art.

With respect to the conscious display of artistry by artists, the ancient Greeks laid the foundations, just as they established all the major branches of modern learning. From the sixth century BC onwards the Greeks were the first (outside China) to lay down a systematic body of recorded thought dealing with the fundamental aspects of human nature, including the soul, and its intersections with the natural and divine worlds. The idealising philosophy of Plato and the nature-based thought of Aristotle set the tone for centuries. Alfred North Whitehead, the twentieth-century mathematician and philosopher, famously declared that ‘the safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato’. If we include Aristotle, Whitehead’s statement becomes eminently supportable. However Plato himself was notably disparaging about visual representation, regarding it as second-hand reflection of the sensory world, which was itself a shadowy manifestation of higher mental and spiritual realities.

The visual arts in Greece were centred on the representation of the human body. They participated in contemporary views about humanity and the gods, granting bodily form to concepts, and in turn shaping the notion of ideal beauty, not least through the artists’ own writings. The Roman scholar Pliny noted that the great Apelles wrote on art, as did the fifth-century BC sculptor Polycleitus. In his famous Canon, Polycleitus established a system of proportions that comprised the musical mathematics of the parts of the body in the context of the whole. Endowing art with a ‘science’ – a systematic base in rational knowledge – was and remains a vital component in certifying the status of art and artists alongside other prestigious disciplines. All the Greek treatises on the visual arts are lost, but Pliny, in his extraordinary compilation of everything he considered worth knowing, provides a Roman echo of how the Greek artists regarded themselves and were regarded by others.

Art, for Pliny, arose from the imposition of high culture on physical materials – paint, bronze, marble and so on – involving supreme individual talent (ingenium or ‘genius’), the imitation of nature, the distillation of beauty, the imaging of the divine, and the conveying of emotion in narratives. Successive artists contributed to the long march towards perfection, from primitive beginnings to the diverse glories drawn from nature. Painting, for instance, progressed from the tracing of lines around shadows, to full line drawing, to monochrome painting and the addition of shading, followed by the mastery of colours and the scintillation of highlights.

There are too few surviving works of painting to trace this progression. However, enough sculpture has emerged over the ages, occasionally in the original and more often as later copies, to flesh out the Plinian narrative. This progress is usually shown via a sequence of statues representing a kouros (a young man). We can juxtapose an example from the sixth century BC with one from less than a century later. The earlier kouros retains large quotients of Egyptian rectitude, emerging from a rectangular marble block with the planes of front, side and back still very much apparent. Key transitions in the youth’s anatomy are delineated as grooves, in keeping with the line drawing described by Pliny. His successor humanises the basic schema with rounded contours, a tremor of flesh and blood and perhaps a hint of a smile. In this instance, very exceptionally, we know the funerary function of the statue. Its inscription instructs us to ‘stop and show pity beside the marker of Kroisos, dead, whom, when he was in the front rank [of the troops], raging Ares [Mars] destroyed’. It is likely that each of the kouroi and the korai (female counterparts) had a specific memorial function, representing the ideal essence of the person commemorated rather than a realistic portrayal.

When a century later we encounter two Greek warriors we find that the communicative presence of the figure has been transformed. The bronze hero’s weight (looking at the one known as Warrior A) is poised with easy athletic grace. His head turns, his calcite eyes staring assertively, fringed with silver lashes, while his copper lips open in speech, disclosing his silver teeth. Bronze was already an expensive and prestigious material; here it is notably enriched. Beyond a possible memorial function, we know nothing definitive of the identity of the warriors, or their authorship.

Warrior A can be seen generically as a classic hero. He could readily serve as Agamemnon, the tragic hero of the Trojan wars, who had sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis (Diana), and was murdered by his adulterous wife on his return. Such heroes, male and military in mien, became god-like in their virtues, while the disputatious gods displayed the human vices of vanity, lust, jealousy and revenge. In the plays of the great Greek tragedians, the human actors are separated from the gods by immortality and power but not by character. The vibrant Warrior would need no visible transformation for him to become Ares (Mars), the god of war. In a general sense, the warriors are the male embodiments of the self-proclaimed moral virtue and athletic heroism that was valued in Hellenic civilisation, above all in the city-state of Athens. It is worth remembering that the Greek dating system was based on the four-year cycle of the Olympic games.

