ilJRNARD

iEtENSON
S E1 1 NG

KNOmilG

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

LIBRARIES

COLLEGE LIBRARY

SEEING

AND KNOWING

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in

2011 with funding from

LYRASIS

IVIembers and Sloan Foundation

http://www.archive.org/details/seeingknowingOObere

BERNARD BERENSON
SEEING

AND KNOWING
NEW YORK
GRAPHIC SOCIETY
Greenwich, Connecticut

LTD.

Text

first

published

in

by Chapman and

Hall,

1953 London.

Library of Congress Catalog Card

All rights reserved.

Number 68-13052

Printed in the United States of America

XHE ILLUSTRATIONS

for this edition of Seeing

and Knowing have been chosen by the editors. The author's indications for many of the earher paintings and sculptures have been followed. In addition, a number of contemporary works are included to represent the kind of art which
Berenson attacks. Some of these are already
recognized as modern
classics; others are pro-

vocative works created in the twenty years since

this essay

was

written,

which go

still

farther in

rejecting the classical convention.

OF ILLUSTRATIONS
LIST
1

FRANCESCO GUARDI
View
of the

Grand Canal
Institute of Arts

The Minneapolis
2
3

GUARDI,

detail

from View of the Grand Canal

Detail from
fig. 4.

VAN DER WEYDEN,

ROGIER VAN DER WEYDEN

St.

Luke Painting the Virgin

and Mrs. Henry Lee Higginson
of Fine Arts, Boston

Gift of Mr.

Courtesy,

Museum

PAOLO UCCELLO
Perspective drawing for a Chalice
Florence, Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe

Courtesy Manelli Art Reference Bureau

Hellenistic fresco, Ulysses

and the Laestnjgones

Vatican

Museum

Photograph: Alinari Art Reference Bureau

EDGAR DEGAS
Carriage at the Races
Arthur Gordon Tompkins Residuary Fund Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

CLAUDE MONET
The River
The Art
Institute of Chicago, Potter

Palmer

Collection

PAUL SIGNAC Quay at Clichy

The Baltimore Museum
of Art

10

HILTON BROWN
Study for the Screen Series No.
i

St. Louis,

iq66
Kazimir Gallery, Chicago

11

JOACHIM
T]ie

A.

UYTEWAEL
The Leonard
C.

Deluge

Yale University Art Gallery,

Hanna,

Jr.

Fund

12

RUBENS,

Tlie

Judgment
Gallery,

of Paris
of the Trustees,

Reproduced by courtesy

The National
13

London
Lascaux

Paleolithic painting of Bison,

(Dordogne)
14
Paleolithic

Venus from Balzi Rossi

(Ventimiglia)

15

Egyptian

statuette,

c.

2500

B.C.,

Min-nefer,

Overseer of the Tenants of the Court

the

The Cleveland Museum of H. Wade Fund J.

Art,

Purchase from

16

Fragment

of an Egyptian tcall painting,

from Thebes
Reproduced by courtesy
of the Trustees,

The
17

British

Museum

Assyrian Relief of Sennacherib, 7th century B.C.

Charles

Amos Cummings Bequest Fund

Courtesy,

Museum of Fine Arts,

Boston

18

Greek vase, Red-figured Stamnos

Catherine Page Perkins Fund Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

19

American Indian Petroglyph, Painted Desert,

Arizona
Photograph Courtesy of Museum of American Lidian, Heve Foundation
:

20

Cycladic Idol, Second Millenium

b.c.

William Amory Gardner Fund Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

21

painted

Reproduction of a Cretan Figure of a Youth, relief at Knossos

Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge

22

Mantiklos "Apollo" Greek,

Francis Bartlett Collection

c.

700

b.c.

Courtesy,

Museum of Fine Arts,

Boston

23

Greek Statue 615-600 B.C.

of a youth of the "Apollo" type,

The Metropolitan Museum

Fletcher Fund, 1932

of Art,

24

Greek Athlete, 3rd quarter 5th century The Cleveland Museum Fund
of Art, Gift of

b.c.

Hanna

25

ALBRECHT DURER
Apollo

Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees

British

of the

Museum

26

African ancestral figure from Mali

Courtesy of The New York

Museum

of Primitive Art,

27a EDGAR DEGAS

Mary

Cassatt at the Louvre

of Art

The Baltimore Museum

27b

Portrait of Mile Hortense Valpingon

The Minneapolis

Institute of Arts,

John R. Van Derlip Fund, 1948

28

FRANCISCO GOYA Que Tal? (The Old

Lille

Ones).

Museum

Photograph: Archives Photographiques

29

BARTOLOMEO MANFREDI
(attributed to)

The Chastisement

of

Love

Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago

30

12th century fresco in

St.

Nicholas, Tavant

(Indre et Loire), King David Playing the Harp

Photograph: Marburg Art Reference Bureau

31

CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI
Torso

The Cleveland Museum

Hurlbut Collection

of Art,

Hinman

B.

