Visual intelligence in painting

Review of Metaphysics

Volumn 59, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 333-354

  Sokolowski, Robert ^a  

^a CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA   (United States)

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EID: 29744468659     PISSN: 00346632     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (53)

1. The phrase is from David Braine, The Human Person. Animal and Spirit (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), xxii.
2. See Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 15: "Thus the movement of a human eyelid is a categorially ambiguous identity; it may be a wink or a blink, a wink which is an exhibition of intelligence, a subscription to a 'practice' and has a reason, and a blink which is a component of a 'process' to be understood in terms of a 'law' or a 'cause'." See also p. 32.
3. In the next six paragraphs I use, with additions and revisions, some material that I have published in "Language, the Human Person, and Christian Faith," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 76 (2003): 29-30.
4. I have found the work of the American linguist Derek Bickerton to be very helpful in regard to syntax as constitutive of human speech. See his Language and Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990),
5. and Language and Human Behavior (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995).
6. His work belongs to the tradition initiated by Noam Chomsky with Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957)
7. and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965). The relation of these notions of syntax to Husserl's doctrine on categorial intentions and categorial intuitions calls for investigation.
8. I once attended a master class given, in public, by Elly Ameling at the University of Maryland, and one of the things that impressed me most was the accuracy and force with which this wonderful soprano registered the consonants in her singing. She emphasized the importance of such precision in what she told the students.
9. Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (New York: Meridian Books, 1954), 152.
10. I am grateful to Kevin White for much of the material in this paragraph, as well as for many other remarks and suggestions that I have used in this paper. On the distinguished status of the human face: it is now often said that the human brain is the most complicated thing in the universe. It would be interesting to ask whether the brain or the face should enjoy the greater prestige.
11. Kyra Karmiloff and Annette Karmiloff-Simth, Pathways to Language. From Fetus to Adolescent (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 43.
12. Kyra Karmiloff and Annette Karmiloff-Simth, Pathways to Language. From Fetus to Adolescent, Ibid., 2.
13. Kyra Karmiloff and Annette Karmiloff-Simth, Pathways to Language. From Fetus to Adolescent, Ibid., 151.
14. The syntax in language makes it possible for us to go beyond stating things in speech; it permits us also to appropriate what we are saying. We do so when we use the first-person pronoun in what I would want to call a "declarative" manner, as opposed to a merely "informational" usage. We can say not only, "It is raining," but also, "I know it is raining." When Nietzsche says that "only the spirit of music allows us to understand why we feel joy at the destruction of the individual," he wishes to reduce speech to the rhythms that underlie both syntax and phonemes, a reduction that also removes any declarative expression of myself as speaker. See The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 80.
15. The phrase about the Blessed Virgin is from Francis Slade.
16. The full title of David's painting is Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and Coronation of the Empress Josephine at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris on 2 December 1804.
17. Norbert Lynton, "Masters of Color: Derain to Kandinsky. Eighty masterpieces from the Merzbacher Collection," Times Literary Supplement (13 September 2002).
18. See also John Gage, Color and Culture. Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), chap. 7,
19. "Disegno versus Colore."
20. Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock both give up on disegno as well as representation, but they cannot do away with color. Their work is the opposite of a line drawing. It is interesting to note, however, that Rothko claimed that his work was governed by a metric and not just by color, In a response to a claim that it is the color that dominates in Rothko's work, John Gage writes, "For the painter himself this was far from being a matter of course, and he told Phillips [Duncan Phillips of the Phillips collection in Washington, D.C.] that 'not color, but measures were of greatest importance to him'"; "Rothko: Color as Subject," in Mark Rothko, ed. Jeffrey Weiss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 248.
21. My thanks to Kevin White for the reference to Rimbaud, as well as for some of the finer points about consonants in the words "howl" and "bark."
22. Adrian Stokes, Colour and Form (1937; reprint, London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1950), 109 (italics original).
23. Jeryldene M. Wood, "Introduction," in The Cambridge Companion to Piero della Francesca, ed. Jeryldene M. Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 7 (my italics).
24. Piero della Francesca wrote a treatise on painting entitled, De Prospectiva Pingendi (Ravenna: Danilo Montanari, 2000). At the beginning of the work (p. 7) he says, "Painting contains in itself three principal parts, which we say are design (disegno), composition (commensuratio), and color (colorare)." His list encompasses only two of the three dimensions that we have distinguished (composition of images, and color and line). He does not mention anything equivalent to cadence, but the reason for this omission may be the fact that the book gives instruction on how to use perspective. Rhythm is too deep in the structure of painting to be teachable.
25. An important contrast between speech and painting lies in the fact that speech moves us away from the words to the thing, while pictures bring the thing into themselves. There is, therefore, an interesting "spatial" difference between the two modes of presentation.
26. Edith Wharton, False Dawn, in Old New York (1924; reprint, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952), 60-1.
