Art History as Ekphrasis
2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1467-8365.2009.00720.x
ISSN1467-8365
Autores Tópico(s)Visual Culture and Art Theory
ResumoDetail of Michelangelo, Rondanani Pietà, c. 1555–64 (plate 3). View from right hand side of Michelangelo, Rondanani Pietà, c. 1555–64. Marble, 195 cm (height). Milan: Castello Sforzesca. Photo: Author. The history of reflections about what art history is and how it might best be done, about how art works and what art is, is long and distinguished. I do not propose to review it here. Nor do I presume to suggest a definition of what art is or how it may come to be. My concern is more limited. I want to make a proposal about the nature of art history, which may seem outrageous to those who see themselves in the tradition of the ‘critical historians of art’, or to those who believe art history has the elevated status of philosophy, or to those who think the discipline is ultimately a branch of history more generally, but I will make it nonetheless. My proposal is very simple. Far from being a rigorous pursuit, art history – certainly since its founding fathers in the modern era, Vasari and Winckelmann, and undoubtedly in the surviving ancient sources who were their inspiration (Pliny, Vitruvius, Lucian, Philostratus, even Pausanias) – is nothing other than ekphrasis, or more precisely an extended argument built on ekphrasis. That is, it represents the tendentious application of rhetorical description to the work of art (or to several works or even to whole categories of art) for the purpose of making an argument of some kind to suit the author’s prior intent. Not everything that results from ekphrasis is art history, but that series of uses of interpretative description, which attempt to make a coherent argument on broadly historical or philosophical lines, is definitely art history. The particular rules governing the making of description and its appropriations have changed radically over the centuries from (say) Philostratus to Vasari to Riegl to T. J. Clark – to suit the particular intellectual contexts and social aspirations of those writing about art in these different worlds. And the kinds of results or findings required by different periods (and sometimes different scholars) from such description have also changed. Some find that art can reveal artists, others that it can indicate social history or underlying cultural reflexes, others still that it implies very little at all beyond itself. But my proposition is that – whatever the particular agenda or argument – art history is ultimately grounded in a method founded on and inextricable from the description of objects. I hope this is not controversial. A number of issues follow methodologically from placing description at the centre of the enterprise. First, we must be clear about what we mean by description. Here I take an extremely open-ended view: any account of an object from the most hardcore formalist analysis (Riegl’s work is exemplary here, and that of his followers in the Second Vienna School), to a floridly evocative description (what Panofsky somewhat dismissively called attention to the sensuous aspects of art), to a highly complex analysis of deeper meanings and symbolic networks (the high-point of Warburgianism), from the mere mention of an object to its dismissal, from encomiastic praise to vituperative attack – all these and everything in between constitute ekphrasis, and hence may make up the descriptive basis for the practice of art history (see plate 1). The reason such accounts are ekphrasis, and hence the bedrock of art history, is that all these descriptions conspire to translate the visual and sensual nature of a work of art into a linguistic formulation capable of being voiced in a discursive argument. The act of translation is central. We conduct it with such ease. And yet the conceptual apparatus into which the object has been rendered, and its transformation from a thing that signifies by volume, shape, visual resonance, texture into one that speaks within the structures of grammar, language, verbal semiotics (call it what you will) and can be appropriated to numerous kinds of argument or rhetoric, are quite simply vast. In fact, they are so vast that the truly responsible viewer might balk at the prospect of so falsifying the object by the act of its verbal rendition. Or, as in Lucian’s brilliant dialogue ‘On the Hall’ (De domo) might rise to the challenge of creating through verbal artistry a description (descriptive fiction?) which at least attempts to rival or to emulate the range of emotive, formal and textural resonances evoked by the object described. The enormity of the descriptive act cannot be exaggerated or overstated. It constitutes a movement from art to text, from visual to verbal, that is inevitably a betrayal. Not everything in the world of the sensual autonomy of the object can be translated into words, and much that was not there is inevitably added by words. In other words, description