Richard Woodfield, 'Pictorial Experience' more

Pictorial Experience* Richard Woodfield 0 The topic The notion of ‘pictorial experience’ depends on the idea of the experience of a picture and this latter term is fraught with difficulties that could only be properly captured by a full-length book. Rather than attempt to deal with pictures in their widest sense, in this essay I will concentrate on ideas of pictorial experience lying behind a tradition of imagery that extends from Egyptian art to the art of our own day. In doing this I will follow Ernst Gombrich’s suggestion that we concentrate on the mechanisms at work behind the function of such images, leaving matters to do with artistic excellence to one side. In the same way that discussion of linguistic experience is prior to analysis of literature, discussion of pictorial experience is prior to discussion of the masterpieces of visual art. Paradoxically, this means that this essay will not revolve around a discussion of the ‘aesthetic’ so much as that which makes the aesthetic possible. It is time to re-examine the notion of the aesthetic in the light of the originating notion of aisthesis but this is not the place to do it. 1 The theory There is an idea, prevalent in a variety of guises, that visual imagery offers an experience of what is seen by its creator. In classic art history, the history of visual art is the history of vision. A classic formulation of this view was given by Heinrich Wölfflin in his book Principles of Art History: “Vision itself has a history, and the revelation of these visual strata must be regarded as the primary task of art history.”1 A little further on through his argument he declared: “Just as we can hear all kinds of words into the ringing of bells, so we can arrange the visible world in very different ways for ourselves, and nobody can say that one way is truer than another.”2 In certain philosophical circles, the visual image is taken to offer a criterion of what is seen: we come to understand what we have seen by making a drawing of it. A classic version of this view was Wittgenstein’s formulation: ‘What is the criterion of the visual experience? Wittgenstein writes in the Philosophical Investigations. ‘Well, what would you expect the criterion to be? The representation of “what is seen”.’3 1 * Published in Ananta Ch. Sukla, Art and Experience, Westport Connecticut and London: Praeger 2003, 71-90. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (trans. M. D. Hottinger), London: G Bell and Sons 1932, p. 11. 2 Principles, p. 29. 3 Quoted by Richard Wollheim, in his modified translation, in “On Drawing an Object”, On Art and the Mind, Cambridge Mass. and London: Harvard University Press Richard Woodfield Pictorial Experience Art historians in the early twentieth century worked on the assumption that the artist was naturally inclined to depict what he saw and any deviation from the naturalistic-realistic-photographic norm was a consequence of either choice or will. Philosophically, recognition of an image as an image of X could was a matter of inculcation. For Nelson Goodman4 anything could, in principle, be represented by any image and recognising such a connection was a matter of inculcation or habit: one recognises Picasso’s portrait of Daniel Kahnweiler as such out of accustomisation. His disciple Marx Wartofsky took the stronger view that our sense of what it was to see the world was conditioned by our habits in looking at pictures and the pictorial discoveries of our day:5 people in the past saw literally different worlds. Rather than address the theory abstractly by the construction of historically disembodied argument, this essay will adopt a narrative approach. 2 The art historians: Wölfflin and Riegl Ironically, Wölfflin qualified the application of his own statement of the relationship between vision and depiction, opening out the possibility of an asymmetrical relationship between the two. In the same Principles of Art History (1915) where he had declared that the history of art was the history of vision he acknowledged the fact that the fifteenth century writer Leon Battista Alberti had observed the effect of reflected light on local colour, ‘a person walking over a green meadow takes on a green colour in the face’, but that it assumed no normative significance for the production of painting. This led him into the remarkable statement that “we see here how little style is determined by observations of nature alone, and that it is always decorative principles, convictions of taste, to which the last decision is assigned.” 6 With this qualification in mind, the notion of the artist’s vision becames a notion of how the artist chooses to create imagery within the constraints of taste, which carries little weight for a general theory of the relationship between human vision and pictorial representation. A fifteenth century Florentine artist did not depict the world in the way that he did because that was the way that fifteenth century Florentines saw the world. He depicted the world in the way that he did because it accorded with fifteenth century Florentines’ judgements of taste.They simply liked the kinds of pictures that they did and this had to do with the pictures that were available for consumption rather than abstract notions of the artist or public’s experience of nature. 1974, p. 3. 4 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company 1976. 5 Marx Wartofsky, “Art History and Perception” in Perceiving Artworks (ed. John Fisher), Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1980. Note that volume 59 (1), Winter 2001 of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism features a symposium “The Historicity of the Eye”. I share Arthur Danto’s assessment of Wartofsky’s position. 6 Principles, p. 51. See Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting (trans. Cecil Grayson), Harmondsworth: Penguin 1991, p. 46: “Reflected rays assume the colour they find on the surface from which they are reflected. We see this happen when the faces of people walking about in meadows appear to have a greenish tinge.” Richard Woodfield Pictorial Experience For a more forceful notion of pictures reflecting a culture’s concept of the appearance of nature one has to turn to Alois Riegl’s Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (1901) . While Wölfflin was centrally interested in art of the Italian renaissance and used it as a norm by which to judge baroque and Northern art, Riegl was concerned to rescue late antique art from the stigma of decline. Rejecting the notion that its artists were simply inept, he argued that the art was a product of a Kunstwollen to produce a self-consciously optic vision of the world. Using the traditional psychological idea that visual perception is dependent on sensations obtained from both sight and touch, Riegl analysed the development of ancient art from an Egyptian emphasis on touch to a late antique emphasis on sight. The art of classical Greece represented just one moment in the transition from one to the other. Egyptian art was based upon: The greatest adhesion to the pure sense perception of the (seemingly objective) material individuality of objects and, therefore, the greatest