The system of early modern painting

Representations

Volumn 62, Issue , 1999, Pages 31-57

  Berger Jr , Harry ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 64949154064     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.1998.62.1.01p0011g     Document Type: Review

References (60)

1. Marcelin Pleynet, quoted by Jean-Louis Comolli, "Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field," in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley, 1985), 2:43
2. Pleynet's thesis is the object of Comolli's critical examination. Comolli, whose essay first appeared in 1977 (Film Reader, no. 2)
3. reminds us that Pierre Francastel had emphasized - against the myth of the enduring dominance of quattrocento perspective - "the coexistence of several figurative systems" (Movies, 44)
4. See Pierre Francastel, Peinture et société (Paris, 1965)
5. Jean-Louis Baudry, "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," in Movies and Methods, 2:534
6. Martin Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle, 1988), 4
7. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)
8. David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago, 1976), 149
9. See also my "L. B. Alberti on Painting: Art and Actuality in Humanist Perspective" (1965) in Harry Berger Jr., Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making, ed. John Patrick Lynch (Berkeley, 1988), 374-75
10. Crary, Techniques, 42-43. Though Crary doesn't mention Norbert Elias, this passage strongly evokes Elias's description of the " psychogenesis" of homo clausus as a function of "sociogenesis" in early modern Europe
11. Jonathan Crary, "Modernizing vision," in Vision and Visuality, 33
12. This is the official church view. In practice, of course, things were different. The cults, shrines, and images of saints were guarantors, sites, and repositories of magical power. For a concise discussion, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), 25-50
13. Decorum is "that proportion, correspondence or conformity that style has with subject"; Andrea Gilio (1564), quoted in John Shearman, Mannerism (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1967), 166. Significantly, Gilio is expressing the norms and constraints of Tridentine reform
14. David Rosand, "'Divinità di cosa dipinta': Pictorial Structure and the Legibility of the Altarpiece," in The Altarpiece in the Renaissance, ed. Peter Humfrey and Martin Kemp (Cambridge, 1990), 146
15. Paul Hills, The Light of Early Italian Painting (New Haven, 1987), 16
16. Marcia Hall, Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting (Cambridge, 1992), 48
17. See also John Shearman, Andrea del Sarto (Oxford, 1965), 1:132-34
18. Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (1953; reprint, New York, 1971), 1:251
19. E. H. Gombrich, "Light, Form, and Texture in Fifteenth-Century Painting North and South of the Alps" (1964), in The Heritage of Apelles: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (Ithaca, 1976), 21, 31
20. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1983), 84, 90-91
21. On the close relation and interaction between graphic modeling and the science of optics see David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge, 1987), 3-9
22. Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven, 1990)
23. My colleague, Professor Donna Hunter, uses the phrase "visual fix" (borrowed from Stephen Heath's The Sexual Fix) to characterize the effect of a preference for "plastic or sculptural ... forms that are bounded or separated from everything that is not form; it favors forms that are firmer than most flesh" and imbued "with a stillness that calls attention to the stasis inherent in all 'fixed' images."
24. Hunter speculates that the visual fix may be a (humanist) response "to an abhorrence of variants on the hard, young, male body." I'm grateful to Professor Hunter for permission to quote these remarks from her stimulating paper, "The Neo-classical Fix: The School of David and Reproductive Engraving, or Reproduction as Representation" (delivered at the annual meeting of the College Art Association, Chicago, February 1992). Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987)
25. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (London, 1972), 87-89
26. The quoted statements are from Hall, Color and Meaning, 94
27. David Summers, "Maniera and Movement: The Figura Serpentinata," Art Quarterly 35 (1972): 293
28. See also his "Contrapposto: Style and Meaning in Renaissance Art," Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 336-61. In contrapposto different parts of the body are counterposed to each other - e.g., hips and legs in one direction, chest and shoulders in another
29. David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton, 1981), 76
30. "Quattrocento color-modelling," John Shearman notes, "has the stylistic effect of intensifying linearity," but "when color is liberated from its function of creating form" and is "deployed with greater flexibility," it can produce "chromatic emphases ... independent of the formal construction" and the consequent "diminution of the linear content" may be intensified by "sfumato modelling, [which] replaces the precise and finite hardness of Quattrocento painting by softness of surface and elusive imprecision"; Shearman, Andrea del Sarto, 1:132-33
31. The first three quoted passages in this sentence are from Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven, 1983), 94
32. and the last is from Sheldon Nodelman, Marden, Novros, Rothko: Painting in the Age of Actuality (Seattle, 1978), 24-25
