Richard Woodfield, 'The Freedom of Shaftesbury's Classicism' more

THE FREEDOM OF SHAFTESBURY'S CLASSICISM Richard Woodfield Although the third Earl of Shaftesbury has received extensive treatment at the hands of historians of aesthetics, comments on his position in the history of art theory have been rather less than fair. Jerome Stolnitz remarked that in the Second Characters `Shaftesbury becomes just another neoclassical critic and, it might be added, not a terribly good one, for his rules are markedly unoriginal and stilted .1 As for his artistic tastes, Sprague Allen maintained: `He clung tenaciously to all the current prejudices in favour of classicism, and nowhere except in his censure of the formal garden is there a hint that his insight or native intuition was sufficiently quick and keen to enable him to escape from the cramping limitations of his point of view.'2 It would, of course, be absurd to deny that Shaftesbury was a classicist and that as a consequence he had very strong views concerning artistic merit views which were so strong that he had the temerity to criticize Shakespeare, Milton and Bernini. But it would be a mistake to forget the rationale of his antipathies since it is this which makes him interesting as a classicist and gives him a significant place in the history of art theory. If Shaftesbury had ever produced a final draft of the Second Characters, it would have made much more illuminating reading than his notes and would have brought out the full character of his classicism, which is ultimately based upon his view of the relationship between freedom and culture. As a politician Shaftesbury was opposed to tyranny; as a philosopher he was opposed to Hobbes's Leviathan. Hobbes's argument for authority was still powerful at the end of the seventeenth century. Naturally enticing was his picture of the 'secure state in which men are free, subject to the exercise of power. In the pre-civil state of nature there is no place for industry or the arts, and the life of man is `solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short'. The way out of this situation is to institute a Sovereign with power to enforce obedience to law; freedom consists, simply, in the absence of legal restraint. The ideal state is one which gives maximum security, protecting men from each other; the positive role of the Sovereign is to eliminate poverty and dissatisfaction with his rule, not to encourage the arts. But if Hobbes had taken a pessimistic view of human nature and saw society's bond as force, Shaftesbury took an optimistic view and saw society's bond as persuasion. Shaftesbury's ideal state is characterized by the presence of culture, not simply security; he realized that the two need not necessarily go together. This is not to suggest that in Hobbes's ideal state there would be no culture in a descriptive sense, but that Shaftesbury had a normative view of culture: Let a nation remain ever so rude or barbarous, it must have its poets, rhapsoders, histonographers, antiquaries of some kind or other, whose business it would be to recount its remarkable transactions, and the achievements of its civil and military heroes.3 The medieval `Roman yoke' had no doubt ensured a degree of security, but this had not stopped it from being barbarous; the French monarchy had ensured security, but its culture was corrupt; the Oriental empires were secure but they produced artistic monstrosities.4 In Shaftesbury's view of the relationship between freedom and culture a number of 'non- philosophical' factors were operative. `Lord Shaftesbury and Modern Aesthetic Theory', Philosophical Quarterly, XI (1961), p. 113. Tides in English Taste (1937). I, p. 85. 3 Advice to an Author (in Characteristics, ed. Robertson, 1900), I, p. 146. 4 Ibid., pp. 218-20. 2 1 Shaftesbury faced an English situation in which, he believed, the arts were at a low ebb; certainly a concern for the state of painting was in the air.5 To a classical scholar, and good Whig, the reason for the situation was obvious. A favourite subject of discussion amongst Roman writers on rhetoric was the decline of oratory under the rule of the Emperors; Tacitus, especially, had argued at length that the decline was due to a loss of freedom.6 Shaftesbury concurred: If therefore it so happened in these free communities, made by consent and voluntary association, that after a while the power of one or a few grew prevalent over the rest; if force took place, and the affairs of society were administered without their concurrence by the influence of awe and terror; it followed that these pathetic sciences and arts of speech were little cultivated since they were of little use. But where persuasion was the chief means of guiding the society; where the people were to be convinced before they acted; there elocution became considerable, there