possible assimilation of the material appearance of the work of art to the plane, yet not the optical plane, imagined by our eye at a distance from objects, but the tactile plane suggested by the sense of touch …7 In late antique art: objects are endowed with full three-dimensionality. Hence an existence of space appears to be recognized, but only as long as it adheres to material individuals; that is an impenetrable coherent space measured cubically, not infinite deep space between individual material objects. … It is significant that each material individual gives up its traditional tactile connection with the datum plane thus isolating itself from the plane, even though remaining on it in rank and file.8 Riegl, unlike Wölfflin, invoked the notion of Weltanschauung to ground the changes in visual experience and visual imagery. The world view was literally that, a view of the world. Stylistic changes were not a product of taste or choice so much as will [Kunstwollen] and that will was the product of a changed Weltanschauung: the Egyptians could not help but see and represent the world in the way that they did. The same was true of the Greeks of classical antiquity and the Romans of the Empire. Riegl drew on notions current in Völkerpsychologie that in the earliest period “the idea prevailed that the existence and the forms of life of … individual shapes were ruled by arbitrary forces.” In the classical period “men now developed (together with a gradual change in religion towards philosophy and science) concepts of binding and logical relationships among individual phenomena.” And in late classical antiquity the “mechanistic system of causality was no longer valued … and was replaced with a different kind of connection – 7 Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry (trans. Rolf Winkes), Rome:Giorgio Bretschneider Editore 1985, p. 24. Original edition 1901. 8 Late Roman Art Industry, p. 26. Richard Woodfield Pictorial Experience magic.”9 These particular ideas were by no means radical but current in his day. It is significant for contemporary theorising on the relationship between vision and representation that Walter Benjamin became an advocate of Riegl’s views, though he gave them a characteristic shift. In his essay ‘The work of art in the age of its mechanical reproducibility’, he used the argument of Riegl’s Late Roman Art Industry to substantiate the notion that “During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.”10 Differing, of course, from Riegl’s philosophical position in his own idiosyncratic version of Marxism, Benjamin emphasised the importance of social transformation. The invention of photography brought about transformations in the perception of works of art, the notion of art itself and the modern public’s perception of the world itself. The change in photographic processes, from long single exposures to the carte de visite, resulted not just in a transformation of the relationship of the photographer to the sitter but also in the phenomenological status of the photographic image itself. While the earliest photographs captured the aura of the subject, the later, less human and more mechanised, photographs alienated the subject from the viewer. In the hands of his numerous contemporary commentators, such as Jonathan Crary,11 the invention of photography has transformed the very way in which modern man perceives the world. 3 Problems with Riegl Despite his concern to reject the norms established by the art of classical antiquity and the Italian renaissance and because of the emergence of Impressionism, Riegl was still bound by a mimetic view of art. According to this view artists had a natural tendency to create images of appearances of what they saw: strange appearances perhaps but nevertheless appearances. A major transformation in this view of Egyptian art occurred with Heinrich Schäfer’s book Von ägyptischer Kunst (1919). Schäfer had noticed that in a fragment of a Babylonian poem coming from the library of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal (660-627 B. C.), a description of Etana’s flight to heaven refers to the diminishing apparent size of the world below: When he had borne [him] aloft one league, The eagle says to [him], to Etana: 9 Late Roman Art Industry, pp. 231-2. Riegl’s view of the relationship between ancient magic and modern science was not as crazy in the early twentieth century as it might sound today. Current popularisations of contemporary science mystified the perception of objects, an example being Whitehead’s notion that when we look at a table we don’t actually see a table but a swarm of atoms. Contemporary theosophy had a lot to answer for as well. 10 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations (trans. Harry Zohn), London: Fontana 1973, p. 224. 11 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge Mass. and London: MIT Press 1992. Richard Woodfield Pictorial Experience ‘See, my friend, how the land appears! Peer at the sea at the sides of [Ekur]! ‘The land has indeed become a hill; The sea has turned into the water [of a stream]!’ … When he had borne him aloft a third league, The Eagle [says] to him, to Etana: ‘See, my friend, how the land appe[ars]!’ ‘The land has turned into a gardener’s ditch!’12 The poet could describe a perspectival view of the world without that view being embodied in contemporary art. There was a further reference to such diminution in Isaiah 40:22 “[Jehovah] sitteth on the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers” and a contemporary Confucian text remarked on how small the world looks when seen from above.13 Schäfer drew the radical conclusion that the distinctive Greek revolution in art took its form out of a concern with optical appearance from a stationary point of view. He was particularly critical of a vocabulary that speaks of “the Egyptian ‘turning’ things ‘over’ to draw them, ‘lifting’ them ‘up’, ‘shifting’ them together, or ‘drawing in section’, and so on”, as if the Egyptians were concerned with those varieties of appearance. He also emphasised that ‘projection’ “plays no part in an Egyptian two-dimensional picture, unless the word is emptied of its content and just used for ‘sketch, represent’.”14 Instead he suggested the idea that “figures are always drawn as if their planes were looked at frontally”15 and proceeded to analyse Egyptian art in terms of a complex repertoire of motifs based upon that particular drawing method. That technique may be assimilated to ‘writing’ and in consequence the spectator’s response is appropriately described as ‘reading’: “and in fact we can approach the content of depictions based on frontal images best by reading off the contents of their parts as enumerative statements.”16 This is no more nor less than a matter of regarding Egyptian imagery as continuous with hieroglyphic script. Riegl correctly observed that Egyptian imagery lacked a spatial appeal to the observer but as H.A. Groenewegen-Frankfort observed, following Schäfer, Riegl did not see, however (nor did his followers in the narrow path of formal criticism), that they also lacked the intention of affecting him or of communicating a pictorial message in the manner of true narrative or true monumental art. In fact, they hardly ever depict a situation which the spectator – drawn as it were into the orbit of a ‘scene’ – was meant to share.17 12 Heinrich Schäfer, Principles of Egyptian Art (trans. John Baines), Oxford: Griffith Institute 1986, p. 347. 