32

ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER

Artillerymen
Collection,

The Museum

of

Modern

Art,

New York

33

JOAN MIRO
Portrait of a
Collection,

Lady

in

1820
of

The Museum

Modern

Art,

New York

34

WILLEM DE KOONING Woman and Bicycle

Collection of

Whitney Museum

of

American Art

35

PABLO PICASSO
Amhroise Vollard

The Metropolitan Museum

of Art, Elisha

Whittelsey Collection, 1947

36

PABLO PICASSO Weeping Woman

On extended loan to The Museum New York, from the artist
of

Modern

Art,

37

School of Paris,

c.

1390,

Madonna and Child

with Saints, from the Large Bargello Diptych

Florence, Bargello

Photograph: Archives Photographiques

10

38

JEAN FOUQUET,
Virgin

C.

I450,

and Child, from the Melun Diptych

Antwerp Museum
Photograph: Archives Photographiques

39

PIET MONDRIAN
Diagonal Compositiori
Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago

40

HANS HOFMANN
Exuberance
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, Gift of Seymour H. Knox.

New York,

41

HENRY MOORE
Reclining Figure

Cranbrook Academy Michigan

of Art, Bloomfield Hills,

42

JACQUES LIPCHITZ
Mother and Child,
Collection,
11

The Museum

of

Modern

Art,

New York

43

LARRY BELL
Untitled
Courtesy Pace Gallery,

New York
11,

44

Miniature from the Menologion of Basil nth century a.d.

Vatican Library

Photograph: Art Reference Bureau

45

JAN van eyck?

Baptism of Christ, Miniature from the Trivulzio Book of Hours
Municipal Museum, Turin Art Reference Bureau

46

JOACHIM PATINIER
Rest on the Flight into Egypt

The Minneapolis

Institute of Arts

11

47

TITIAN
Noli

me

tangere

Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of

The National
48

Gallery,

London
Castle of Steen

RUBENS, Landscape with

Reproduced by courtesy

of the Trustees of

The National
49

Gallery,

London

JULES DU PRE
Tlie

Hay Wagon
of Art, Bequest of

The Metropolitan Museum

Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887

50

JOHN CONSTABLE Weymouth Bay

Reproduced by courtesy
of the Trustees of

The National
51

Gallery,

London

PAUL CEZANNE Mont Sainte Victoire seen from Bihemiis Quarry

The Baltimore Museum
of Art,

Cone Collection

52

NICOLAS DE STAEL
Sicilian

Landscape
Dubourg, Paris

Collection, Jacques

53

13th century mosaic, detail from The Last

Judgment, Baptistry, Florence

Photograph Alinari Art Reference Bureau
:

54

GIORGIO NE, The Tempest

Venice, Accademia

Photograph: Alinari Art Reference Bureau

55

JEAN-BAPTISTE-CAMILLE COROT

A View

near Volterra

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Chester Dale Collection

12

56

ANDREA MANTEGNA
The Adoration
Gift,

of the

Shepherds

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Anonymous

1932

57 58

BELLINI, Detail from

fig.

58.

GIOVANNI BELLINI T/?e Feast of the Gods

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.,

Widener Collection

59

CLAUDE LORRAIN
Shepherd and
his

Flock
Library,

The Pierpont Morgan

60

New York

TITIAN The Rape

of Eiiropa

Isabella Stewart

Gardner Museum, Boston

61

BARNETT NEWMAN
DaijI
Whitney Museum
of

American

Art,

New York

13

SEEING

AND

KNOWING

I
I

had been

sitting

through the

first

part
I

of the Sienese Palio.

Not being German,

dispose of a Hmited quantity of Sitzfleisch

flesh to
end. At

sit

with and was coming to an

the flag-waving
)

last, at last

but

O how

long

it

did

last!

was

over,

and

the flashing

by

of the galloping horses

would only take a moment more.

I

do not enjoy unanimity.

I
it.

suffer

from

crowd emotion, and resent

So

had

not been too happy under the impact of

communal enthusiasm.
pageants.

Besides,

I dislike

They

are as

much
up

a fake as

forged pictures, and the descendants of

ancient houses
forbears have

who

dress

as their

little in

common with them

except clothes.

So

all in all I

was glad that the perform-

ance had almost reached its end and that

soon
I

would be able
and meditate.

to steal

away and

digest

The sun had

just set

and the afterglow

flushed from the red palaces that guard

the theatre-shaped Piazza of Siena.

was

watching the

flicker of

fading light

when
17

FRANCESCO GUAR DI
Grand Canal

suddenly
ing,

became aware first of a creepfinally as of

Vietv of the

then of a crowding, and

a stream pouring into the paved arena

until
it

was brim-full

or (to

change the
If I

simile)

jammed

tight.

With what?

had

trusted

my

eyes

should have said

with flowers from a herbaceous border,

so multicoloured

was what
else.

actually saw,

and

saw nothing
I I

In an instant
the crazy-quilt

inferred that the mass,

at,
I

was looking

did not

consist of flowers or patchwork.

knew,
I

although in the growing dimness

could

not distinguish heads or faces, and the

18

jam was such that

saw no bodies, yet

knew
must

that this floral canopy not only

be, but

was

actually,

composed

of

human

beings.