orators and bards were heard, and the chief geniuses and sages of the nation betook themselves to the study of those arts by which the people were rendered more treatable in a way of reason and understanding... . Hence it is that those arts have been delivered to us in such perfection by free nations, who from the nature of their government, as from a proper soil, produced the generous plants; whilst the mightiest bodies and vastest empires, governed by force and a despotic power, could, after ages of peace and leisure, produce no other than that what was deformed and barbarous of the kind.7 Shaftesbury felt that, with the elimination of Stuart tyranny and the establishment of the rights of Parliament Britain had entered into a new era of freedom and that the way was now open to cultivate the arts. There were, however, two main obstacles: religion and taste. Shaftesbury's attack on received Christian beliefs does not concern us here, but his views on taste do. Shaftesbury conceived of art from a fundamentally rhetorical point of view, thus participating in a tradition stemming from Alberti's De pictura (1435), which had been reinforced in the seventeenth century by Junius's De pictura veterum (1637).8 In England, in particular, the value of the plastic arts for propaganda purposes had been recognized, especially by the iconoclasts and by Elizabeth I, who used the miniature as an instrument for diplomacy.9 Works of art could convey religious and political values; the business of painting, like rhetoric, was to `please, instruct and move'. Painting had the power, when used in the service of virtue, to improve; but it also had the power, when used in the service of vice, to corrupt. When an admiration for corruptive art was joined to a doctrine of `taste' (goût), as Shaftesbury believed that it was, an attack was required both on the taste and on the supporting doctrine. As his views on 'taste' have received considerable discussion we will concentrate in turn on the tastes for religious and French art. I Shaftesbury falls into the classicist pattern of complaint described by E. H. Gombrich in `Norm and Form' (in Norm and Form, 1966). 6 The `fullest discussion we possess on the causes of the decadence of eloquentia' (G. M. A. Grube, The Greek and Roman Critics, 1968, p. 275). 7 Advice . . ., pp. 154-5. 8 For a survey of the rhetorical tradition see A. Ellenius, De Arte Pingendi, 1960. 9 Cf R. Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, 1963. 5 Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Gothic art had a distinct appeal to a section of the cultivated public.10 As a classicist Shaftesbury was bound to criticize Gothic art, but the terms in which he did so are a consequence of his view of freedom and an elaboration on earlier classicist doctrines. The best known critique of Gothic art had been made by Vasari, whose Vite were popularized in England in the seventeenth century.11 For Vasari the decline of art set in before the fall of the Roman Empire and during the Middle Ages the progress of art was stultified by Christian aversion to pagan antique statuary; Gothic art was simply barbarian and a product of bad workmanship. Shaftesbury, taking a lead from Tacitus, ascribed the decline of art to a loss of freedom and then added the innovatory idea that Gothic art was due to a peculiar mental state. The doctrine of the consensus gentium was current in classicist circles in the seventeenth century12 and so it comes as no surprise that it was used by Shaftesbury: a lack of appreciation for classical art was a sign of irrationality. If harmony and symmetry (m short, classical art) were not to the taste of medieval artists, they had corrupted minds: 'Bad figures: bad minds.'13 It was at this point that Shaftesbury advanced on earlier, Catholic, classicist views. Rationality could only occur where criticism was encouraged and unless it were encouraged, `we should remain as Gothic architects as ever'.14 Whilst it is true that Vasari recognized the merit of criticism in the development of Florentine art,15 he would not have dared take the next step, which was to maintain that Gothic art was born of a situation where the Church suppressed criticism, denouncing it as heresy and encouraged superstition a point put most strongly in the unpublished Plastics: Insinuation from hence, as to the last and present grand hierarchy of Romish Church. Whether not better to have followed the Egyptian in this (as m many other things) and keep the orthodox forms horrid, savage, and consequently inspiring superstition, as in reality their first were from the Gothic times or last feces of the Empire and of Arts, where images, etc., were introduced.16 Gothic art was not, then, simply a product of ignorance but was generated by the peculiar needs of the Papacy.17 For a writer antipathetic to