13 Principles of Egyptian Art, pp. 80-1. 14 Principles of Egyptian Art, p. 85. 15 Principles of Egyptian Art, p. 91. 16 Principles of Egyptian Art, p. 110. 17 H. A. Groenewegen-Frankfort, Arrest and Movement: Space and Time in the Art of the Ancient Near East, London: Faber and Faber 1951, pp. 37-8. Richard Woodfield Pictorial Experience The images in Ti’s tomb, for instance, were “elaborate pictographic conceits rather than images of transient events”.18 A later critic was Ernst Gombrich, who tackled Riegl’s account of late antique art. In a review of his friend Josef Bodonyi’s dissertation on the use of the gold background in late antique art (1933), Gombrich took the opportunity to analyse changes in pictorial construction and spectator response in late antiquity.19 It is well known that Pope Gregory I had defended the use of images in a Christian context by declaring that “What Scripture is to the educated, images are to the ignorant, who see through them what they must accept; they read in them what they cannot read in books.”20 But the consequences are worth pondering. If classical antique art had invoked spectatorial presence, as at a theatrical stage, late antique art worked on an entirely different principle: pictorial statement. Given the density of his original German formulation, I quote a later English version: The new purpose which [Christian Medieval] art had to serve is too well known for me to dwell on it. The sacred story had to be conveyed with optimal clarity. No wonder we can observe an element of regression towards the symbolic or pictographic mode which is already manifest in that great landmark of Early Christian art, the mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore of the fourth century. Take the scene of that cycle of the passage of the Jews through the Red Sea, where it is the Pharaoh with his army who suffers the defeat at the hands of the Lord. No doubt there are many residues here of the methods of hellenistic illusionism, the individual treatment of bodies, movement and draperies, but there is now no spatial framework, but rather a maplike treatment of the event to allow us to have a full view of the scene with the drowning victims of the miracle, while the towering figure of Moses dominates the representation in a manner which recalls the earlier pictographic approach.21 If earlier naturalistic images, which we only really know through the frescoes preserved in Pompeii, invited being looked into the new Christian imagery of Santa Maria Maggiore invited being looked at. Late antique narrative imagery concentrated on what had happened rather than how it had happened. Furthermore, I would suggest, when money was available, artists and patrons concerned themselves with sumptuous display and there was a continuum between church decoration, ornament and ritual objects. Describing the motivation behind the decoration in the new basilica of Nola, Paulinus wrote: It seemed to us useful work gaily to embellish Felix’ houses all over with sacred paintings in order to see whether the spirit of the peasants would not be surprised by this spectacle and undergo the influence of 18 19 Arrest and Movement, p. 33. "J. Bodonyi, Entstehung und Bedeutung des Goldgrundes in der spätantiken Bildkomposition (Archaeologiai Értesitë, 46, 1932/3)", Kritische Berichte zür Kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur, 5, 1932/33 (published in 1935) [pp. 65-75]. 20 Caecilia Davis-Weyer, Early Medieval Art 300-1150, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall 1971, p. 48. 21 The Trilling Seminar (Columbia University, New York 1987) “Style, Skill and Function in Image Making”, unpublished ms., pp. 9-10. Cited by courtesy of Sir Ernst. Richard Woodfield Pictorial Experience the coloured sketches which are explained by inscriptions over them, so that the script may make clear what the hand has exhibited. … When one reads the saintly histories of chaste works, virtue induced by pious examples steals upon one…22 The decorations were both a luxury, befitting a place of worship, and educative at the same time. Whether the peasants could actually read the inscriptions or needed them to be read to them is another matter. Their experience of the environment of the buildings of the basilica was total. 4 Multifunctionality As Gombrich has observed on a number of occasions, it would be a gross oversimplification to think that imagery at any given time or place would necessarily be used to satisfy just one function: ... one of the things we have learnt from psychoanalysis is that what is successful in society will have many functions at the same time. The picture of the criminal [in Italian painting] was not so much a ‘wanted’ poster as a magic imprecation, and it may also have been a display of the skill of Leonardo or Botticelli, who actually painted criminals hanging on the wall of the town hall. Most things in society ... fulfil many functions. The number of specialised tools is very small, and art certainly belongs to those institutions which meet many demands at the same time.23 This is, of course, just as true of medieval art. Many early Christian writers objected to the use of images on the grounds of grounds of their prohibition by the second commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that it is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.24 In reality, this commandment faced the same kind of obedience as all of the others: recognition of the word but subject to interpretation in the deed. There was a tradition of Jewish imagery and the early Christians in search of converts were prepared to succumb to pagans’ needs for decorative imagery; this was justified on the grounds of its potential educational function. Such imagery could also be used to satisfy the overt demands of display from socially ambitious converts. It was one thing to provide plainly functional buildings for the hoi polloi but quite another to provide suitable buildings for worship by the Emperor and his retinue. As André Grabar has demonstrated25 there were strong connections between the use of imperial imagery and the subsequent use of images of Christ: images of the Emperor demanded respect and so did those of Christ. It is utterly unsurprising that amongst the 22 23 Paulinus of Nola (early 4th C) quoted in Early Medieval Art 300-1150, p. 19. `Ernst Gombrich discusses the concept of cultural history with Peter Burke', The Listener, 27th December 1973 [pp. 881-3], p. 883. 24 Exodus 20: 4-5. 