So in Venice from a

window on

the

Grand Canal, where

lagoon,
to
I

it

opens toward the

was looking diagonally across

San Giorgio. Steamboats and motor-

launches were going up and

down and

were

so big in shape

and

so clearly

articulated, that
I

even

at a certain distance

recognized what they were. But what

it

was
2 GUARDI
detail

that

packed them

tight? Again,

as at Siena, spots of colour suggesting

from View of the Grand Canal

Hower gardens rather than what I unques^s:

tioningly

assumed they were, namely

I

passengers.

knew what they must be

At the same time

from experience, not from what was

presented to

my view.

kept seeing zigzaggy criss-cross silhouettes

and

my

eyes alone could not have

told

me

that they

were gondoliers stand-

ing and rowing in their gondolas. (1,2)

From my own house between Maiano

and Settignano
I

look over fields to the

Arno and

to other fields

beyond and

beyond, rising to meet the graceful dip

of the skyline. This receding space
is

studded pell-mell with rectangular white

spots.

That

is all

they are to the eye.

19

3 Detail from

fig.

happen
tell

to

know what

the eye does not

me, that they are houses which the

intervening distance prevents

recognizing for what they

nearer at hand, not
I

me from are. Much

or trans-

many

furlongs away,

see masses of green,

opaque

lucent or glistening.

They

are spiky or

smooth and,

as

if

supporting them,

roughly cylindrical somethings, vaguely

brownish, greenish, greyish.
in
I

have learnt

babyhood

that they are trees

and

vest

them with

trunks, with branches,

with twigs, with foliage, with single

leaves, according to their
cies, ilex,

presumed

spe-

chestnut, pine, olive, although

my eyes see only varying shades of green.

Perhaps
diction
I

am uneasy over

this contra-

between looking and knowing,

distressed over having to interpret every-

thing

we

see beyond, as tangible objects

in a familiar space.

So

revel in the

pictures of a van

Eyck or

a Rogier

van der

Weyden,

or their so-candid follower, the

Master of the Munich panels representing

the Life of the Virgin, because they make

me traverse space with no fatigue. They

attain this object

by the

exquisitely naive

device of diminishing, as the distance

from the eye increases, the

trees

size of houses,

and human

figures.

3,

20

4 ROGIER VAN DER

St.

WEYDEN

Luke

Paintirig the Virgin

for one, along

with millions of others

who may
satisfied

not think of these matters,

am

with their perspective; yet so

far as I

know

they have not, like Paolo

Uccello, kept their wives

5 PAOLO UCCELLO
Perspective drawing for a Chalice

awake with

their tossings over

mathematical con-

vergences.

5
is

The

fallacy or rather the trick

objects,

to

make

and

in particular

human

figures,

no matter

how diminished in size,

if

as tangibly visible as

you could touch

them. To identify them so clearly and

with such detail

as they increasingly

recede from the eye gives one the feeling

that at last one has got into the right kind
of world,

where

sight

is

not

dimmed by

distance truly a life-enhancing experience.

The ensuing paradox

overcoming
neither

arises

from the

fact that this life-enhancing sense of

spatial distance (while
)

we

move nor toil

is

produced by our
if

being

made

to see figures as

we had

come up with them

close at hand; while

as

a matter of fact at the distance

assumed we could not discern the shape

with the naked eye except as a vague blur.

We

remain unaware of the absurdity

earliest infancy

because from

we have

been unconsciously learning

to store our

23

minds with generic shapes with which

we
a

clothe objects animate and inanimate.

When we are given the cue that there is

man somewhere, anywhere, no how far away, we think of him as
human male must
have. All

matter

being

recognizable, and as having the shape a

we admit

is

that with gradual recession

from the angle

of vision this creature will diminish in

size.

So
6 Hellenistic fresco
Ulysses and ihe Laestnjgones

we

are not taken aback, not even

surprised, that in

most paintings human

EDGAR DEGAS

and, naturally, other animal figures retain

their perfectly recognizable, tangible

Carriage at the Races

shapes at distances where actually they

should look like mere blots.

Oddly enough, although Pompeian

painting seldom penetrates beyond a

middle distance,
distance distance
shapes,
if
(

it

blurs shapes at that

while a Degas at a like

7) paints horses and

men

with

not features, unchanged.

precisely, exactly

To reproduce

what

appears to the uninformed, untutored, to

the so-vaunted "innocent eye" should be,

we may assume,
sionist" artists.

the one aim of "impres-

We

should confine the

25

epithet "impressionist"

and

all its

deriva-

tives to representations of purely retinal

impressions.
Instead, the epithet
is

misused

in

various ways.

The inventors
it

of the term did not apply

to a

new and

peculiar

way

of seeing

shapes but to the most effective use of

pigments for reproducing colour, value

and tone
novelty

as usually seen

If

there

was

it

was

in the subject-matter, in

their preference for the socially

uncon-

ventional aspects of

life,

of the workaday,

vulgar, even brutal, even repulsive sides

of the

human lot.
of

The term was quickly wrenched out

its

original use

and misunderstood by

aestheticians as
off in a
gists as

meaning anything dashed

frenzy of creation, by archaeolo-

works of art weathered, timeworn,

blurred and of uncertain outline and

relief:

and by most

art critics (including

myself in the days of ignorance ) as swift

devil-may-care notation, no matter

how
it

incompetent,

how

absurd, so long as
free.
is

seemed unlaboured and

What we
since
it

generally call "seeing"

utilitarian convention, built

up in the race

has been

human and perhaps

when

still

"higher animal"; and in us

26

CLAUDE MONET

individuals of to-day

by

all

sorts of

The River

contacts

and conditionings

to

which we

are submitted during the years prior to

self-awareness.