superstition Gothic art was to be condemned, but the positive element of the criticism was the recognition, albeit undeveloped, of a relation between the content and form of works of art. Shaftesbury departed from previous classicists in recognizing that Gothic art had a particular historical purpose. His very acute awareness of its value for propaganda purposes led Shaftesbury to attack contemporary religious art; he certainly had no time for the highly emotive art of the counterreformation. Fréart de Chambray, a leading French classicist, had criticized Raphael for choosing to paint the Massacre of the Innocents: Cf P. Frankl, The Gothic, 1960; S. Allen, op. cit.; S. Kliger, 'Whig Aesthetics: A Phase of Eighteenth- century Taste', English Literary History, XVI (1949). 11 By, for example, William Aglionby, Painting Illustrated in Three Dialogues, 1686. 12 It may be found, for example, in F. Junius, De pictura veterum, 1637, an extremely popular handbook of classical commonplaces used by Shaftesbury: this is not, however, to suggest that Junius was necessarily a direct source. 13 Plastics (in Second Characters, ed. Rand, 1914), p. 105. This is a classicist commo nplace; for a discussion of its significance see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 1958, chapter IX. 14 Advice ..., p. 153. 15 Cf. E. H. Gombrich, `The Leaven of Criticism in Renaissance Art' (in Art, Science, and History in the Renaissance, ed. C. S. Singleton, 1968). 16 Loc. cit., pp. 103-4. 17 See also Miscellaneous Reflections, (in Characteristics, ed. cit.), II, p. 213. 10 In summe ... there should nothing have appeared but desolation, bloud and Carnage: But our Painters Idea was not, it seems, so warm, and would certainly have succeeded much better, in a less violent composition, more conformable to his Genius.18 In a projected chapter on decorum, for Plastics, Shaftesbury replied: This is the place for censure of the censurer of Raphael, Monsieur Fréart. But then by way of excuse for him (he being a stout defender of the ancients) observe: That this is in common with all other popish virtuosi accustomed to cruel and indecent spectacles.... Painting, wholly opposite to the decorum, viz. crucifixion, martyrdoms, wheels, gibbets, torments, ...19 If the medieval portrayal of the Last Judgement with its arsenal of saints and demons was intended to strike fear into the heart of the perceiver, then this attitude had a natural correspondence with the seicento portrayal of martyrdoms to rouse extreme and ecstatic states. But a problem of consistency does arise since the artists that Shaftesbury most admired, above all Raphael, worked for the papacy. A view of the relationship between form and content which had been adduced for the criticism of Gothic art would seem to dissolve in the face of the art of the High Renaissance. Equally a seicento artist might turn his hand to a martyrdom or to a Judgement of Hercules. It is at this point that Shaftesbury developed his idea of the link between freedom and culture. Renaissance Italy, as opposed to the Gothic Middle Ages, was characterized by the presence of civil liberty; the political power of the papacy had declined : This reduces things to a parity with a free state and independency which sets painters and artists free, erects a public, a nation, Italy (see Machiavelli's passions for Italy as the Greek philhellina) excites emulation, etc., creates a taste, judgement.20 Furthermore the modern period was to be distinguished from the Middle Ages by the willingness of the papacy to encourage the study of `heathen' learning; the pontiffs 'justly observe that their very traditions stand in need of some collateral proof'.21 In such a situation it was possible for artists to recreate classical values, as did Raphael in his Massacre of the Innocents; artists were also able to place themselves in the service of lay patrons, whose secular demands competed with the religious demands of the papacy. The tenor of political life in Renaissance Italy, with its spirit of healthy competition and extravagant individualism, was to be contrasted with the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV. Furthermore the counter-reformation had made life difficult for the artist by subjecting him in religious art much more to the control of the church authorities. It is in this context that one may appreciate Shaftesbury's antipathy to Bernini, `an apostate in statuary' : Memd. Bernini wicked. Therefore sit the harder on him as on Spaniolet, Carvagio (sic), etc., throwing in a word in behalf of M. Angelo and Salvator Rosa.22 Besides having worked for Louis XIV Bernini was after all the Papal Artist par excellence; he more than any other did the most to exalt the position of the papacy in the seventeenth century. He was the extreme celebrant of power and a devout Catholic: `Bad figures: bad minds.'23 Michelangelo on the other hand was notorious for his insistence on independence and an opportunity to say a word on his behalf was readily presented to Shaftesbury. An Idea of the Perfection of Painting (trans. J. Evelyn), 1668, p. 49. Plastics, p. 167. 