25 André Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of its Origins, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1968. Richard Woodfield Pictorial Experience ignorant, and not so ignorant, Christian images were believed to possess magical powers. They were taken to be what they represented. The iconoclastic movement was motivated by a variety of factors: concern for visual purity, to match the imageless devotions of the more rigorous Muslims, hostility to luxury and the economic power of the Church as well as misguided beliefs about the power and efficacy of material objects. Theological debate only addressed the theological issues involved, which were much narrower and much more focussed than the larger social issues. One may wonder whether amongst its manifold functions, there was an aesthetic dimension to the experience of medieval art. It was possible for artists to exert themselves beyond the minimal demands of display and to exercise a high degree of skill in the practice of their craft. Manuscript illumination, in particular the Book of Kells, was a case in point. The grotesques and drolleries in the margins of later manuscripts were a clear demonstration of imagination run riot both on the part of the artist and the spectator. It wouldn’t have been done unless there were an appreciative audience. As long as one thinks of aesthetic response in terms of classical ideals of beauty and sublimity one stands alienated from the more curious delights of medieval art. St Bernard of Clairvaux, in a letter to the abbot William of Thierry demanded to know the attractions of church decoration: In the cloister under the eyes of brethren who read there, what profit is there in those ridiculous monsters, in that marvellous and deformed beauty, in that beautiful deformity? To what purpose are those unclean apes, those fierce lions, those monstrous centaurs, those half-men, those striped tigers, those fighting knights, those hunters winding their horns? … In short, so many and marvellous are the varieties of shapes on every hand, that we are more tempted to read in the marble than in our books, and to spend the whole day wondering at these things rather than in meditating the law of God. For God’s sake, if men are not ashamed of these follies, why at least do they not shrink from the expense?26 As Meyer Schapiro pointed out, this was an attack on profane, not religious, images without any didactic meaning. Nevertheless, in the Cistercian manuscript of the Homilies of Gregory on Job, Bernard’s own order, depicted scenes from daily life “astoundingly modern in their freedom of conception and precise drawing, rich in finely observed details, perhaps the first observations of their kind in medieval art.” Another Cistercian complained: Beautiful pictures, varied sculptures, both adorned with gold, beautiful and precious cloths, beautiful weavings of varied color, beautiful and precious windows, sapphire glass, gold-embroidered copes and chausibles, golden and jewelled chalices, gold letters in books: all these are not required for practical needs, but for the concupiescence of the eyes.27 While they might not have been practical they were certainly functional, indeed multi-functional: craftsmen exercising their skills to the greater glory 26 Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, quoted by Meyer Schapiro in “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art” in Romanesque Art: Selected Papers, London: Thames and Hudson 1993, p. 6. 27 “On the Aesthetic Attitude”, p. 7. Richard Woodfield Pictorial Experience of God, patrons creating a fitting house for the Lord and visions of a divine, unearthly, world. All could be enjoyed for their sheer delight. Boccaccio, in his Decamerone, celebrated Giotto as the painter who “had brought back to light that art that had been buried for centuries under the errors of those who painted to delight the eyes of the ignorant than to please the intellect of the wise.”28 The pictorial experience of an image created, once again, on the spectator principle to celebrate the Passion of Christ and the deeds of St. Francis invited a different kind of response to the rich fabrics of the earlier church. But surely Giotto’s The Mourning of Christ (1306) was as much an invitation to lamentation as a demonstration of a new form of artistic skill, an invitation to empathetic meditation as well as rational recognition. Alberti, in his much later treatise De pictura, had recommended that there should be a figure in the painted ‘historia’ who tells the spectator what is going on, and either beckons them with his hand to look, or with ferocious expression and forbidding glance challenges them not to come near, as if he wished their business to be secret, or points to some danger or remarkable thing in the picture, or by his gestures invites you to laugh or weep with them.29 This invitation to empathetic response was not far away from the kinds of demands exercised by the contemporary Netherlandish devotional images.30 5 Transitions to modernity Prior to the Italian renaissance visual imagery had been dominated by familiar themes, whether from life, from the Bible or from popularly shared stories, and it fulfilled familiar functions, worship, celebration, commemoration, instruction, decoration and ornamentation. Pictorial methods were again familiar: representation, symbolisation, allegory and demonstration. Hidden meanings were not the order of the day and the artist functioned as a craftsman producing goods on commission. Spectators could be visually appreciative of the way in which the artist handled his subjects. There was a period in antiquity when Romans, appreciative of Greek artists’ skills, collected their work without regard to their religious functions and commissioned copies. In the Italian renaissance, again, patrons started to commission and buy artists’ works without regard to their specific functions, simply as demonstrations of their artists’ skills for their private collections.31 The production of ‘works of art’ in their modern sense impinged on the public domain and became obvious through such things as the transformation of the altar piece.32 28 Boccaccio, Decamerone, Giornata, VI, Novella, 5. Quoted by E. H. Gombrich in “Visual Metaphors of Value in Art” in Meditations on a Hobby Horse, London and New York: Phaidon Press 1963, p. 17. 29 Alberti, On Painting, pp. 77-8. 30 On which see Sixten Ringbom, Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic CloseUp in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting, revised edition, Doornspijk: Davaco Publishers 1984. 31 On this topic see the essays collected together in E. H. Gombrich, The Uses of Images: Studies in the Social Function of Art and Visual Communication, London: Phaidon Press 1999. Richard Woodfield Pictorial Experience Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura is a case in point of a set of paintings that were traditional in their function but new in their compositional principles. The so-called School of Athens, for example, is not a complex demonstration of the inter-relationship between philosophical systems, as some commentators have thought, but an image of an exemplary set of philosophers maintaining the tradition of representing Philosophy by displaying a philosopher. In the Middle Ages, sculptural reliefs of the arts had signified Philosophy by Aristotle, Rhetoric by Cicero, Grammar by Donatus, and so on. Being allocated a wall for Philosophy gave Raphael the opportunity to represent a clutch of philosophers which he had to do in a visually interesting way. Michelangelo’s comments on the difference between Italian and Flemish painting are revelatory about what he