Most

of these conventions are strictly

concerned with the recognition of objects

we want to approach or avoid, but some

are representational.
It is

with these

last

that

we have

to

do now.
is

Representation

a compromise with

chaos whether visual, verbal, or musical.

The compromise prolonged becomes

27

convention.
a season, as

The convention may

is

last for

the case with fashion, or

for thousands of years, as in ancient

Egypt

and Mesopotamia and most other

as well as in

China

lands, Asian, African,

American, before their contact with

hellenized Europeans.

The

history of an art should be the

it

account of the successive conventions

has suffered up to date. To a singular

degree these conventions have tended to

a certain similarity the world over. Until

not long ago discussion was

rife as to

whether they spread from one centre or

were due

to stages of civilization.

Thus

neolithic art tends to curious resem-

blances which convinced

many

that,

for instance, the sculptures of Central

America were derived from Egypt or vice

versa, those of the Nile valley

from the

heirs of Atlantis, namely, the artists of

Yucatan, Guatemala, or Mexico.

easier to

It is

assume

that,

given a similar

way

of visualizing, given like tools

terials,

and ma-

the results could not be very

It
is

different.

probable that Central

Americans did not attain an advanced

neolithic use of instruments until

many

centuries after

Egypt became acquainted

with

iron,

and even after the same Egypt

28

began

to

be altered by Hellenic influence.

or

Assuming that one

Mexico can be

two scrawls

in

identified as copies of

Asiatic symbols, they could have affected

Mayas and Aztecs no more than Hellenistic

representation was affected

by an

Indian ivory dug up not long ago from

the ruins of Pompeii.
If art is as

primitive
in birds

much an animal function in man as in the rest of creation,

insects

and beasts,

and creeping
for

things, then there

is

no reason

assum-

ing that

it

was diffused from one

centre,

any more than the family, the

tribe, the

clan, the

use of

fire,

the contrivance of

shelters,

and numberless other arrangeinstitutions.

ments and
If

we wish
in

to think in earnest

we must

keep

mind
is

unfailingly

and constantly

that art
arbitrary.

convention, although not

Conventions that outlast the

ages are habitual shortcuts to effective

communication, whether the end be

practical or representational.

The alphabet

is

a convention. So
is

is all

arithmetical notation. So

mathematics,

even the highest. Indeed,

it

may be

the

most absolute of conventions without

validity outside the mind,
ity exists
if

indeed valid-

anywhere outside our so-human

29

minds. The words

of

we

use, the

words

workaday speech,

are conventions.

Within us a seething cauldron steaming

with stenches and suave vapours; or a
Noah's ark crowded with champing,
milhng, whirhng, fluttering beasts and
birds, creeping

and crawhng

things,

each

standing for a something of ourselves, an

incipient sensation, an urge, a wisp of

thought, a yearning. Outside our so-called

selves the treacherously simplified dis-

tance with

its

illusive

but shapeless
pot of gold at
I

beyond, as alluring

as the

the foot of the rainbow, after which

recall

running eighty years ago. Above

a sky ever changing

and ambivalent with

cloudy symbols of a high romance, but

also of terror, horror,

doom

or of chill,

damp, domestic discomfort

to the

only. Nearer

eye the multiplicity, the count-

lessness of everything, the leaves

trees,

on the

the endless variety of things,

in the field of

animate and inanimate,

vision,

moving, never staying put.

describe them,
of

How

name them, how

classify

them and, hardest

them
so that

how all, how

stabilize

we end by agreeing
outlines, will

on what sounds, what

invariably call

up the same words, the

same images? Only those who never have

30

attempted to paint or to write ignore

what agony it is to communicate to others

what one wants
to represent or to say.

And
one

the joy of creative art comes

when

is

lured to hope that he has found the

cypher, the symbol, the generic shape or

scrawl, the hieroglyph, the convention,
in short, that will
is

do

it.

The

prosaic task

to

prove

it

and fix it with pen and pencil

it

so that to others
it

will

mean almost what

means

to ourselves.

We
The

cannot kindle
fire

when we

will

that in the heart resides,

The

spirit

bloweth and

is still,

In mystery our soul abides;

But tasks

in hours of insight will'd

Can be through hours

of

gloom

fulfill'd.

(Matthew Arnold, Morality,

lines 1-6.)

Our

entire being

and doing

consists of

a series of conventions
successive.

permanent or
so

We

take

them

much

for

granted,

we

are so

unaware

of them, that

we

apply the word "conventional" either

to those

ways

of writing

and acting that

us, or to the

are losing their hold

on

manners and customs of

eigners

outsiders, for-

whom

in our heart of hearts

we

believe subjects for anthropological

research while

we

alone are rational.