20 Ibid., p. 129. 21 Miscellaneous Reflections, II, p. 305. 22 Plastics, p. 152 n. 1. 23 Loc. cit. 19 18 As Jacques Thuillier has demonstrated,24 there was a significant hostility towards Michelangelo on the part of the French classicists in the seventeenth century, the most important protagonist being Fréart de Chambray. Fréart had criticized Michelangelo for his violation of the principle of decorum: `Mic. Angelo was so rude and unpleasing, that he retain'd not so much as any regard to Good-Manners.'25 Shaftesbury reacted to this criticism: Michael Angelo to be justified against the French and other bigot attacks. Pietro Belloris denial of Vasaris and the received account of having taught Raphael; and particularly against the French author, Fréart de Chambray. Whose as impertinent censure of Raphael (...) in his Massacre of the Innocents.26 Shaftesbury never did get round to writing a justification of Michelangelo but it is possible to imagine what shape it would have taken. As a `popish virtuoso' Fréart would have agreed with the earlier, well known view circulated by Ludovico Dolce that in the Last Judgement Michelangelo sacrificed decorum to the demands of art: And if these figures of Michaelangelo's were more fully decent and less perfect in their design, this would be a good deal better than the extreme indecency that one actually views.27 Now Vasari in his account of the Last Judgement wrote: Thus he has demonstrated how painting can achieve facility in its chief province: ,namely the reproduction of the human form. And concentrating on this subject he left to one side the charm of colouring and the caprices and novel fantasies of certain minute and delicate refinements that many other artists, and not without reason, have not entirely neglected.28 It is clear that Michelangelo put to one side the kinds of effect which Shaftesbury believed that Fréart, as a French courtier, would want to see; this will be discussed further in a moment. Vasari observed that Michelangelo painted his nudes in the `grand manner'29 and it is precisely this that made such an appeal to Shaftesbury, the admirer of Grecian statuary.30 Vasari saw the Last Judgement as a supreme example of the observation of human nature31 and weighed against this the criticisms of Dolce and Fréart could only have seemed trite; the ability to paint draped figures was `mechanical' but the ability to present an heroic vision of human nature demanded the heights of philosophical sensibility. Finally, Shaftesbury had a great respect for artists who abided by the principles of their art in the face of corruptive influences: Michelangelo and the Papacy, Poussin and the French court. Shaftesbury had a strong aversion to art which propagated specifically papal values; he also found Christian art, taken as a whole, difficult to accept: `Dilemma about the use of pictures by Christians. Either none or good.'32 He was a deist and a stoic and as a consequence had little time for art which was narrowly Christian: Chief support of painting what? Xt ! Wretched model. Barbarian. No form, no grace of shoulders, breast, no démarche, air, majesty, grandeur, a lean uncomely proportion and `Polémiques autour de Michel-Ange au XVIIe siècle', Dix-Septième Siècle, 36/7 (1957). Op. cit., p. 14. 26 Plastics, p. 132. 27 M. W. Roskill, Dolce' s 'Aretino' and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, 1968, p. 165. 28 Vasari, Lives of the Artists (trans. G. Bull), 1965, p. 379. 29 Ibid. 30 Cf Sensus Communis (in Characteristics, ed. cit.), I, p. 95 n. and Plastics, pp. 144-5, 158. 31 Loc. cit. 32 Plastics, p. 122. 25 24 species, a mere Jew or Hebrew (originally an ugly scabby people) both shape and physique, with half beard peaked, not one or the other. Lank clinging hair, snivelling face, hypocritical canting countenance and at best melancholy, mad and enthusiastical in the common and lower way, ...33 These words went unpublished, at least until the twentieth century, and it is interesting to speculate on the form which they would have taken in publication whether an attack on certain pictures of Christ or as a satire on notions of strict historical decorum. Notwithstanding his admiration for Raphael, which was commonplace amongst classicists, the artist who drew closest" to Shaftesbury's ideal was Poussin. Sir Anthony Blunt has demonstrated the way in which Poussin infused his art, both religious and secular, with stoicism;34 stylistically, he avoided, in an appeal to the intellect, the emotional displays of counter-reformation art and the seductiveness and