saw as their respective merits: In Flanders they paint, with a view to deceiving sensual vision, such things as may cheer you and of which you cannot speak ill, as for example saints and prophets. The paint stuffs and masonry, the green grass of the fields, the shadow of trees, and rivers and bridges, which they call landscapes, with many figures on this side and many figures on that. And all this, though it pleases some persons, is done without reason or art, without symmetry or proportion, without skillful selection or boldness and, finally, without substance or vigor.33 Michelangelo’s paintings and scultures were not esoteric in their meanings though they were conspicuous displays of his skill. A painting such as The Last Judgement was a compositional tour de force but was not intended to strike terror into the hearts of its spectators as were the northern paintings of the same subjects. It could be captured under the notion of terrible sublimity but that was a sublimity of the rhetoricians and as such it was celebrated by Sir Joshua Reynolds in his last and fifteenth Discourse. The sixteenth century witnessed the emergence of printed texts discussing the fine points of the art of painting and it became recognised as a subject fit for discussion in cultured circles. Patrons advisors began to suggest ideas for interesting and out of the way subjects; this affected not just painting but the design of festivities as well.34 At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Reformation had the effect of turning Dutch painters away from religious subjects and channelling their energies into secular imagery: portraits, landscapes, still-lifes and images of domestic and public life. Gentleman’s manuals contained discussions of painting and the work of painters and specialised texts such as Jonathan Richardson’s Two Discourses: An Essay on the Art of Criticism and An Argument in behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur (1719) assumed a kind of popularity. Connoisseurs were expected to refine their skills in front of easily available prints after famous 32 See “Paintings for Altars: Their Evolution, Ancestry and Progeny” in The Uses of Images. 33 From Francisco Hollanda’s Four Dialogues in Robert Klein and Henri Zerner, Italian Art 1500-1600, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall 1966, p. 34. 34 On this topic see E. H. Gombrich “Introduction: Aims and Limits of Iconology” in Symbolic Images, London 1972 as well as James. M. Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi, Yale: Yale University Press 1996. Richard Woodfield Pictorial Experience paintings, they commissioned copies of their favourite works and set about forming their own collections of original and fakes. There is a substantial and growing debate over the various mental sets that spectators were expected to assume in front of paintings. That is too large a subject to deal with here. 35 Of considerable importance was the growing number of Salons where paintings would be exhibited to the general public. The French king opened his birthday salon to the public in 1737 and the phenomenon of public art criticism was born. Cochin, the Secretary to the French Academy felt that no good would come of it: This sort of publication can degenerate in no time to criticisms, mockery, and baseless judgements. Any writer will soon persuade himself that negativity amuses the public and can see his work. Selfinterest runs the show, and it will become no more than a periodical series of insults which would aggrieve our artists, close the studios, and ruin public exhibitions, which are more useful to the arts than are the arguments of literary men who know nothing.36 He was not wrong. Work that had been produced to satisfy the needs of the court and wealthy clients for the decoration of their private apartments received a mixed response. The problem was not so much what the subjects were as what the audience was expected to gain by looking at them. The Revolution put an end to court and church patronage and painters looked for their new audience among the middle class through state sponsored salons. A cleavage emerged between artists who sought to make a public appeal and those who catered for a more select and pictorially cultured audience; the disparity was described with great insight by Émil Zola in his novel L’Oeuvre (1886). A classic case of conflict between an artist and his audience was Manet’s exhibition of Olympia at the Salon of 1865. Théophile Gauthier wrote of it: With some repugnance I come to the peculiar paintings by Manet. It is awkward to discuss them but one cannot pass them by in silence. … In many person’s opinion it would be enough to dismiss them with a laugh; that is a mistake. Manet is by no means negligible; he has a school, he has admirers and even enthusiasts; his influence extends further than you think. Manet has the distinction of being a danger. But the danger has now passed. Olympia can be understood from no point of view, even if you take it for what it is, a puny model stretched out on a sheet. The colour of the flesh is dirty, the modelling non-existent. The shadows are indicated by more or less large smears of blacking. What is to be said for the Negress who brings a bunch of flowers wrapped in a paper, or for the black cat which leaves its dirty footprints on the 35 See for example the debate over eighteenth century French painting started by Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1980 and the debate over seventeenth century Dutch painting, surveyed in Wayne Franits (ed.) Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997. 36 Quoted by Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1985, p. 9. Richard Woodfield Pictorial Experience bed? We would still forgive the ugliness, were it only truthful, carefully studied, heightened by some splendid effect of color. The least beautiful woman has bones, muscles, skin, and some sort of color. Here is nothing, we are sorry to say, but the desire to attract attention at any price.37 This passage has been quoted at length because it is a prime example of an intelligent and cultivated spectator admitting complete defeat in front of an image. By 1865 the Parisians were familiar with Realism as an alternative to conventional academicism, romanticism and classicism thus it was not the case that Gauthier only had one model of artistic excellence by which to judge the work. It was just so novel that he found it utterly unintelligible. Only acclimatisation to the new mode of painting and demonstrations of conspicuous failure could generate an accomodating mental set. Fortunately, artists such as Manet and Monet did not have to gain the approval of the Parisian populace to become successful and make a living out of their art. Experiment with visual difficulty became a central feature of modernist avant-garde art. Monet was concerned to paint the world as it was seen. In June 1890 he wrote to his friend Gustave Geffroy: I have gone back to some things that can’t possibly be done: water with weeds waiving at the bottom. It is a wonderful sight, but it drives one crazy trying to paint it. But that is the kind of thing that I am always tackling.38 Almost a century earlier, the