is not merely selective; it is (at its best) a parallel work of art. To put this another way, however good the approximation in words of the object described, it can never fully be or fully replace the object. Description may be seen as a primary interpretative act (like an anthropologist’s account of a different culture in which unavoidably prior viewpoints born from scholarly training or cultural background cannot be wholly extricated from ‘objective’ ethnography). In this case, on the bedrock of a verbal interpretation, many further layers of analysis – each more interpretative than the last, each more authoritative or speculative than the last – will come to rest. But the difference from anthropology is that, in most cases, works of art are not cultures or peoples for whom an unrepeatable ethnography – whatever its partiality, whatever its weaknesses – may have to stand. Rather, each of us can make our own primary description (tendentious in that it exists to help me make my specific argument and tendentious also in that it inevitably emerges within the range of other such descriptions, differentiating itself rhetorically from them in order to make my point about the object different and special, but thereby finding its voice not in the direct inspiration of the non-verbal nature of the visual but rather in the history of other verbal discourses already floating about the object or objects like it). Yet it is on this foundation and no other that art history rests. So far as I know no rules have ever been written for this act of translation and it has hardly been subjected to analysis. It is the necessary and inevitable move before we start – the only way we can have objects to discuss at all. Yet the questions it begs are endless and the fundamental assumption that pictorial or architectural thought operates in parallel ways to verbal thought, that verbal forms of signification are adequate in any way to account for visual and material forms of signification, must remain no more than an assumption taken unexamined as an axiom. It might be objected that since the end of the nineteenth century description has become more objective because it can be supplemented with photographic reproduction – a visual (as opposed to verbal) rendering of the object by visual means and a ‘control’ against which the description may be read. If one followed this line, one might grant the descriptive translation more authority than I have done, less haphazard partiality and tendentiousness, and a greater objectivity (as necessary to the foundation block of an argument). But personally I cannot for a minute entertain the credibility of photographs as anything but tendentious and personal ‘takes’ on whatever they frame in the shot. The photograph is a visual ekphrasis – interpretative, angled, chosen, made possible by a particular circumstance, the presence of a photographer in a specific time and place… The art historian may take his or her own pictures, in which case the ‘objective correlative’of visual proof is merely part of the tendentiousness of the original ekphrastic formulation. Or photographs may be purchased from an archive or museum or someone else, in which case the art-historical argument (especially an argument based on photographs rather than one where the author has recently been in front of the actual object) will depend in part on other people’s framings and interpretative views, the appropriation of earlier forms of tendentious (visual) ekphrasis to one’s own point. This is no different from working with earlier essays and discussions of the object to hand. Now, even if my worries about the betrayals of ekphrasis were granted, we cannot be squeamish about committing the act. Without interpretative description, there would be no art history. But that is at best an instrumental argument (there may be someone, somewhere, after all, who can envisage a better world without art history – as Plato arguably might have done). More to the point, images and objects – insofar as they are designed to relate to us at all – invite ekphrasis, indeed they require it. Part of the play of their relations with viewers is to elicit verbal as well as more directly sensual or visual responses, and in that sense they are themselves the spur to the range of narratives to which art history belongs. They may be coy about the potential mistranslation and misrepresentations in this process, but these are themselves part of the game of soliciting meanings and encouraging often contradictory interpretations. So the generation of ekphrasis is not only necessary (to art history) but is inevitable in the viewing of art. Descriptions often need to be long, for they must entice the non-verbally responsive object into a state where it is both available as ekphrasis and so angled in its new descriptive form as to be appropriate to the specific argument being made. Yet arguments are rarely about one object or even a few. Typically, for them to be compelling or simply interesting enough