frivolity encouraged by the French court. II The Restoration brought with it a taste for French art and fashions, and a taste for courtly behaviour and licentiousness. The situation changed dramatically under William III, when any inclinations to French tastes were taken as support for the Jacobite cause. It is not surprising that Shaftesbury as a good Whig should have been hostile to French culture, but in view of the fact that his art theory was closely linked to that of the French classicists some comment is called for. In terms of content Shaftesbury's attitude towards French art was uncomplicated. He saw the art of the late seventeenth century as the manifestation of and encouragement to a falsity of behaviour which was the product of a court-oriented tyranny. He criticized the French court for encouraging: `Pictures of the pretty princes and princesses, and court- airs as hung in toy-shops',35 and theatricality 'a fictitious, false and affected gesture and mien: not the natural bow, tread or entrance into a room'.36 The type of behaviour which he saw represented in works of art was out of accord with his stoicism and the gracefulness of action represented by antique statuary. But in terms of style Shaftesbury's position was more complicated. The French Academy had witnessed a struggle between the supporters of dessin and coloris.37 Largely as a result of the efforts of Roger de Piles the tyranny of the Academy was relaxed and a 'colouristic' art allowed. The debate had resulted in a greater freedom for the artist, but Shaftesbury was opposed to the product; he regarded a pleasure in colour as a false taste. Sensual titillation was too easy for a right appreciation: `The art itself is severe, the rules rigid.'38 The freedom which de Piles gained was false, an illusion: colour appealed to the senses and not to the mind.39 From his Attic standpoint Shaftesbury would have recalled the ancient rhetorical criticism of Asianism, a 'colouristic' oratory which was the product of decadence, in turn a product of tyranny. While Shaftesbury stood on the side of dessin as opposed to coloris, a major dilemma could occur, however, over his attitude towards `the rules'. Whilst it is true that Shaftesbury referred to the `rules rigid', it is equally true that he shared the English aversion to French pedantry in the application of the rules : Ibid., p. 120. Nicholas Poussin, 1958, chapter VII. 35 Plastics, pp. 114-15. 36 Ibid., pp. 128-9. 37 The major discussion of this conflict is by B. Teyssèdre, Roger de Piles et les débats sur le coloris au siècle de Louis XIV, 1957. 38 Advice ..., I, p. 219. 39 Plastics, pp. 146 ff. 34 33 But Critic-Learning flourish'd most in France; The Rules a nation, born to serve, obeys; And Boileau still in right of Horace sways. But we, brave Britains, Foreign Laws despis'd, And kept unconquer'd, and unciviliz'd, Fierce for the Liberties of Wit, and bold, We still defy'd the Romans, as of old.40 Pope's lines would have been appreciated by Shaftesbury.41 Although this passage may be cited as evidence of an antipathy towards rules and of an exaltation of native freedom, there can be little doubt that its message was double-edged. The French are hide-bound by rules, a product of political tyranny, but the English are uncivilized; ostensibly the purchase of civilization was to be made at the expense of freedom. The way out of the dilemma was to draw a distinction between freedom and licence and to oppose pedant-learning. Shaftesbury's descriptions of two of the most important French classicist art theoreticians are revealing : he accused Fréart de Chambray of having a `dogmatical character'42 and C.-A. du Fresnoy as guilty of `the wrong impertinent blundering application of the plastic rules'.43 There is a number of different ways in which one might account for the view that Fréart's character was `dogmatical'. One might wish to argue, for example, that Shaftesbury subscribed to the doctrine that there is `a grace beyond the reach of art'.44 Whilst it is true that Shaftesbury had views on grace, chiefly concerned with personal deportment, these do not fall easily into line with the doctrine as it stood and as it received its classic formulation by René Rapin : There are yet m poetry, as in the other arts, certain ineffable qualities which cannot be explained: those things are like mysteries. There is no precept at all to teach these secret graces, those imperceptible charms, and all those hidden and agreeable qualities of poetry which move the heart, as there is no method for teaching someone to please. It is entirely an effect of nature.45 Shaftesbury had a pungent reply to this line of thought: 'Tis not the je ne sais quoi to which idiots and the ignorant of the art would reduce everything. 