English writer William Gilpin had counselled: The appearance of blue and purple trees, unless in the remote distance, offends, and though the artist may have authority from nature for his practice, yet the spectator, not versed in such effects, may be displeased. Painting, like poetry, is intended to excite pleasure … Neither poetry or painting is a proper vehicle of learning. The painter will do well to avoid every uncommon appearance in nature.39 Ironically, Monet became one of the world’s most popular painters as the general public accommodated to his new style of painting the visual world and discovered the truth behind his paintings of appearance. Even greater difficulties were posed by the invention of cubism which, in reality, aimed at breaking down the conventional expectations of the painted picture. Gleizes and Metzinger, who had rather different ambitions from Picasso and Braque, invoked Rieman’s non-Euclidean geometry to argue that their own painting transcended “the imagination of the vulgar” in the interests of a profounder truth.40 Daniel Kahnweiler complicated matters even further by advancing quite a different argument: as the artist could not transcribe reality, naturalism was a form of writing and cubism was just a 37 Quoted by John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, London: Secker and Warburg 1973, pp. 123-4. 38 Richard Friedenthal, Letter of the great artists: from Blake to Pollock, London: Thames and Hudson 1963, p. 129. 39 William Gilpin, Forest Scenery quoted in E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A study in the psychology of pictorial representation, Oxford: Phaidon Press 1986, p. 323. 40 Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du cubisme, Paris 1912, excerpted in Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1969, pp. 207-16. Richard Woodfield Pictorial Experience further development in the creation of symbols which could be learned to stand for reality: We must not forget something that is absolutely fundamental ... to the comprehension of cubism and ... modern art: the fact that painting is a form of writing. Painting is a form of writing that creates signs. A woman in a painting is not a woman; she is a group of signs that I read as `woman'. When one writes on a sheet of paper `f-e-m-m-e', someone who knows French and who knows how to read will read not only the word `femme', but he will see, so to speak, a woman. The same is true of painting; there is no difference. Fundamentally, painting has never been a mirror of the external world, not has it ever been similar to photography; it has been a creation of signs, which were always read correctly by contemporaries, after a certain apprenticeship, of course. Well, the cubists created signs that were unquestionably new, and this is what made it so difficult to read their paintings for such a long time.41 There had always been a battle to defend abstract art in the face of its philistine critics and one argument which was frequently used was that naturalistic painting was actually just as conceptual as abstraction. What is being described here is the phenomenon of inculcation and theorists such as Rudolph Arnheim and Nelson Goodman have argued that the perception of resemblance is simply a matter of familiarity. Arnheim believed that just as the public has experienced difficult in recognising the realism of Cézanne and Renoir, the day would come when they would recognise the realism of “the Picassos, the Braques, the Klees”: Today we can hardly imagine that less than a century ago the paintings of Cézanne and Renoir were rejected not only because of their unusual style, but because they in fact looked offensively unreal. It was not merely a matter of different judgement, but of different perception. Our forefathers saw on those canvases incoherent patches of paint that we are no longer able to see, and they based their judgement on what they saw.42 It is not hard to believe that the general public should have taken offense at paintings by Cézanne and Renoir, for the reasons spelled out by William Gilpin. We can still see the patches but we are not offended by them. It is, however, quite a different matter that we should come to recognise the realism of the Picassos because that was precisely what he had aimed against. Analytic cubism, unlike the art of Cézanne and Renoir, was intended to defeat the conventional expectation to see objects represented in space. Synthetic cubism was intended to disrupt conventions of illusion and reality with its use of real world surfaces: newspapers, veneers and the like. Margaret Hagen’s description of Picasso’s portrait of Ambroise Vollard as “quite incredibly lifelike”43 simply beggars belief. 41 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, My Galleries and Painters, London: Thames and Hudson 1971, p. 57. 42 Rudolph Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: The New Version, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1974, p. 137; originally published in 1954. 43 Margaret Hagen, Varieties of Realism: Geometries of Representational Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986, p. 223. Richard Woodfield 6 Mental set Pictorial Experience In a review of Charles Morris’s Signs, Language and Behaviour Gombrich was critical of the notion of the iconic sign: an image of a cat on a mat can attract any number of true statements and is not simply a verbal equivalent of ‘a cat sits on a mat’. An image of a man may be a portrait of that man but might alternatively be a picture of a butler. Images have to be aided by language to gain a representational function. More importantly for our topic, Gombrich suggested that in the light of his minimal images of gondoliers Guardi relied on the spectator to read ‘iconicity’ into his sign and that The contextual, emotional, or formal means by which this type of interpretation is evoked or facilitated – in other words, the relation between objective ‘iconicity’ and psychological projecting – would have to form one of the main fields of study of a descriptive semiotic of the image. Perhaps it will show that the history of ‘seeing’ is really the history of a learning process through which a socially coherent public was trained by the artist to respond in a given manner to certain abbreviated signs.44 This theory could, if taken in a radical way, support the line of thought proposed by Arnheim and Goodman. In its developed form in Art and Illusion it did not. In a lecture given to the British Psychological Association at Durham in 1955, Gombrich considered the problems presented by the Rorschasch inkblot test: Rorschach has emphasised that the experiment is really one of matching. We match or memory images, or engrams as he calls them, against the fresh stimuli issuing from the card. Where we are aware of the matching of both sides of the equation we know that we interpret, where we know noting of it we call perceiving. There must be a differing threshold, he says, that distinguishes one from the other, but the two merge.45 Put an artist in an experiment to copy a Rorschach blot and the copy can be achieved by a process of matching. The ultimate product would be a facsimile which offers as many different