to be published and read, they must make a general point – usually a historical one in the current era. But how can one little object – one object among millions, which may have survived by pure happenstance and is known to the art historian by the same chance that makes him or her ignorant of so many other objects – how can one object carry the weight of a general argument? It is, in my experience, always the case that the ekphrastic descriptions (often combined with photographs), that form the basis of our art history books and articles, are made to carry more weight – both as cultural exemplars of their time or context and as steps within an argument on which its next stage can rest – than they can in fact bear. For one aspect of ekphrastic interpretation is to make the particularity of a work of art more general, by becoming discursively like other objects with which we may want it to be comparable, than its pre-verbal form actually is. There are many reasons why art history might wish to suppress its reflex to move from the particular to the general (not least its disciplinary claims to be a grander philosophical or historical profession than simply the description of objects) but its unwillingness to reflect upon the ekphrastic process on which it is founded is one of them. As an example we may take the ceremonial picture representing Justinian and Maximian. A composition on the plane: centralised; just verticals (contour, folds, ornaments; the axiality is only slightly reduced in the figure of Maximian) and horizontals (lines of heads, feet, garment-seams and arms). Spatial composition: the figures step frontally out of space in the direction of the beholder and stare straight at him; even though the main group shows partial overlaps on the plane, along with the entourage of five body guards in three rows, the main group is compressed into one compact plane-like mass leaving no visible space between the figures. The floating of the feet repeats the phenomenon (already observed in the more advanced style early Christian sarcophagi from Rome) by which the foreground figures appear to step on the feet of the ones behind them; this is obvious proof that the artist’s aim was a complete isolation of the individual figures in space, even at the price of sacrificing the connection to the plane (in this case the connection of the feet with the ground below); linear folds (corresponding to the engraved folds in sculpture), yet inclined towards pleating (as can be seen particularly in the double lines). All this, along with the slim, elongated and stilted-bodily proportions (together with a reduction in head size) largely establish a relationship with the subsequent Byzantine style, which is generally the most characteristic aspect of the style of these mosaics. How one can speak of ‘decline’in view of works such as the San Vitale mosaics, is incomprehensible since every line demonstrates clear planning and a positive will… To facilitate the disintegration of figures, the individual parts out of which they are composed must be separated from each other as clearly as possible. This leads to a preference for objects that are, by their very nature, piecemeal and patchwork and that tend to fragment. Thus the clothes of the peasants are not chosen with a uniform taste but are thrown together by chance, just as the ‘motley’costumes of The Battle Between Carnival and Lent are improvised out of everything imaginable. The dappled torsos of the horses and cows fall by themselves into such patches. In the visions of madness (and dreams), we see how heterogeneously composed, fragmented creations –‘condensations’, to use the specialized term – come together and then dissolve as in Dulle Griet (Mad Meg). Alternatively, the positions and movements of the individual bodies are sought to show the separation and independence of the limbs: the prisoners’ feet separated from their bodies by the stocks in Allegory of Hope; the awkward movements of the dancing peasants in Peasant Kermis, which have been criticized as ‘poorly drawn’; the contortions of epileptics. Only the legs remain of the figure who falls into the barrel in Allegory of Gluttony, only the upper body of the one who falls through the ice in Skaters in Front of Saint George’s Gate. They all appear mutilated, and the cripples in fact are. In its intentions, this disintegration of form corresponds in the real world to the process of destruction… The painting called La Derelitta, ascribed first to Masaccio, then to Botticelli, then to that amiable fiction L‘Amico di Sandro, and recently regarded as part of a series of cassone panels executed by the young Filippino Lippi after designs by Botticelli, is a source of discomfort not only to the connoisseur but also to the student of iconography. The subject is as enigmatic as the authorship. A young woman, shut out of a palace, sits ‘derelict’ on the steps before the gate and weeps. This is the sort of pathetic scene which appealed to nineteenth-century novelists by