Interpretation, emotion, and belief: cognitive dimensions in art historical investigation, featuring examples from Jan Vermeer, Nicolas Poussin, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini
2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 27; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/02666286.2011.553798
ISSN1943-2178
Autores Tópico(s)Renaissance and Early Modern Studies
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Hereby I express my sincere thanks to Staffan Carlshamre and Mårten Snickare for having read and given valuable comments on earlier versions of the article. I also express my sincere thanks to David Carrier for taking interest in the text. Notes 1 – Torsten Pettersson, ‘What is an interpretation?,’ in Types of Interpretation in the Aesthetic Disciplines, eds Staffan Carlshamre and Anders Pettersson (Montreal, QC, Kingston, London, and Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003), pp. 30–51, claims that his understanding of the term ‘interpretation’ reflects current language use in epistemology; he stresses the idea that an interpretation has arrived at understanding when clarity and solution are at hand (no more unsolved or confused elements). 2 – On earlier assumptions and readings (before the 1990s), see Christine Hertel, Vermeer: Reception and Interpretations (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 56–69. Hertel reviews opinions of the girl as frivolous and corrupt, but also as elegant and refined, and even as in need of guidance and help; Hertel insists on a case of ‘interruption’ (p. 61), where the viewer takes on a function in the represented world — a topos recurring in later scholarship. For a recent interpretation and discussion of scholarly traditions, see Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf, ‘A Painting without Genre: Meaning in Jan Vermeer's The Girl with the Wine Glass,’ Konsthistorisk tidskrift (Journal of Art History) 78/2 (2009), pp. 77–91. On the theme of instruction, in particular, see p. 82 and note 22. 3 – The notion of the need for a composed and balanced face of a protagonist in ‘high’ art is a main idea of Lessing's arguments on Laocöon, Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Manlerey und Poesie (Berlin: n.p., 1766): see Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke 1766–1769, ed. Wilfried Barner (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990), pp. 17–22. Laocoön could be perceived to harbor a great soul, similar to that of Greek heroes (as an enemy of the Greeks but worshipping the same cruel gods and with equal passion and courage); but his heroic status did not hinge on a display of constraint in situations of suffering. Laocoön, the man in reality, could be heroic despite screaming out his pain (just as did Greek heroes like Achilles). The problem related to the great sculpture was that visual art could not communicate an emotion if the condition of the figure's soul or mind in that state of emotion would entail exceedingly contracted limbs or grimacing facial features — qualities that could not be rendered in visual art. So, to Lessing's mind, the reason for Laocoön's pathetic but composed face in the Classical statue stems from the art form, not the character represented. 4 – The painting belonged to the collection of Pieter Claesz. van Ruijven and Maria de Knuijt, a total of twenty Vermeer paintings (including, for instance, the thematically connected Officer and Laughing Girl now in the Frick collection). The couple's son-in-law, Jacob Abrahamsz. Dissius, inherited the collection. After Dissius's death, in 1695, the collection was auctioned. In all probability, van Ruijven and de Knuijt were the patrons or direct buyers of the painting. See Wayne Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 172. 5 – Nanette Salomon, ‘From sexuality to civility: Vermeer's women,’ in Vermeer Studies, ed. Ivan Gaskell and Michiel Jonker (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1998), pp. 309--24, here p. 320, compares the girl's face to the face of a triumphant child who has accomplished a clumsy (first step) drawing, represented by Giovanni Francesco Caroto in a painting of 1520. The idea of the smile as a sign of childishness or immaturity is supported by Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting, p. 70. Salomon also refers (on the issue of the man's gesture and the girl's holding of the glass) to de Lairesse's Het Groot Schilderboek; this treatise was published in 1707 and cannot have been a source for Vermeer. However, as Lisa Vergara states in the volume where she quotes this treatise, de Lairesse, born in 1640, was just a few years younger than Vermeer, who was born in 1632, and they shared the same notions of conventions regarding behavior and elegance, stemming from a much older tradition of chivalry and courtly manners, ‘Antiek and Modern in Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid,’ in Vermeer Studies, pp. 235–55. 6 – See especially Lisa Vergara (previous note); and Gregor J.M. Weber, ‘Vermeer's use of the picture-within-a-picture: a new approach,’ in Vermeer Studies, pp. 295–307. Weber interprets the inserted images as exempla equivalent to rhetorical devices. 7 – Vermeer's ‘deformation’ of the codes of high art, his visual comment on its artificiality, and its stage character can be seen in his The Art of Painting. 8 – Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting, p. 172. 