'Tis not the dokei, the I like and you like. But why do I like? And if not with reason and truth I will refuse to like, dislike my fancy, condemn the form, search it, discover its deformity and reject it.46 He agreed with Quintillian's dictum that: `The learned understand the art of composition, the unlearned enjoy pleasure from it',47 and several consequences follow. Firstly, it is one thing to say that the ability to create great works of art cannot be taught by rules and quite another to say that the works, once created, could not be judged by rules.48 Secondly, to allow the heart, the seat of the Pope, Essay on Criticism, 1711, p. 41. Cf Miscellaneous Reflections, II, p. 328. 42 Plastics, p. 132 n. I. 43 Ibid., pp. 128-9. 44 Cf S. H. Monk, 'A Grace Beyond The Reach Of Art', Journal of the History of Ideas, V (1944). 45 'Réflexions sur l'Usage de l'Éloquence de ce Tems en Général' (3672) quoted by Monk, op. cit. 46 Plastics, p. 144; see also Advice ..., p. 214. 47 Plastics, p. 140. 48 The classicists' rules, like those of tennis, tend to have a prohibitive character. A good tennis player is not good simply because he observes the rules; the same was true of the artist. The legal doctrine of mitigating circumstances could have been applied to geniuses who violated laws. 41 40 passions, to be the ultimate judge of art would, as Shaftesbury was well aware, open the door to aesthetic relativism.49 Asianism did, for example, make an instant appeal but Shaftesbury would ask why it made the appeal which it did; the question once answered would result in a condemnation of the art.50 Thirdly, the doctrine would breed an attitude towards art which might well operate to the neglect of genius. As we have seen, the French had great difficulty in accommodating Michelangelo within their artistic arcanum; Thuillier's explanation is that : `De Mignard à David une peinture qui se veut plaisante recherche les séductions de l'anecdote et les prestiges du coloris, tandis que le sens social s'accomode mal des outrances du génie.'51 The graceful could descend to the merely fashionable: `Painter's taste like dancing masters in carriage. All towards the affectation.'52 Rather than ascribe to the 'je ne sais quoi' of the French, Shaftesbury was inclined to the `pardonable error' of Longinus. It is striking that in the Plastics the famous notion of the just PROMETHEUS, under Jove 53 is associated with Michelangelo : Like that sovereign artist or universal plastic nature, he forms a whole, coherent and proportioned in itself, with due subjection and subordinacy of constituent parts. He notes the boundaries of the passions, and knows their exact tones and measures; by which he justly represents them, marks the sublime of sentiments and action, and distinguishes the beautiful from the deformed, the amiable from the odious.54 Shaftesbury did, however, think that Michelangelo was not without his faults; like Zeuxis he erred on the side of greatness `by running into the unsizeable and gigantic, rather than into the minute and delicate'.55 This shows a difference in direction of values between Shaftesbury and Rapin. Rapin's highest artistic value was grace, which was to be found in `harmony, elegance, clarity, sweetness, brilliance and propriety' as opposed to beauty, which was to be found in `grandeur, nobility, majesty, weightiness'; the former came from genius, the latter from art alone.56 So the kind of art which exerted the highest appeal to Rapin was in its `sweetness' decadently French. In contrast Shaftesbury, viewing Aristotle through the eyes of Longinus, maintained that `the to kalon, the beautiful, or the sublime, ... is from the expression of greatness with order';57 an heroic sublimity was his highest value. In his attitude towards Michelangelo he looked forward from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century when there was a growing preference for `greatness' over `sweetness'.58 One is reminded of Winckelmann's admiration of the Laocoon and his claim that: The last and most eminent characteristic of the Greek works is a noble simplicity and sedate grandeur in Gesture and Expression. As the bottom of the sea lies peaceful beneath a foaming surface, a great soul lies sedate beneath the strife of passions in Greek figures.59 Certainly Winckelmann shared with Shaftesbury an hostility towards French taste. This is a distinguishing feature between Shaftesbury and du Bos (on which see E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1951), pp. 322 ff.) and is worth bearing in mind since both writers had an influence on Winckelmann. 50 Advice ..., 1, pp. 218-19. 51 Op. cit., p. 357. 52 Plastics, p. 110. 53 Ibid., p. 119. 54 Advice ..., I, p. 136. 55 Sensus Communis, I, p. 95 n. 56 S. H. Monk, op. cit., p. 147. 57 Sensus Communis, I, p. 94 n. 58 The development of Diderot's art criticism is an instance of this. 59 Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (trans. Fuseli, 1765), p. 30. 