arousing reflections as to what had happened before and what would happen after. The Pan Painter likes out-of-the-way subjects; and the picture on the other side of the vase is unique. The god Pan is almost unknown in Attic art before the Persian wars: he had ground for complaining to Philippides, on the eve of Marathon, that the Athenians neglected him. After the Persian wars Pan becomes quite popular at Athens: but not in this context: only here is he seen pursuing a boy. A young goatherd, in country garb – goatskin, sheepskin cap, stockings, whip – is hotly pursued by the goat-god; at the rock-seat, a third, strange person, the wooden image of some small, Priapus-like deity, views the scene with a round, bewildered eye. A word about the painting, before we turn to other vases by the same painter. A blend of late archaic daintiness and early-classic grandeur; the pathos of the early-classic period but not its ethos; swift, nay explosive movement; ravishing elegance; a darting, fastidious touch; piquant contrasts, deliberate and amusing disproportions – small things made larger, big things smaller, than one expects; round heads with tiny nose and delicate nostril but big chin and bull neck; wasp waist but sturdy thigh; powerful arms but tapering fingers; the bow very long, the quiver very thin; the hounds Lilliputian; Pan’s face small between long beard and long horns. The forms, even more than in most vase-painters, approximated to geometrical shapes, with a special fondness for circle and arc (even the irregularities of the rock are fully patternised); yet packed with expression, and tense with life. But can we still see it in isolation? Is not the popularity it once enjoyed, and our own reaction against it, a disturbing element? I may confess to you that, when I approached the Palazzo Pitti this autumn to study the picture in preparation for this lecture, my heart sank as I saw the coloured postcards, box lids, and souvenirs displayed on the stalls in front of the Gallery. Should I really inflict this on you? A fresh encounter with the original removed my doubts. My doubts but not my difficulties. For, after all, you have only my word for it that the painting looks different from those baneful reproductions, that the very brushwork shows a freshness and boldness which banishes all thought of the sugar-box, and that the colours, under old varnish, have a mellowness and richness which no print and no copy can bring out. I remember in particular the warm golden brown yellow of the Christ-child’s garment, as it stands out against the deep blue of the Virgin’s skirt, the dark red of her sleeve and the gold-embroidered back of the chair, and, most of all, the blending into harmony of that daring green scarf which so easily brings a cheap and discordant note into prints. There are some patches of repair and over-painting over cracks affecting St John and the fringe on the Christ-child’s face; but by and large the condition of the picture seems to be good, and the enamel-like finish of the Virgin’s head, the spirited, fresco-like treatment of the drapery and the chair with its impasto highlights all appear to me to betoken the master’s own handiwork. It is true that even in the Pitti Gallery it is not easy to come to terms with the picture. The vast golden eighteenth-century frame produces a dazzle that all but kills the subtle gradations of tone on which Raphael relied. As soon as you screen it off with your hands the picture comes to life. Chardin seems to be doing something strange with perspective here and there. The chair-back is odd: if the lady were sitting comfortably on the chair, surely the chair-back would not be turned to face us and the picture-plane as much as it does. The tea-pot is also rather 1910: spout and perhaps also handle are flattened out on the canvas. Then there are a whole range of striking colour devices. The most obvious is the red-lacquered table, assertive but almost unstable. And if one looks in other pictures by Chardin, one finds other cases of reds in relation to blues and blacks. Again, and very conspicuously, there seems something extraordinarily deliberate and determining about the differential distinctness and lighting of the picture. There is a determinate plane of distinctness on the line of the teapot, hand and arm; and within this plane some things are more sharply focused than others. What does all this represent? In the bas-de-page of the Ormesby Psalter’s 101st Psalm, the scandalized look of the gryllus is almost voyeuristic. Here he stares at a ‘bawdy betrothal’, in which another squirrel-grasping lady accepts a ring from a young man – an anti-illustration of ‘my heart is smitten’ in the Psalm above. In this marginal masterpiece the margins include their own meta-marginal parody further out on the edge. Here, beneath the courtly couple, a fat cat stalks a mouse, reversing the gender positions above, so that the mouse in its hole is beneath the knight whose sword sticks out of his own hole like a phallus. The