9 – Vermeer adorned himself with the upper-class title ‘seigneur’ and he was a member of a militia company. See Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting, p. 172. Vermeer was the head man of the artists’ Saint Luke's Guild in Delft, 1662–1663, and again, 1671–1672. See Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., Vermeer & the Art of Painting (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 4. Wheelock refers to the archival research of John Michael Montias. 10 – On the criminal issues of Vermeer's wife's family, see Bryan Jay Wolf, Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 193–94. 11 – See note 5. 12 – See Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 119 – 23, on the strict adherence to historical truth, even to antiquarian evidence, concerning representations rendering scenes from the Early Christian church, and connections to iconography of the first Christian communities, such as the Traditio legis-the motif and the symbols of the Eucharist. 13 – Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: Norton, 1967); Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy 1450–1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973, first publ. 1940). 14 – Anthony Blunt, ‘Poussin's Notes on Painting,’ Journal of the Warburg Institute 1 (1937–1938), pp. 344–51, shows how Poussin draws on philosophy, rhetoric, music, and poetics of an Aristotelian blend. 15 – On the issue of a musical effect in Poussin's paintings, see also Josep C. Allard, ‘Mechanism, music, and painting in 17th-century France,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 40/3 (1982), pp. 269–79; Naomi Joy Barker, ‘ “Diverse passions”: mode, interval, and affect in Poussin's paintings,’ Music in Art 25/1–2 (2000), pp. 5–24. 16 – In a contemporary print made by Etienne Baudet (1636–1711), the subject of the painting is explained as a visual analysis of how strong emotions are transported by effects: ‘Divers effets d'horreur et de crainte sont ici exprimés./…/’ See Étienne Baudet's etching and engraving after Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Man killed by a Snake: British Museum, AN144351001, 575mm x 759mm, Georges Wildenstein, Les graveurs de Poussin au XVIIe siécle, introduction par Julien Cain (Paris: Les Beaux-Arts/Presses Universitaires de France, 1957). 17 – See Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles Le Brun's Conférence sur l´’expression générale et particulière (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 18 – René Descartes, Les Passions de l’âme, Œuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Léopold Cerf, 1909), p. XI (this treatise is Descartes's last printed work, published in 1650), p. 344 (for the will which is an emotion only of the soul and caused by the soul). 19 – On Charron's relation to Poussin's work, see Richard Verdi, ‘Poussin and the “Tricks of Fortune’’,’ The Burlington Magazine 124/956 (1982), pp. 681–85. 20 – On access to a spiritual contemplation through perception and sense experience, see Saint Ignatius, The Spiritual Exercises, trans. Thomas Corbishley and Anthony Clarke (Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire: Anthony Clarke, 1973); for instance, the first preparatory exercise and the First day, second contemplation, over the Birth of Christ. On the impact of Jesuit learning on Baroque Italian art, see The Jesuits and the Arts 1540–1773, eds John W.O'Malley, S.J. and Gauvin Alexander Bailey (Philadelphia, PA: Saint Joseph's University Press, 2005). The tight relation between Bernini's art and Jesuit circles and Jesuit thinking is a lead in most works on the artist. For a thorough analysis of devotion as displayed in Bernini's art, see Giovanni Careri, Flights of Love, the Art of Devotion, trans., from French, Linda Lappin (Chicago, IL, 1995 (in French 1990)). 21 – About the idea of the bodily resurrection as a moment, ‘a twinkling of an eye,’ and with reference to Paul's letter to the Corinthians, see Catechismus romanus, 1680, p. 67; and Catechismus Romanus ex decreto Concilii Tridentini ad Paroches/…/ 1566, ed. Adolphus Buse, Bielefeld and Leipzig, 1867, pp. 104–14, on the resurrection of the human body. The arguments are 1/logical: the human is a compound of body and soul, the soul is indestructible, but, to become part of a human living in the afterlife, the soul must regain the body; 2/metaphorical: the human resurrected body is the plant coming out of the seed (the old corrupt body); 3/ethical: to be punished or rewarded for deeds in earthly life, the person must be revived at the Last Judgment. 22 – On the architectural structure with the Cornaro chapel as transept, see Irving Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts (New York, London: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 85. 23 – Ibid., pp. 116–17; the office was first decreed by the Sacred Congregation of Rites in 1629, for the Order of the Discalced Carmelites in 1636, and extended to the universal church in 1644. 24 – Ibid., p. 112. 25 – Timothy J. Clark, The Sight of Death. An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. v. 26 – Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry; Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema, ed. K. Aschenbrenner and W.B. Holther (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), pp. 115--16. Compare also Ursula Franke, Kunst als Erkenntnis. Die Rolle der Sinnlichkeit in der Ästhetik des Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Studia Leibnitiana Supplementa, Band IX (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1972), pp. 48--50. 27 – Robert Stecker, ‘Expression of Emotion in (Some of) the Arts,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42/4 (1984), pp. 409–18. In the section about ‘The Nature of Emotion,’ pp. 409–10, Stecker refers to Georges Rey and his theory about ‘components’ of emotions, the ‘cognitive’ being one of them; Stecker prefers to use the term ‘intentional’ for this aspect. 