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Using Artistic Masterpieces as Philosophical Examples: The Case of Las Meninas

2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: 68; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1540-6245.2010.01417.x

1540-6245

Robert Wicks,

Classical Philosophy and Thought

Although theoretical issues govern the content of philosophical aesthetics, references to individual artworks have a hand in its theorizing. Many of these works are familiar, such as the Egyptian Pyramids (c. 2560 b.c.e.), the Parthenon (447-432 B.C.E.), Polycleitus' Doryphoros (450-440 b.c.e.), Leonardo's Mona Lisa (1503-1506), Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508-1512), Shakespeare's Hamlet (c. 1600), Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C Minor (1804-1808), Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917), John Cage's 4'33 (1952), Andy Warhol's Brillo Box (wood, 1964), and Philip Johnson's AT&T Building (now Sony Tower) (1984). Through overuse, such examples can reduce to mere placeholders for categories such as ancient architecture, music, masterpieces of painting, tragedy, pop art, postmodern architecture, and the like. One need only reflect upon how some aestheticians have used Duchamp's Fountain and Warhol's Brillo Box interchangeably as examples of ready-made art. This is despite their several decades of arthistorical differences and dissimilarities in representational structure, since one is a commercial item and the other is a painted copy of a commercial item.1 References to artworks in the absence of detailed art-historical knowledge of other works by the same artist can generate misrepresentations and misunderstandings of the work, and it should not be surprising that some existing traditions of these abstracted references have given rise to a legacy of misconstrual. A case in point is how one of the finest paintings in the Western artistic tradition, namely, Diego Velazquez's Las Meninas (1656), has been set into many people's minds as the visual epitome of the seventeenthand eighteenth-century scientific worldview. This is how Michel Foucault describes it in his bestseller, The Order of Things (1966), using an interpretive approachwe can label it an oeuvreindependent onethat attends to the work in virtual isolation from other paintings that Velazquez completed. The present aim is to show how Foucault's oeuv re-independent approach to interpreting Las Meninas has precipitated a one-sidedness in philosophical discussions of the work since the 1960s. I refer here mainly to otherwise excellent and influential articles by John Searle, and Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen, along with a similar assortment of writings by others who continue to adopt Foucault's, Searle's, and Snyder and Cohen's oeuvre-independent methods for understanding the work.2 Such has been the prevailing philosophical practice when discussing Las Meninas within the Foucauldian legacy. Once we consider Las Meninas'?, meaning more concretely in relation to some of Velazquez's other paintings, it becomes evident that although Foucault himself characterizes Las Meninas as a paradigmatic illustration of representation, the art-historical context reveals that the painting represents the classical outlook only partially, since it also embodies the outlooks Foucault describes exclusively in contrast to the classical one, namely, those of the Renaissance and Modern eras. Las Meninas cannot consequently do the exemplificatory work that Foucault intends without ignoring crucial layers of the work's meaning. These layers, as we shall see, are shown significantly through the relationship between Las Meninas and an assortment of other works by