In the representation of the female form, the ideal envisaged by male fantasy becomes more poetically real than the reality. By no one was this more potently expressed than by Praxiteles, who in the fifth century BC created iconic images of Apollo, Hermes, Artemis and Venus. His Venus for Knidos, known like his other masterpieces through later copies, shows the goddess of love after bathing, making an ineffectual gesture of sexual modesty as her hand hovers over her highly idealised genital triangle. The statue was a sensation. During a rapturous account in the Amores, a dialogue about love formerly attributed to Lucian, the author declares that ‘all her beauty is uncovered and revealed, except in so far as she unobtrusively uses one hand to hide her private parts … The temple had a door on both sides for the benefit of those also who wish to have a good view of the goddess from behind, so that no part of her be left unadmired’. Of the many later versions, that in Munich gives the best idea of the melting subtlety with which Praxiteles evokes her sexual beauty, envisioned for us yet outside our mortal reach.

Even the most indulgent of the gods commanded respect in the highest places, as on the supremely prestigious pediments of the Parthenon on the lofty Acropolis in Athens. The temple was dedicated to Athena, patron of the city. Her birth from the head of Zeus (Jupiter), fully formed and armed, was displayed in the triangular space of the east pediment, sculpted by Phidias and his workshop in the middle of the fifth century BC. Only the flanking figures have survived. At the end of the left side, the sun rises in the person of a barely emergent Helios in his chariot, drawn upwards by two rearing horses. The other figures are less readily identified but probably represent Dionysus (Bacchus), Demeter, Persephone and Artemis (Diana). Even fractured and eroded clean of their original colour, the marble gods who oversee our fate manifest a remarkable sense of bodily presence, more ideal than our own but compellingly real and alive, whether nakedly male or draped with flowing female garments that serve to define the figures’ gracious motion.

Later Greek sculpture created striking effects of bodies in vigorous motion. The most famous example is the narrative sculpture of the Death of Laocoön and his sons (Antiphantes and Thymbraeus), excavated to huge acclaim in Rome in 1506. The tragic story of the Trojan priest is known in a number of varying accounts. The sculpture tells what happens when he tries to warn Troy of the Greeks’ ploy with the wooden horse. Athena and Poseidon, who favoured the invaders, dispatch serpents to kill him and his sons. The date of the massive sculpture is much debated, but a consensus seems to be settling on the first century BC.

The powerful bodily torsions and agonised expressions are worthy of the Greek tragedians, whose dramas often tell of resolute heroes suffering the cruellest of divine torments. Virgil, the Roman author, later captured the agonies in his Aeneid, where the ravaged priest ‘strains to burst the knots with his hands … while he sends terrible shouts up to the heavens, like the bellowing of a bull that has fled, wounded, from the altar’. The sculpture made a powerful impression on Pliny, who described ‘the Laocoön … in the palace of the Emperor Titus’ as ‘preferable to any other work in the arts of painting or statuary. It is sculpted from a single block … This group was made in concert by three supreme artists, Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus, natives of Rhodes’. It exploits the kind of bodily empathy that later artists in the Christian tradition, particularly Michelangelo, used to convey the severe spiritual and physical suffering imposed on those who were obstinate in their virtue.

As we noted, the painted equivalents of this sculptural narrative have been lost. We catch only glimpses. Perhaps the most spectacular reflection of elaborate Greek painting is the floor mosaic in Pompeii of the Battle of Alexander Against Darius. The resolute Greek emperor, in a badly damaged section on the left, steadfastly focuses his attention on the Persian king, who retreats in his chariot through a tilting forest of spears. The bold foreshortenings of the agitated horses, the tangled mass of warriors, the rhetoric of gestures and expressive faces provide a powerful echo of what the Greek narrative painters achieved. It may be a copy of the Battle that Pliny describes as painted by Philoxenus for King Cassandra shortly before 300 BC.

By the time that the Laocoön was carved, the rising power of the Roman empire, at first republican and then imperial, was submerging that of Greece. The Romans created their own vigorous Latin version of Greek religion and culture, not least in the visual arts, where copies and variants of key masterpieces were produced in considerable numbers. Alongside iconic images, new sculptural genres emerged, such as densely carved sarcophaguses, bronze equestrian monuments, and narrative reliefs on commemorative columns and triumphal arches. Portraiture was a particular penchant of Roman sculptors, capturing the confident likeness of imperial citizens forging careers in an urbanised and militaristic society. A striking example is the head of an elderly man in the Vatican, identified as someone of civic or religious status by the veil on his bald head. His deeply carved features convey an individual sense of self-conscious gravity. The now anonymous man could well serve as C. Trebatius Testa, to whom the philosopher and politician Cicero wrote in Gaul in 54 BC: ‘ In the “Trojan Horse”, just at the end, you remember the words, “Too late they learn wisdom”. You, however, old man, were wise in time’.