49 It might be argued that Shaftesbury's politics also came out in his attitude towards C.-A. du Fresnoy. The De Arte Graphica opened with the memorable expression 'Ut pictura poesis erit', which led to Dryden's famous `Parallel of Poetry and Painting'. Shaftesbury had, of course, a profound personal dislike for `Mr. Bays' but this alone would not have led him into a critique of the sorority of poetry and painting: Also comparisons and parallel ran between painting and poetry because of thepictoribus atque poetis (painters and poets) etc. and the ut pictura poesis (poems are as paintings) almost ever absurd and at best constrained, lame, or defective.60 Had the Plastics ever have been published, its introduction would have contained a discussion of the differences between names, images and emblems;61 Shaftesbury certainly had powerful aesthetic reasons for distinguishing between painting and poetry.62 He was also fundamentally opposed to Dryden's view that `the principal end of painting is to please, and the chief design of poetry is to instruct.'63 The Judgement of Hercules squared up to the problem of the way in which painting, as opposed to poetry, could instruct. Furthermore the application of the rules of poetry to painting had a baneful effect on criticism in the French Academy and led to academic pedantry in Dryden's `Parallel' ;64 it was to this kind of pedantry that Shaftesbury was averse. In anticipation of Lessing, Shaftesbury felt by being constrained to a moment, the pregnant moment, the painter was faced with problems different from the poet's. It is regrettable that Shaftesbury died before he was able to publish the Second Characters in a finished form. Ploughing through the thickets of his notes one can too easily seize upon ideas which are recognizable from earlier classicist art theory and brand him as just another Neo-Classical critic. If the Second Characters had been published, Shaftesbury would have had an even greater influence on eighteenth-century attitudes towards art than he did. Even so a number of issues which would have received greater clarification were raised in the published works and did have a subsequent influence, most importantly the doctrine of the relationship between freedom and culture. To my mind the doctrine that great cultures can only emerge from free societies originated with Shaftesbury, who transformed and gave philosophical substance to a late classical commonplace. Meinecke saw Shaftesbury as one of the important forerunners of what he termed `historicm'; he certainly exercised a great influence on later French and German historical thought. Perhaps the most significant influence was upon J. J. Winckelmann, of whom Meinecke wrote: We should recognise that his thesis of liberty as a necessary basis for art did hold good within certain limits. It had developed not only out of his enthusiasm for ancient Greece, but also from his critical attitude to the luxuriance of Baroque and Rococo art. It was a true and delicate piece of historical perception to sense the change in art from Raphael and Michaelangelo as linked with the change in political atmosphere from the comparative freedom of the Renaissance to the subservience of a courtisan society. His successful analysis of the styles in ancient art was closely connected with his distaste for Baroque and Plastics, p. 141. Plastics, pp. 90 ff. A comparison of the arts of painting, poetry and music was, by the way, taken up by Shaftesbury's nephew James Harris, Three Treatises, 1744. 62 Plastics, pp. 141 if. and 'A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgement of Hercules', first published in English in 1713. 63 `A Parallel of Poetry and Painting' (in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Scott, 1808, XVII), p. 301. 64 Cf R. Lee, 'Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting', Art Bulletin, XXII (1940) and T. J. B. Spencer, `Imperfect Parallel between painting and poetry', Greece and Rome, VII (1960). 61 60 Rococo art in comparison; and he used the analogy of this change in contemporary artistic taste in his examination of ancient works of art, and in classifying them under their historical periods. Thus Winckelmann's disapproval of his own times, which he refused to consider either politically or artistically great, helped to guide him through the changes and chances of artistic history.65 It is well known that Winckelmann made extensive notes from Shaftesbury's Characteristics and that his Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764) had a powerful effect upon later German art historiography. But, I regret, considerations of Shaftesbury's significance in the development of eighteenth-century art historiography will have to be left for another occasion. 65 F. Meinecke, Historism, 1972, p. 242.