33. Bryson's concentration on the historicized virtual observer, whose "role, and the kind of work he is called on to perform, are constructed by the image itself" (Vision and Painting, xiii), leads him to ignore the role and work of the empirical viewer. As any onsite investigator of paintings knows, you can't learn very much about a picture by standing stock-still, fixed and immobile, before it, and letting your "prolonged, contemplative" gaze regard "the field of vision across a tranquil interval" (94). On the contrary, you move restlessly back and forth on the perpendicular shuttle. You may do this no matter what role the picture offers you as the observer in the painting. But there is a great deal of painting - early modern Western painting - that activates the shuttle by a variety of devices that pull you in for a better look at some detail you can't make out from a more comfortable viewing distance. Small size is the most obvious device, but there are many others - sketchy figures in the background, for example, or dark half-tones filled with dim shapes, or books and letters with writing that seems to be legible, or transparent shadows thrown over strategic expressive junctures of the sitter's face. In many cases the message you receive from the closer view is, in Bryson's terms, erasive: "Isn't it wonderful," the painting says, "how the textures, forms, and tones of the virtual image refuse to yield to the appearance of paint - how velvet remains velvet, wrinkles wrinkles, and wood wood." But in other cases the shuttle produces the opposite effect: "Isn't it wonderful how, as you draw close, the virtual textures, forms, and tones begin to change into facture, pigment, thick impasto, thin glazing, and the weave of the canvas."
34. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York, 1932), 229
35. José Ortega y Gasset, "On Point of View in the Arts," trans. Paul Snodgrass and Joseph Frank, in The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and Culture (Garden City, N.Y., 1965), 99-120
36. The name given to the visible brushwork of Titian, Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto, and other Venetian painters was pittura di tocco e di mácchia. For me the most important word in this phrase is di because it means both of and by: the touches and blobs are the effects as well as the causes of this method of painting
37. Gombrich, "Light, Form, and Texture in Fifteenth-Century Painting," 19-35, esp. 19-23 and 30-32
38. David Rosand, Titian (New York, 1978), 11-12
39. Bryson, Vision and Painting, 89-90, xiii
40. Sylvia Ferino Pagden, "From Cult Images to the Cult of Images: The Case of Raphael's Altarpieces," in Altarpiece in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1990), 165, 168
41. Bram Kempers, Painting, Power, and Patronage: The Rise of the Professional Artist in Renaissance Italy, trans. Beverley Jackson (London, 1992), 183
42. In Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice (New Haven, 1986), 23, Rona Goffen cites another form of occupation and another reason for the patronal conjunction of mendicant orders with noble families: "The right to burial in one's parish church was the irresistible quid pro quo exchanged with patrons by the friars for the building, decoration, and endowment of their churches."
43. For an excellent example of secular patrician infiltration see Patricia Simons, "Patronage in the Tornaquinci Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence," in Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. F. W. Kent and Patricia Simons, with J. C. Eade (Oxford, 1987), 221-50
44. The patron's control over the details of the commission assigned to Domenico Ghirlandaio is reflected not only in the contract but also in the fact that the biblical events depicted in the chapel supply a pretext for what is essentially a series of group portraits of members of the patron's and allied families portrayed as if they are staging religious spectacles. On the role played by such chapels in the politics of self-representation, see F. W. Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai (Princeton, 1977), 99-109
45. David Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto (New Haven, 1982), 16
46. For a more detailed account of the political and cultural context and its relation to the status of artists, see ibid., 7-16
47. E. H. Gombrich, "The Leaven of Criticism in Renaissance Art: Texts and Episodes," in Heritage of Apelles, 111-31
48. and E. H. Gombrich, "The Renaissance Conception of Artistic Progress and its Consequences," in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London, 1966), 1-10, 7, 8
49. Gombrich, "Artistic Progress," 4, 10, 3, 7, 10
50. Kempers, Painting, Power, and Patronage, 211
51. Jacqueline Lichtenstein, "Making Up Representation: The Risks of Femininity," Representations 20 (Fall 1987): 78
52. For a brief account of the graphic prehistory of this rebellion - "the challenge of realism" posed by Leon Battista Alberti and Florentine painting and met by Jacopo Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, and Andrea Mantegna - see Patricia Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (New Haven, 1988), 105-20
53. See Rosand's text and catalog copy in Titian, the essays collected in Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice
54. and David Rosand, "Titian and Pictorial Space," in Titian, Prince of Painters (Munich, 1990), 94-100
55. Rosand, "Titian and Pictorial Space," 98
56. Even "the earliest Titian," S.J. Freedberg claims, sought in Giorgione's style "those elements which will liberate him from quattrocentesque literal, essentially objective, depiction: from forms copied in their immobility and contained in static order"; S.J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy, 1500 to 1600 (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1975), 137
57. On the attention paid to this phenomenon by Venetian writers, see Mosche Barasch, Light and Color in the Italian Renaissance Theory of Art (New York, 1978), 101-2
58. Peter Humfrey, The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice (New Haven, 1993), 204-7
59. "Erasive" is Norman Bryson's term: see, for example, the discussions on pages xiii, 89, and 92 of Vision and Painting
60. Even the most inconspicuous traces of facture in tempera and fine oil painting can be detected by looking at the painting from the wrong angle or in the wrong light; that they are difficult to pick out is itself part of the statement the painting makes. I think the case of fresco is different because in buon fresco (in which facture disappears in the absorptive process of chemical bonding with wet intonaco), the most visible traces tend to be those of the giornate, the patches that record the work done in discrete sessions of painting, and I don't yet see how giving these patches representational status would enable them to modify the meaning of the image