Our knowledge of Roman painting is fragmentary but we at least have those miraculous relics from the villas of Pompeii and Herculaneum interred by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. The surviving wall paintings exhibit a sophisticated command of space and naturalism. The cultivated pleasures of gardens are conveyed with particular delight in the frescoed Garden Room in the Pompeian House of the Golden Bracelet. The murals, painted with delicate energy, extend the relaxing joy of the actual garden into the adjoining space within the house. A tone of licentious pleasure is set by the pillars of a maenad on the left (a female companion of Bacchus) and on the right a satyr (a lusty goat-man), each supporting a panel of a woman lounging with erotic intent. Two theatrical masks hang from the top of the aperture, reminding us that the garden of the house serves as a theatre for sensuous pursuits.

During the span of the seven centuries separating the upright kouros from the house in Pompeii we have witnessed the rise of the kind of art and artist we later recognise as serving a variety of functions in religious and secular contexts. Overtly secular works in domestic settings, such as the Roman portraits and the Herculaneum frescoes, seem to have occupied an increasing portion of artists’ production. We will see a similar trend from the Renaissance onwards.

We have witnessed an art of the human body that has risen to expressive extremes of pleasure and pain. And, not least, we have noted the invention of writing about art, telling of how it evolved into a self-conscious pursuit through which patrons and painters could mutually exalt their own status.

2

‘GRAVEN IMAGES’

From ‘The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments’ in the Rationale divinorum officiorum, c. 1290 AD, by William Durandus, the Bishop of Mende:

III. 1–4: Pictures and ornaments in churches are the lessons and the scriptures for the laity. As [Pope] Gregory declared, it is one thing to adore a picture, and another by means of a picture to learn historically what should be adored. What writing supplies to someone who can read, a picture can supply to someone who is unlearned and can only look …

Gregory said that pictures are not to be dismissed – in order that they should not be worshipped – because paintings appear to move the mind more than descriptions. Thus, deeds are placed before our eyes in paintings, and so appear to be actually occurring, whereas in descriptions, the deed is done as it were by hearsay, which affects the mind less when aroused in our memory.

I. 24–25: The glass windows in a church are Holy Scriptures, which repel the wind and the rain, that is all things hurtful, but they transmit the light of the true Sun, that is to say God, into the hearts of the faithful. Windows are wider within than without, because mystical insight is broader, and precedes the literal meaning. Also, by the windows the senses of the body are signified, in that they should be closed to the vanities of this world, and open to receive spiritual gifts with complete freedom.

By the tracery of the windows, we understand the prophets or other less known teachers in the Church Militant.

When Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 312 the role of image-making underwent a huge shift compared to ancient Greece and Rome. According to the most fundamental interpretation of Christian doctrine, there were to be no figurative images at all.

As the medieval writer Durandus later noted, there are six occasions in the Bible when making ‘graven images’ is explicitly decried. The term ‘graven image’ corresponds to the Hebrew word for ‘idol’. It was idolatrous to worship a physical image made by human hand. Only God should be adored. Key episodes in the Old Testament, most notably Moses’s destruction of the golden calf and the establishing of the Ten Commandments, provided the basis of Jewish rejection of images. Early Christian imagery similarly avoided figurative depictions, and chose to resort to signs. The Hebrew YHWH (Yahweh), as the ‘tetragrammaton’, served as the sign of God the Father’s presence. Christ was signified by abbreviations of his Greek name as ‘christograms’: XP (chi ro in Greek), IHC or IHS, or ICX.

Out of this prohibitive climate, Christianity nonetheless developed an elaborate and arcane system of symbolic representation. Over the centuries Christianity progressively succumbed to the age-old need to create ‘idols’ to support religious devotion – tangible representations to which we attribute spiritual powers. The extraordinary elaboration by which Christian images came to convey doctrinal meanings was rooted in the need to circumvent the explicit proscriptions in the Bible. Even so, episodes of fundamentalist iconoclasm continued to erupt, in which images were overthrown, mutilated and destroyed. However the incorporation of the Church into traditional structures of Roman-style rulership favoured the use of images as tools of power.

Over the Christian centuries there were a series of moves to legitimise images. Durandus is particularly keen to cite Pope Gregory the Great who wrote two letters around 600 stating what became the standard justification of images – as the illiterate’s Bible. Gregory also considered that they could stimulate religious feeling so that devotion was directed towards the subject rather than the representation. Durandus himself described in extraordinary detail how to ‘read’ every part of a church. He explained the deep meanings not only of the figurative images but also its architecture: wooden beams, for example, signify preachers supporting the Church.

Suppose that there is a mosaic in a church that depicts Christ instructing St Peter to ‘feed my sheep’. It can be read at various levels: literally, in terms of the immediate story of Christ’s instruction, as witnessed by the disciples; symbolically, in that the flock of lambs signifies the followers of Christ, himself characterised as the Good Shepherd; allegoricallyanagogically