I

(As

write (August 1948)

wonder
31

whether half of our present troubles are

not due to conventions regarding international behaviour as old as

Homer and

long since branded as "absurd',' "lethal"

"malignant" ghosts from

whom we cannot
to have, as

shake ourselves

free.

So long then
need, as

as

we want

we

we must have, contact with others of our own species, we can have it only through conventions. If we shed
any instinctively or throw them over
deliberately, either they are replaced

before too long or we

fall

back into private

universes, self -immured, incominunicado

as

we
I

risk

being

at present.

admit of innumerable approaches,

conventions of any and every sort (9),

not only in our Europe but everywhere
else in all times or places.

Provided of

course that the object

is

not distorted or
so that
it

besmirched or even befouled

raises displeasure or

even disgust. Pro-

vided
for

still

more

that the object can be,

compromise, instantly recognized.

Literature,
certainly,
is

Anglo-American

literature

now overshadowed by

the

glossolaly of Gertrude Stein

and still more

by the polyglot etymological puns and

soap-bubbles of James Joyce.
I

can see

what fun both these

jokers

must have
32

had.

What

cannot understand

is

that

almost the entire hterary world of Eng-

land and America, including responsible

university professors, take

them seriously,

write deliriously or solemnly, and always

portentously, about them. Indeed, in a

recent weekly, supposed to be one of

the most authoritative in Great Britain,

Finnegans Wake was compared

deepest Shakespeare.
It is

to the

worse

in the visual arts.

Words
word out

drip with sub-meanings. Take a

9

PAUL SIGNAC
at Clichij

of the colour-vat in our

own minds where

Quay

7*fV

'

:i^

10

HILTON BROWN
i

Study for the Screen Series No.

St.

Louis, ig66

it

soaks;

do what you can

it,

to

wring

it

clean, to dry
it,

to

harden

it,

to crystalhze

as the

French have done with

their

language for three whole centuries until

the other day: yet

some

trace of meaning,

besides

what

is

intended, sticks. Not so

with straight
circles,

lines

and

dots, squares

and

and other geometrical diagrams

in

no visual contact with actuality and

related to each other onlv in the executant's impenetrable selfhood

(

lo

Addicts of cross-word puzzles and kin-

dred games have been trained and

exercised
(

as

we

all

are through play

to

excel in the deciphering of these enig-

matic messages. Here

reassert that

communication

is

made
of

possible

by

ac-

cepted conventions and by these only,

and that the history

all

all

expression, of
arts in

the

arts,

and of the visual

particular, should be, can be, nothing but

an account, and perhaps an attempt to

interpret,
its

successive conventions.

A
it,

tradition, a convention,

needs conit,

stant manipulation to vivify

to

to enlarge

keep

it

fresh

and supple, and capable and producing

of generating problems
their solution.

To keep

a convention alive

and growing
genius,

fruitfully requires creative

fails
it

and when that

either

35

becomes mannered and academic or

runs "amok^ as in the last few decades.

The

first

happened

to Florentine art
art

about 1550, to Venetian

(although
it

about 1600
in the

had an aftermath
to

XVIIIth century),

Flemish
until
it

art in the

XVIth century (11)

was

rein(

vigorated and renewed by Rubens

12

and Van Dyck. But from the Xllth

to the

XXth century somewhere

in

in our world,

our part of Europe, a genius never

failed to
11

come

to the rescue,
it,

who

seized

JOACHIM

A.

UYTEWAEL

the convention, vitalized

it

and handed

The DeluEe

on.

[^,

12

RUBENS
of Paris

The Judgment

IT
The
visual arts

(excepting
it

architecture

to the extent only that

does not depend

on appeals

to our sense of

weight and

support, to our breathing, to our feelings

for space ) the visual arts are, I repeat,

a compromise

between what we see and

what we know.
37

13 Paleolithic painting of Bison,

The

Palaeolithics of Biscaya
(

and the

Lascaux (Dordogne).

Dordogne

13

had

to learn to see

how
so

the bison looked and

how he moved
him with

that they might get at

javelin or sling.

spike or

Few

representations of

animals in action surpass the paintings

of Altamira. In

bone scratchings of the

stalk

same period deer

14 Paleolithic Venus from
Balzi Rossi (Ventimiglia).

through reedy

marshes. The

last

betray a certain aware-

ness of surroundings, which foreshadows

landscape.

The hunted

is

there, but the

hunter, the man, seldom appears, and in

the few cases
scarcely

when he
for

does,

you would

know him

human. Not being

pursued for food, he did not interest the

artist.

Indeed

it

was only

in the

Aurignacian

period that sculptors began to represent

the human figure, beginning with females
like the so-called

Venuses found

in

South
(

East and South Central Europe

14

They have
and are
of the

breasts like bottles,

huge

behinds, small almost featureless faces,

startlingly like the masterpieces

most admired wood and stone

carvers of our

own

day.