possible interpretations as the original. When confronted with nonsense figures, the artist starts with an interpretational schema and can then proceed by way of correction. Looking back at the history of art, one can see that artists have followed the practice of schema and correction. There is evidence in the British Museum that Egyptian artists proceeded this way as much as artists of the Renaissance; there are tablets on which formal drawing conventions have been tried out and corrected in the same way that drawing masters would later correct life drawings from the model. The business of the Egyptian artist was to produce images that would facilitate identification. The business of the naturalistic artists of antiquity and the Renaissance and modern period to the Impressionists was to produce images that would facilitate projection of a convincing image of the visible world. The history of artistic technique of those periods was one of growing 44 E. H. Gombrich, “Signs, Language and Behaviour” in Reflections on the History of Art (ed. Richard Woodfield), Oxford: Phaidon Press 1987, p. 248; originally published 1949. 45 E. H. Gombrich, “Art History and the Psychology of Perception”, Durham 17.4.55, ms. p. 10, courtesy of Sir Ernst. Richard Woodfield Pictorial Experience sophistication in the development of projective methods that would be convincing and appealing. In his recent book Shadows: The depiction of cast shadows in Western Art (1995), Gombrich demonstrated that in one period of Renaissance art shadows were both discovered and subsequently dropped, because of compositional interference, only to be used again for dramatic effect. One way of describing the history of naturalistic imagery is to say that artists have taught us to see, in the sense of drawing attention to aspects of appearance that in the normal course of events occur unregarded, like coloured shadows. Another way of describing it is to suggest that artists have developed conventions, that is procedures, for constructing images that can afford convincing images. A case in point was Brunelleschi’s invention of one point linear perspective. When we look at the world around us there is a constancy to the appearance of objects. The same object may pass through a variety of lighting conditions, for example, and yet still be recognisable as the same object. A man walking away from us down a street will gradually get smaller but he will not seem to turn into a smaller man: he is the same man but smaller. Similarly, a hand held up to my face would not appear as a huge hand, shrinking in size as it is moved away. What Brunelleschi discovered was that to simulate changes in apparent size, the artist had to regulate his construction of objects in a distance by a mathematical rule. That rule yields a surprising result: depicted objects in a distance are, as painted images, smaller than they would appear to be to natural vision. This can be demonstrated in a photographic montage of lamp posts trailing off into the distance down a street.46 Cut out the lamppost at the end of the street and place it next to the lamppost in the foreground and one will be surprised to discover that the smaller lamp post will appear to have shrunk. The correlative surprise is that if one adjusts the smaller lamppost to the size one thinks it ought to be and then montages it back to its original place, it will throw the perspective out of skew. A number of writers have suggested that imagery constructed on the basis of one point linear perspective has to be looked at from a specific station point otherwise the image would not be convincing. This is clearly wrong, as our experience of looking at television and film screens would demonstrate. We experience no difficulty in being captured by the events on the screen irrespective of where we sit. It is only anamorphic imagery that demands a particular viewing point and the whole point behind such imagery is to generate surprise from an incongruous image. Other surprising results emerge from the study of colour relationships. The best example of this is the so-called ‘spreading effect’: Only two colours are used, one tone of red and one of blue. If they look different in combination with different patterns of black and white, this is due to their mutual influence, which no one claims to understand completely: we obviously do not see the ground in isolation; we see the whole pattern as one and attribute its total brightness or darkness to its 46 See the montage in E. H. Gombrich, “Visual Discovery Through Art” in The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Oxford: Phaidon Press 1982 ill. 6, p. 19. Richard Woodfield Pictorial Experience elements. There is only one way of convincing ourselves that it is only the proximity of white which makes for the impression of a brighter background while the proximity of black casts a shadow over its surroundings. We must follow with the eye the stripes of colour that lead from the gloomy part to the bright region. There is no break.47 The painter must learn to accommodate to the visual effects that different regions of coloured pigment have on each other to control the total effect of his painting. The same red will look different depending on whether it is in proximity to, or surrounded by, a black or a white. It is absolutely surprising that artists can generate convincing effects from a wide range of pictorial conventions. One has only to think of the contrast between the immaculately detailed imagery of a Holbein and the loose brushwork of a Rembrandt, the finely honed drawings of the Nazarenes against the rough sketches of a Degas. Perhaps most surprising of all was the invention of caricature: while its artifice is apparent for all to see, the best caricatures can capture a person’s characteristic appearance to the point of transforming it in reality. One can choose one’s own favourite caricatures to make the point. It is interesting, though, that as a technique it emerged at quite a specific place and time, in the circle of the Carracci at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although specific features of a person have been noticed and remarked on through history and across cultures, the familiar grotesque is different in kind from the individual caricature. The Italian humanist Filefo (1398-1481), in a moment of hatred towards Lorenzo Medici, could write “Look at Lorenzo’s sides, at his head, at his gait! Does he not know when he speaks? Look at the mouth and the tongue, the mucous slipping out of his nostrils. The head boasts its horns.”48 Any artist who drew that in Lorenzo’s day would not have lived long before being assassinated. It took a major change in climate for such drawings to be valued. 