complex criticism of their encoded eroticism is further annotated by the gryllus here who, watching from the wings, as it were, is an incarnation of scopic obsession – having a head between his legs instead of a prick. His look is an ejaculation. Some ekphrases from a selection of paradigmatic art historians. A sense of decency has made qualification for inclusion that the authors be dead, which has the interesting effect that all are men. To discuss how any one of these, as description, formulates the nature of the argument of which it is part would take too much space. But clearly different descriptive choices would in any of these cases have yielded the possibility for profoundly different results. Beyond the issue of generalization, there lies the specific problem of argument. The object translated into ekphrastic description is available for use in an argument – indeed, a series of arguable and argumentative assumptions are the inevitable basis of the descriptive terms chosen to create the ekphrasis in the first place. For much art history nothing is so compelling in such argument as the adduction of formal and stylistic observations so as to make the point at issue out of the object’s own object-hood. Indeed, this was a fundamental aspect of the great Viennese project in art history from before the end of the nineteenth century until the aftermath of the 1939–45 war. Yet the problem is that what we adduce as formal is in fact not the object’s own object-hood and existence as matter but that ekphrastic transformation which has rendered it into a stylistic terminology. How secure can we be that such ekphrastic formalism (the closest in art history some might affirm, that an object can be to its pre-verbal state) is no more than a carefully crafted verbal translation whose discursive functionings are as far from the actuality of objects as any other interpretative description? Likewise, in those arguments which turn to questions of meaning (and are ultimately dependent on the great Warburgian projects of investigating symbol and memory as well as the emphasis on meanings in the early work of Panofsky and Wind), to what extent can we be clear that it is the work of art itself that interrelates with the literary and other cultural artefacts beside which it has been placed, rather than our tendentious ekphrastic extrapolation of it? In other words, when the object speaks in art history and when it is heard, what is heard is our ekphrasis. But we do not stress this point, since the need to elide ekphrasis and object is essential to the method, if it is to carry the conviction of some empirical validity (not to speak of objectivity or positivism)… Let us take an example. Here is a little piece recently composed on Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà (see 2, 3, 4, 5). Detail showing bottom half of Michelangelo, Rondanani Pietà, c. 1555–64. Milan: Castello Sforzesca. Photo: Author. View from left hand side of Michelangelo, Rondanani Pietà, c. 1555–64. Marble, 195 cm (height). Milan: Castello Sforzesca. Photo: Author. View with Ancient Roman base of Michelangelo, Rondanani Pietà, c. 1555–64. Milan: Castello Sforzesca. Photo: Author. Michelangelo is said by Vasari to be the apogee of the Renaissance, the point to which the entire tradition of naturalistic representation has led and at which it has culminated. If this is true, then his last work – the haunting Rondanini Pietà, which since 1952 has been in the Castello Sforza in Milan – is perhaps his most characteristic sculpture. For it is not so much the apogee of his art as the emblem for everything Michelangelo was and for the totality of the tradition of Western image-making in which the Renaissance holds so potent a place. The sculpture’s naturalism is potent but almost in abeyance: an exquisitely rendered arm belonging to the Virgin from an earlier, abandoned sculpture of the Deposition but not yet removed; the elongated forms of Christ’s lifeless legs, breaking into near verisimilitude at the knees before reverting to sketchy unfinish at the feet and the groin. The very elongation of forms, stripped down (unfinished?) almost to the point of abstraction, presages the mannerism to come in Renaissance art. The refusal to finish – the near resistance to move beyond the pure blocking-out of the faces of the sorrowing mother and her dead son – foresees every gesture of modernism in later sculpture from Rodin to Giacometti and Moore. There is, in short, very little, perhaps nothing at all, in the passions and abstractions of the later development of the tradition of Western statue-making which the Rondanini Pietà does not foretell. Yet the sculpture remains naturalistic. Its naturalism is about choosing varieties of unfinish to pare down representation to its ultimate and simplest. How best to render the relations of mother and son? With the intense realism of Michelangelo’s earlier Vatican Pietà? Or with the sketched abstraction of the heads, upper bodies and faces of the Rondanini, into