27. The lecture was given at St. Francis College on 22 April 2003. I am grateful to Francis Slade for notes of his lecture and permission to quote from them. I am also grateful to him for telling me about Edmund Waller's poem, which I use at the end of this essay.
28. One might ask whether the association of portraits with an individual's happiness is found especially in art that has been influenced by Christian belief. See Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image. An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 265: "The unrepeatable and continuing individuality of the human subject, the presence of a personal soul within, animates the portrait as it has been practiced in Europe since the Middle Ages." As a further point, we might say that the memory we each have of ourselves is something like a portrait, presenting, in a dramatic way, to ourselves as the exclusive audience, the self-identity we carry with us so long as we live.
29. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1959), 50. See also p. 57, where Reynolds mentions "this exertion of mind, which is the only circumstance that truly ennobles our art."
30. Thomas Prufer, "Providence and Imitation: Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Aristotle's Poetics," in Recapitulations (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1993), 18-19.
31. Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 31. The German reads, "mit durch die Kunst erzogenen Augen."
32. Gage, Color and Culture, 9 (my italics).
33. Slade makes this point in the lecture mentioned above in n. 22.
34. Peter Campbell, "At Tate Modern," London Review of Books (24 June 2004): 33. Slade added the observation that Hopper's Nighthawks was a favorite of Jean-Paul Sartre, and it is obvious why.
35. On the concept of pairing see Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), §51.
36. Henry James, The Ambassadors, bk. 11, chap. 3.
37. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, chap. 11.
38. See the treatment of these artists by Besançon, The Forbidden Image, 321-77. He considers their ideas a modern version of iconoclasm. At the end of his career, however, Kandinsky returned to representation and depicted fanciful biomorphic images.
39. Besançon, The Forbidden Image, 366.
40. Besançon, The Forbidden Image, Ibid., 369-70.
41. would have to differ with Gadamer's analysis of non-representational art in "Art and Imitation," in The Relevance of the Beautiful, 92-104. He sees it as mimetic, but not in either a Kantian or Aristotelian way; he says that it calls to mind Pythagorean doctrines about mathematical order in the cosmos. Modern art, he says, reflects and imitates this deep-seated pattern, not the forms of things. He claims that such a reduction is necessary because our modern industrial world has marginalized ritual and myth and has "also succeeded in destroying things," so that nothing familiar remains to be imitated or expressed in art (102). What modern art does offer is "a pledge of order" when everything familiar is dissolving (104). I would reply that Gadamer concedes too much to the technological age, and seems, in this passage, to capitulate to it. There still are things that provide a measure and a telos: not only organic entities, but also relationships, situations, and actions that need to be artistically registered for us.
42. See Russell Foster and Leon Kreitzman, Rhythms of Life. The Biological Clocks that Control the Daily Lives of Every Living Thing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
43. The modification is not just cultural but theological. Christian belief understands itself to transcend cultures even while it finds its place in them.
44. This affinity with imaging has been less true of the Catholic liturgy of the past thirty-five years, which is much more verbal and less ritualistic, less visually compositional, than the centuries-old liturgy that preceded it.
45. Hobbes criticizes Catholicism for its use of images, claiming that the Church did not transform the statues it took over from the Gentiles but fell into idolatrous worship of them. See Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 45, pp. 453-5.
46. The phrase is from John Walsh, "Pictures, Tears, Lights, and Seats," in Whose Muse? Museums and the Public Trust, ed. James Cuno (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 79.
47. Alain Besançon, La confusion des langues. La crise idéologique de l'Église (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1978), 43.
48. See also, Trois tentations dans l'Église (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1996), 28.
49. Besançon, La confusion des langues, 44.
50. Besançon, La confusion des langues, Ibid., 43.
51. Besançon makes similar points in other passages. See The Forbidden Image, 33: "Plato posits the fundamental theological principle on which all art rests: that the world is good." On p. 265: "These points, it seems, can be reduced to one: creation is good." On p. 238 he speaks about seventeenth-and eighteenth-century French painting and says, "The reflection of that image [of God] . . . illuminated profane art, provided a sense of well-being, a happiness about being in the world which was also praise of its Creator."
52. Robert E. Wood, Placing Aesthetics. Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), 327.
53. As an epilogue to my essay, I would like to comment on Edmund Waller's poem, "To Vandyck," which speaks eloquently about the presentational possibilities in a picture and about the effect a portrait has on those who view it. The artist's skill does not just entertain the viewer but makes him love the thing depicted: "Rare Artisan, whose pencil moves / Not our delights alone, but loves! / From thy shop of beauty we / Slaves return, that enter'd free." People respond not simply to the image but to the thing imaged. In the one case, it is a response to someone unknown: "The heedless lover does not know / Whose eyes they are that wound him so; / But, confounded with thy art, / Inquires her name that has his heart." In the other case, a response to someone once known: "Another, who did long refrain, / Feels his old wound bleed fresh again / With dear remembrance of that face, / Where now he reads new hope of grace." The painter's work is not just an inert likeness or an aesthetic object, but presents the thing itself, or in this case the face itself, with its own causal efficiency: "Strange! that thy hand should not inspire / The beauty only, but the fire; / Not the form alone, and grace, / But act and power of a face." This article will appear in the Proceedings of the American Maritain Association. An earlier version was presented at their meeting in 2004.