39

With scant anticipations, as for instance

at

K6m-el-Ahmar, Egypt no
B.C. offered

later

than

3000

a completely thought-

out convention of the human nude, female

as well as

male (15),
it

so satisfactory to

the sculptor that

suffered scarcely any

change

till it

collided with the Hellenistic

concept; so standardized that the upper

part of a figure could be done

by one

artist

and the lower by another

away. Knowing had got so
better of seeing that for

living far

much

the

more than 2,000

years artist and public understood each

other without discussion, accepted their

visual limitations

and enabled the

crafts-

man
of

to

produce

in

every material those

masterpieces of figure art the enjoyment

which is even now

At
this point I
if I

so

much of paradise.
to

beg the reader

have

patience

insert a

few words about

the differences between Egyptian and

Mesopotamian

figure arts,

and venture
differ.

to

suggest the reason

It is

why

they

possible that objects in

wood and
to the

other fragile materials, as well as painted

surfaces,

have perished owing

marshy land and damp climate

potamia.

of

Meso-

Among Mesopotamian
young
girls in their

figures

there are no

nude
deli-

loveliness offering lotuses,

no subtly

40

15 Egyptian statuette,
c.

2500

B.C.,

Min-nefer,

Overseer of the Tenants of the Court

cate wood-carvings of youthful females

swimming and holding

things out of

water, no groups in clay or

wood of sturdy

peasants pounding, no robust

kneading and

rolling,

such as

women we find so

frequently in Egyptian paintings, sculptures

and ohjets

d'art

16

Until the

Assyrian period Mesopotamian statues

and

reliefs

never show people without

clothes, clothes that

seldom articulate

the bodies they cover and scarcely distinguish between the sexes.

The

artists

seem

to

have avoided nakedness and

felt

never to have

the desire of exalting

I

the naked to the nude.

cannot recall
arts

unclothed figures in the

of the

Land-between-the-Rivers until Hellenistic

influence produced the innumerable

figurines of the fertility goddess.

are,

These

however, more naked than nude with

their projecting hips

16 Fragment of an Egyptian
wall painting, from Thebes

and sagging bellies.

This

is

not the place to compare the

achievements of Nile and Euphrates.

7tli

17 Assyrian Relief of Sennacherib, century B.C.

They

are

now discussed more

first

for priority

than quahty. The

settled will leave

question

when

open the

other, namely,

that of quality. There the answer seems

clear.

Despite a certain muddiness of

envelope and sloppiness of contour, due

perhaps to

its

having begun with clay as

only material, Mesopotamian art had

much

to

its

credit:

as,

for instance, a
its

grave and imposing masculinity in

statues,

and

in the Assyrian period, action

of the highest order

and the dawn

(

of a
its

modern

feeling for space

17 )

But

43

range was limited. Never playful, never

gay, never elegant, never expressive of joy

on the part of the on the part of

artist,

or of delight

his public.

Let

me

repeat

that this conclusion

may be drawn from

perhaps, but not

the absence of artefacts which might

modify

this impression,
it.

obliterate

Minor objects depend even more than

monumental ones on mastery

nude.

of the

The

fact that the

it

Mesopotamians
(

have ignored
others,

may be

a reason

among

no doubt, but
)

likely

enough the
is

principal one

why

their art

so limited

in subject-matter

and

so lacking in deli-

cacy, in refinement, in charm. These

qualities can

be obtained only when the

of

draughtsman has the same command

the articulations of the

human body that

the poet has over the vocabulary and

idiom he

is

using.

Without

it,

who

could

have made the drawings on Greek vases

of the early

Vth century

b.c.

(i8), or

the figurines

known
which

as

"Tanagra" and

thousands of other objects from the Nile-

Aegean
at,

lands,

it is

a joy to look

to caress, to

dream over? Egypt and

Hellas and their daughters Italy and

France have surpassed

in the

all

other peoples

advantage they have taken of the

44

2j^t^AU^ 1JJvtf>. t3 \1
,.

'

mmmw^Amfmm

18 Greek vase, Red-figured Stanmos

-''K>-5^

19 American Indian
Pctroghjph, Painted Desert,

Arizona

nude
tion,

for every conceivable representa-

no matter how monumental, how

static,

how

active,

how

grave,

how
it

playful.

The nude
and render

is

a convention that

took

thousands of years to perfect and impose

so familiar to civilized
it

man
from

that he no longer distinguishes

"nature!' It

would seem
it

that like

most of

our notions

started out as a concept

of generic shape.

When

a child

drew

wasp-like tiny creatures hopping like fleas

over the paper. As an adult

discovered

that at a certain stage of mental

and

manual development,
tions of our species

similar representa-

were found scratched

all

on every kind of surface

20 Cycladic
Idol,
B.C.

over the

Second Millenium

earth among Sioux and other American

46

21 Reproduction of a Cretan
Figure of a Youth, painted at Knossos
relief

Indians of the Great Plains as late

as, if
(

not later than, a hundred years ago

This palaeolithic state of
as

19

mind gave way

learned to

under compulsion

man

observe. In Egypt the urge

may have
recognize
to

come from
that the

the anxiety to produce statues

fail to
it

Ka could not

as himself. In Hellas

seems

have

been due

to the sheer curiosity of the

sublime ape that was the Greek, combined

with the itch of his hand

to

shape and

model and

refine.

He

experimented with

figures like the Helladic, looking like

cellos or a certain

kind of bottle with a

small middle and a round-knobbed or spiky stopper

(

20

or with cake-walking

busts and bird-like legs as in

Minoan

art

(21), which continued into the Dipylon

47

23 Greek Statue of a youth of the

"ApoUo"

type,

615-600

b.c.