which a viewer may pour all his or her own sense of that grief and mourning which must surpass all others? However humanist the vision, let us not forget its piety and genuine devotion: this is not just any old mother and son, it is the pair of the one mother and son, which means of all and every mother and son. Here the Rondanini is the summing up of Michelangelo’s long fight with the pietà as sculptural subject – from the perfection of finish in the Vatican sculpture of his youth via the abandoned and incomplete versions now in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo and in the Academia in Florence, abandoned because they did not satisfy their maker, to this final meditation. The Rondanini Pietà is Michelangelo’s last statement on unfinish, and in particular on that moment of (in)completion which comes when you lay down your creative tools during the unfolding of a process and simply say this is enough, and on how naturalism to achieve the supreme expression of emotion may need to resort to incompleteness and abstraction. In its naturalism, the pietà is in fact entirely a piece in the classical tradition – looking back beyond Michelangelo’s predecessors like Donatello and the Pisani to the depths of antiquity, with the same intensity as it looks forward. The very willingness to tolerate a no longer relevant fragment, like that near-completely rendered arm, seems to hint at the fragmentary nature of the classical heritage – detached limbs, torsos, heads, all so perfectly finished yet battered and dismembered. That pin, which fixes the abandoned arm to the torso of Christ, stands like a deliberate memorial to all those ancient statues (Roman marble copies of lost Greek bronze originals, we call them now) which sport such struts to keep the marble limbs from splitting off. The urge to combine areas of exquisite finish with a roughness which in ancient survivals is caused by ruin, abrasion and the depredations of time turns this piece into a modern antique, deliberately poised between finish and incompletion, on the edge of that state of ruin whose supreme evocation must be the death of Our Lord. Artistically, what is striking about both the inheritances from the past and the intimations of the future between which this sculpture is so supremely, magisterially, poised, are certain very precise gestures of difference. Ancient statues were finished – their unfinishedness, fragmentation and rough areas are an addition by time to what was once finished. Noses are smashed and faces made rough where statues once fell or were broken. But Michelangelo’s unfinish is by design; and it lies before a state of final finish which he decides never to attain. His work is in progress and for ever incomplete. But some parts of that unfinish, and perhaps all of it – above all that arm which looms to the right of the principal group, and the sketchy intimacy of the faces of the Virgin and Christ – are deliberate, deliberately not worked further upon or removed. By contrast, the masterworks of modern sculpture that use abstraction, fragmentation and abrasion, do so with full design. They adopt as a stylistic trait, a strategy of representation, an aesthetic mode, that which in this sculpture is the point of unfinish most close to the wear of time on an ancient statue and beyond which Michelangelo judges that his sculpture will lose more than it can gain. It is as a work in progress, poised at the zenith of the tradition and encapsulating all that went before and would follow – positioned between naturalism and abstraction and engaged with the naturalism of feeling only possible in abstraction – that the Rondanini Pietà towers above all Michelangelo’s art. It stands as the emblem not only of the kind of work possible in marble sculpture but also of more philosophical concerns about the possibilities of representation embedded in marble sculpture. It is as a work in progress that the Rondanini Pietà becomes the epitome of a tradition of representation in progress and of a drive to naturalism whose most moving moments come when the panache of illusionism yields to the pathos and simplicity of pure form. Rather than tarnish another scholar – arbitrarily chosen and cruelly exposed – I have taken a piece of my own. Let me begin by saying that this little fragment was not composed for this essay, but beforehand and quite separately – in response to seeing the object for the first time in the Castello Sforza in Milan. I still stand by the piece in that it expresses what I think (or feel?) about Michelangelo’s sculpture, if not to the very best of my conceivable abilities then at any rate as well as I could on the day. Clearly the account is tendentious in that the sculpture has been reformulated according to longstanding concerns of my own – the nature of naturalism, the long process of its rise, fall and rise again in the European artistic tradition, its limitations (especially in relation to religion). E
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