7 Wollheim’s objection Gombrich’s Art and Illusion revealed the extent to which the history of naturalistic art has been one of visual discovery. Early printers could happily use the same image to picture different cities but as topographic art developed, so did visual differentiation. The artist Robert Garland could mistakenly portray the cathedral at Chartres with Romanesque windows on its west façade out of his schema for Gothic cathedrals. Spectators would not notice Garland’s mistake if they had not been to Chartres and paid specific attention to its windows. Dürer’s woodcut of a rhinoceros would not satisfy a contemporary zoologist interested in having a scientifically useful image, though she might be happy enough to have it on her wall as a work of art. Whether an artist like Monet could capture the most elusive appearances is another matter. His late paintings, produced in his garden at Giverny, offer fields for visual experience that come close, with the attendant risk of dissolving into chaos like Frenhofer’s masterpiece in Balzac’s novel. 47 48 Art and Illusion, p. 260 and see colour plate VI. E. H. Gombrich and Ernst Kris, “The Principles of Caricature” in Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, New York: Schoken Books 1974, p. 195n. Richard Woodfield Pictorial Experience Richard Wollheim has turned Gombrich’s theory of depiction into a theory of perception and argued that if all perception operates by way of regulation through schema, there can be no ‘exit to the object’.49 As if it were actually the case that seeing an object is qualitatively the same as seeing a picture. In fact, the objects of experience, pictures and the world, differ radically in their nature as objects. Gombrich has argued that normal perception is, indeed, based upon hypotheses about the visual environment. His approach is not inductive, like Richard Gregory’s,50 and he does not take the view that the child learns to see the world by making inferences from collections of experience. Instead he uses the Popperian fallibilistic model: we may occasionally misrecognise objects in the world, taking things to be what they are not. We may also assume that we see more than we actually do, simply because the visual experience that we have is sufficient to get on with our business. When we look at a distant tree we can see its outline shape but we cannot see the specific orientations of all of its branches. If we wanted to be more specific in identifying its characteristics as an object, we would have to walk around it. Perception is instrumental and human perception is highly effective, though there are rare occasions when we are left guessing about what we see. If those were not rare, the human race would not have survived as long as it has. The artist is in a position to make corrections to his images if he believes such corrections to be important. The problem lay in developing skills of representation adequate to the objects of representation. Renaissance artists discovered that in order to make convincing representations of the human body they had to turn to anatomy and dissection. Consequently only a skilled anatomist would be able to appreciate the fine points of Michelangelo’s representation of Adam on the Sistine Ceiling. It doesn’t take a skilled anatomist, however, to appreciate the points of difference between Leonardo’s angel and Verrochio’s in Verrochio’s Baptism (c. 1472) and the grotesque appearance of St. John’s right arm. 8 Pictorial experience past and present The rise of museums in the nineteenth century led to a situation where the general public encountered paintings outside of their original context and contextualised with other paintings from the same country and time. Only now are museums reviewing their hanging policies although the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has had the longstanding practice of locating paintings in period rooms and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has rooms dedicated to the collecting tastes of its donors. Only visits to works of art in situ would begin to give a sense of how they might have functioned for their original spectators: an altarpiece in place at an altar, a family portrait along others in the long gallery of an English country house. Looking at Masaccio’s Tribute Money along with other scenes from the life of Saint 49 Richard Wollheim, “Reflections on Art and Illusion” in On Art and the Mind, Cambridge Mass. and London: Harvard University Press 1974, p. 283. 50 R. L. Gregory, Eye and Brain: the psychology of seeing, third edition: revised and updated, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1986. And consult his later works. Richard Woodfield Pictorial Experience Peter in the Brancacci Chapel will invite consideration of its place in a decorative scheme and diminish the tendency to think of it as a single image having significance within a moment of political life between Florence and Rome. Religious paintings were produced for permanence. They were part of the very fabric of the church and had more than transient significance. Secular paintings were commissioned for purposes and places as well. Without being aware of the circumstances of the production of Botticelli’s Primavera we know that it was painted for a person for a reason, we recognise the connections between its figures and the figures in contemporary religious paintings and we feel that there is a moral to it somewhere. Paintings were enjoyed for their particularity, not for exemplifying a type. The Parthenon stands stripped of its sculptural reliefs that are now housed in the British Museum. Even if they were restored to their original location the Parthenon itself stands alone on the Acropolis, in the sense that its spectators are tourists with no sense of the continuities of the sculptural relief with religious life and the building with other buildings. Spectators and worshippers in churches were familiar with the Bible and used to reflecting on its stories and its characters. This is a specialised form of knowledge that is floating off into a distant horizon. Passages of text no longer spring to mind when we look at a particular religious scene and consulting a handbook like Hall’s Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art offers the possibility of identification but not a sense of recognition. Some Christian traditions still form part of our daily life, like the celebration of Christmas, but only a few people have ever had the privilege of looking at Rubens’ depiction of the Adoration of the Magi as King’s College choir sings carols in the Chapel on Christmas Eve. With thoughts of unpacking presents on Christmas Day we can vicariously participate in the experience of the Magi offering their gifts to the Christ child. The more normal experience of pictures is to trudge past them, feet aching, in aseptic museums or bumper exhibitions, which have a kind of saturation effect. One Dutch still life can be extremely enjoyable but to experience a whole room full of them in the Ashmolean Museum is quite a challenging experience. In the absence of being able to respond to them in any other way, spectators are encouraged to savour the visual flavour of paintings or are instructed on representations of middle class life in eighteenth century England in the presence of a painting by Gainsborough or Reynolds. This is not to suggest that the paintings of the past must necessarily rest opaque but that a lot of what passes for art appreciation at the moment is misplaced. There are exceptions: Rembrandt’s domestic subjects and scenes from the Bible still evoke some depth of recognition. But then we are not talking about just pictures but genuine works of art.