22 Mantiklos "Apollo,
Greek,
c.

700

b.c.

of about 1000 B.C.

(

Then toward 700

b.c.

22

after the discovery of the Nile

and

its

eye-opening wonders, he began to

carve figures of young

to

men and no doubt

(

draw them

as well),

which led him

through early Athens (23), through

Olympia, through Argos, through Sikyon

to Polyclites, to Phidias, to Praxiteles, to

Lysippus and their hosts

24

48

24 Greek Athlete, 3rd quarter

5th century B.C.

L___-

The quest was

for a

compromise
in

between concept and observation

representing the

human

figure. Oscillat-

ing, vibrating, easily pulled this

way and
as "the

that way, the

compromise known
to our

nude" has lasted on

own day except

for periods of occupation like our so-

called "Dark"

and "Middle" Ages. At the

dark period in the North,

end of this
its

last

greatest artistic genius, Albrecht

25

ALBRECHT DURER

Dlircr,

thought of nothing so
It

Apollo

acquiring this canon (25).

much as is now
of

suffering another occupation, but this

time only

partial,

and

it is

hoped

no

protracted duration.

Ill
This partial occupation
causes.
is

due

to

many

Two

or three

may be

selected

as reasons for its suddenness, as well as

for

its

feeling so self-important, so self-

caressing.

The

exhibitions of phases of represen-

tational art prior to the Mediterranean

classical,

excavated by archaeologists or

discovered by explorers, and their repro-

duction in illustrated papers, have tended

51

26 African ancestral figure from Mali

to unsettle the already blase visual con-

cepts and convictions of painters

sculptors.

and

Just before the of mercantile Paris

first

world war a genius

in

propaganda arrived

and

settled

down on

the ground

floor of a

building close to the Palais

Bourbon. There he displayed and showed

off

Negro wood-carvings

of

human shapes

and ventriloquized about them with

phrases that were quickly taken up by
the most authoritative art critics in Paris,

London and New

It

York.

26
to describe the

would take a Balzac

power and the glory

and
their influence for

of gifted dealers

good and

for evil

over the public. Not easy to overpraise

the Durand-Ruels, the Wildensteins, or a
Vollard, for

what they did

to popularize

the great "impressionists" from

Manet

to

Cezanne. Less conscientious tradesmen

worked through

their stooges.

remem-

ber one of them boasting that until his

recent and so successful invasion of the
art market,

he had been a corn-broker.

The
and

idolized poets, painters, sculptors

critics after

the

first

world war gave

vent to the feeling of despair regarding

the future

by expressing

their

contempt

for everything in

the social order, in

52

politics,

and

in all the arts that to that pass.

had

brought them

Ever since about 700 B.C. ( when, thanks

to the Greeks, art

began

to

be progres-

sive

visual concepts, visual convictions,

is

that

to say visual conventions,

at

have

been nibbled

and distorted by the

craving for novelty, by the conceit of ex-

pecting to do better, or by any other urge

to exercise function
effectively

more

freely,

more
It

and more advantageously.

or less unconsciously,

happened more

timidly and always with the hope of perfecting an

art,

never with the deliberate

purpose of throwing over the accumulated treasure of traditions

and

skills

hard

won

in the course of so

many

cena

turies.

Even the "Dark Ages^ through

civilization

deep and general decline of

for

which

as yet,

even after a second

world war, there has been no parallel

went on working, not

clearly

on the

lines

of a classical past but certainly not in

deliberate opposition to

it.

It is in

our

own day
all its

that for the

first

time in history

a long-accepted classical tradition with

invaluable conventions has been

wantonly, jeeringly thrown away. The

damage done
penitential

will not

be made good by

moods

of uncertain sincerity

53

sy

>>

^M.

l!l'n"i/i'

>^'J

I'

#"4^'

'

'J,

27b EDGAR DEGAS

Portrait of

Mile Hortense Valpingon

and proposals

to find salvation

by creepMother
of

ing back into the

All Things.

womb
it

of the

In the figure arts

has meant throwing

away composition,
Degas had shown

for

which already a

a distaste that in the

(

long run will count against him

27 )

It

was accompanied by the conclusion not

based on seeing, on observing, but on
exasperation and on the preconceived

assumption that the squalid, the sordid,

27a

EDGAR DEGAS
Cassatt at the Louvre

the violent, the bestial, the misshapen, in

short that

Mary

low

life

was the only

"reality!'

55

28 FRANCISCO GOYA

Que

Tal? (The

Old Ones).

29

BARTOLOMEO MANFREDI
of

(attributed to)

The Chastisement

Love

30 12th century fresco

St.

in

Nicholas, Tavant

(Indre et Loire)

King David Playing the Harp

Painters turned for their inspiration not

to the great masters of all centuries to those,

but

whether competent or incom-

petent,

whose subject-matter fanned their

fury against the Greeks. So they studied

Goya 28
(

Daumier, Lautrec and Forain

and, in the

more distant past, the inflated

vulgarities of Caravaggio's
(

and brutal

crudest followers

29 ) and further back

,

the daubers of the Xlth and Xllth centuries

(

30

touchingly expressive but as

ignorant and incompetent as painters of

recent years have aspired to be.