28 – According to Lavin, Bernini, pp. 115–16, the ‘love-death- transverberation’ themes were at the core of the canonization bull in 1622. 29 – In the iconographical comparative material collected and presented by Lavin, Bernini, p. xxx, the default case in images of Teresa is to show her in the event of the ‘transverberation.’ 30 – Gillian T.W. Ahlgren, Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 48–66, 167–71. 31 – See note 23. 32 – In Teresa's writings, the mystical experience is connected to an idea of the dry turning humid or watered (Vida, Chapters 11–20, in particular, with descriptions of the state of ‘ecstasy’); in Juan's poetry it is connected to aspects of darkness. Both mystics connect, however, to the symbolism of the ‘Song of Solomon’ in the Old Testament. Compare, for instance, the insistence on the bride being ‘dark’ in the ‘Song of Songs,’ and San Juan's topos of darkness. On the language of mysticism, see for instance: E.W. Trueman Dicken, The Crucible of Love: A Study of the Mysticism of St Teresa of Jesus and St John of the Cross (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1963), pp. 78–87, 122–28. 33 – On Bernini and Neoplatonic traditions of light symbolism and the thought form of the analogy, see Frank Fehrenbach, ‘Bernini's Light,’ Art History 28/1 (February 2005), pp. 1–42. 34 – In the analytic tradition, Robert Stecker refers to the distinction between ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’ as a default distinction used in this tradition during the 1980s and 1990s. See his Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), pp. 113–14 and passim. To Stecker, ‘interpretation’ deals with both ‘meaning’ (‘work meaning’) and ‘significance’; ‘work meaning’ is equal to ‘utterance meaning’ when the artist has succeeded in ‘doing’ what he/she intended; ‘significance’ can be anachronistic reuses of works and other kinds of relations and effects. Unintended trace-like meanings are ‘significance’ in this terminology. 35 – The most substantial philosophical ‘defense’ of art as knowledge is in Friedrich von Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, ed. and trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Other German texts of this tradition are Friedrich von Schiller, On the Naive and Sentimental in Literature, [Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung, 1795] trans. Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly (Manchester: Carcanet, 1981) (cf. Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe, Philosophische Schriften, in collaboration with Helmut Koopmann, ed. Benno von Wiese (Weimar: Böhlau, 1962), Vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 413–503.) On a similar topic, the reflective ‘self’ being extraneous in ‘modern’ society (of the late eighteenth century), turning to art as a means of recovering a kind of totality that has become lost in industrial and discursive society (with division of labor and exploitation of human life), see Friedrich von Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. E.M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 9; and Politics and Aesthetics in the Arts, ed. Salim Kemel and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 227–28. Examples of the poetic magic issuing from this kind of art philosophy are poems by Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) and Friedrich Hölderlin, and further modern poetry of this tradition, such as Paul Celan. 36 – Walter Benjamin builds his very influential reflection on history writing on this concept, in his thesis on German Baroque tragedy: Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Gesammelte Schriften, Band I, 1. Abhandlungen, eds Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 207–409. In various ways the distinction between the allegory as opposed to the symbol (as both real and ideal) has been a leading thought in Romanticism and in art history with a psychoanalytical perspective. See, for instance, Michael Ann Holly, who focuses on the art writer's position, and the awareness of ‘loss’ in the fact that the artwork's own world is irretrievably past and out of reach; her attitude has a ring of Martin Heidegger's statement that we encounter the artworks ‘themselves’ but ‘they themselves are gone for ever.’ See Holly, ‘Interventions: The Melancholy Art,’ Art Bulletin 89/1 (March 2007), pp. 7–17; she quotes Heidegger, ‘The Origin of a Work of Art,’ Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Rowe, 1971), p. 41. On Benjamin's critique of Classicism and the idea of a symbol, see Ursprung, pp. 336–64. 37 – Benjamin, Ursprung, pp. 222, 227. 38 – Ibid., p. 343, on the description of the allegory as a skull. 39 – On the importance of the analogy in philosophy and science at large, see Das Analogiedenken: Vorstösse in ein neues Gebiet der Rationalitätsttheorie, eds Karen Goy and Manuel Bachmann (Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag K. Alber, 2000); David Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973); Metaphor and Analogy in the Sciences, ed. Fernand Hallyn (Boston, MA: Kluwer, 2000); and Barbara Maria Stafford, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 40 – This kind of ‘clarity’ is what Baumgarten had in mind when he discussed the notion of ‘extensive clarity.’ See Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, §13, 41. This is referred to in Ewa Jeanette Emt, ‘Baumgarten och den moderna estetikens födelse,’ Konsten och konstbegreppet (Stockholm: Kairos I, Raster, 1996), pp. 15–24, here p. 22–23.
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