57

32 ERNST

LUDwiG KiRCHNER

Artillerymen

31 CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI
Torso

33 JOAN

MIRO
Lady
in

Portrait of a

1820

Every misuse of the human

figure

was

preached, pictured and praised. Nothing

was dreaded so much as being academic,

that
is

to say,

having a standardized

34

WILLEM DE KOONING Woman and Bicycle

concept, a convention with regard to the

nude (31-34).

The most remarkable draughtsman

still

alive has taken every

advantage of
(

his skill to hide his true gifts

35,

36 )

Perhaps

in

deepest secret he draws in

orthodox fashion everything he bedevils

while painting, as
I

have been assured

Joyce wrote out in plain King's English

35 PABLO PICASSO
Ambroise Vollard

what he

fricasseed for his printed prose.

in "Zentral-

Likewise the one painter

y
'^vs

>

'

^i-

V,_

_,
r

^
,"

^
\\

H
\

(0

4
\

Europa" who composes and paints and

illustrates in a

way

to survive the tossings

and nauseas

of seasonal fashions, feels

obliged to obscure his purpose with

puerile malpractices. Anything to get

away from
erect in the

the sane-asylum which for

thousands of years art has been trying to

36 PABLO PICASSO

mad-house welter of chaos.

Weeping

Woman

These routes might have stumbled on

a path that leads back to sobriety

sanity; for withal they

and

had not

utterly

abandoned the world

of concrete, tan-

gible, let us say "objective^ things of lived

actuality.
at the
its

A remotely parallel movement

of the Gothic period, with
calli-

end

spidery architecture, recklessly

graphic draperies, and affected smiles

(37),

ended not

in a blind alley

but in

a reaction that produced the van Eycks

and Rogier and Conrad Witz and Fouquet

(38) and Masaccio and Brunelleschi

and Bramante.
As
yet,

however, no reaction against

the chopping and juggling, distorting and

fooling with shapes!

No leader, no guide

has appeared, ^^^hen a small boy of seven

or eight, at an age

when for fear of being

I

laughed

at

one dare not ask questions,

table,

gave up trying to draw a

I

because

despaired of showing the underside as

well as the upper one.

cela.

On

change tout

Nowadays

it is

only what cannot

interests the

be represented visibly that

"artist" of the day. Visceral, intestinal

and

meaningless cerebral

activities,

with no

conceivable visual shape, or even concept

of a shape, but

known

to exist, absorb

37 School of Paris, c. 1390 Madonna and Child with Saints

from the Large Bargello Diptych

the limner to the severe exclusion of the

sensible, sensuous, sensual

world of the
62

38 JEAN FOUQUET,

C.

I450,

Virgin and Child, from the

Melun Diptych

eye.

And

thus "knowing"

is

now revelling
still:

in a victory, a
let

"knock-out" a short one,

in

us

hope over "seeing!' Worse way bacK

despair of finding a

to art, to
art"
is

what is now called "representational

as

if

there could be visual art that

not representational or based on what has

been represented in cowardly despair,

painters

and

sculptors, painters

more

particularly,

have deserted the world of

all

concrete shapes with

39 PIET

that the crafts-

MONDRIAN

man

seeing and conventionalizing could

of them,

Diagonal Composition

make

and have taken

to

geometrizing, to abstracting, to "nonrepresentational

40
art!'

HANS HOFMANN

The term

"abstract art" like such

Exuberance

contradictions in terms as a wet dryness,

an icy heat, or a

soft hardness,

may be

conceivable to the mind but scarcely to

the senses. For
visual art has

many

thousands of years

been based on ideated

sensations, on. a

compromise between
sees

what one knows and what one

between what one
sees
It

and

and what one can

therefore

reproduce for others.

would

seem

to

correspond to a continuous need

or desire or

demand of human nature,

matter and
It is

of
as

man who

is

spirit,

body

well as mind.

not likely that he will

be henceforth

satisfied

with the store of

64

geometrical squares, lozenges, diagonals,

circles, globes, trapezoids, parallelepi-

pedons when he asks

(

for the

bread of

art

39

or

No perfection in smearing canvas wood or paper with faint colours,

)

guaranteed to represent nothing, no

in buttering surfaces

skill

with pigments, as a

good and

faithful

nursemaid or Werther's

Charlotte buttered bread, will replace

pictures
(

40

no segments of globes

in

wood or stone, no matter how caressingly

polished and put together so as to suggest

broad-bottomed, deep-breasted females,

41

HENRY MOORE

will replace multimillennial sculpture

Reclining Figure

(41).

42 JACQUES LIPCHITZ

Mother and Child,

II

Neolithic artists

had

their reasons for

doing

women

with colossal buttocks and

huge breasts. They were interested only

in the reproductive functions of the

females and reproduced these only with

scarcely a thought of face

and

features.

Have
43 LARRY BELL
Untitled

sculptors

and painters
(

of to-day the

same magical purpose?

42

What enjoyment
even

this

kind of designing

procures with chalks, inks, paint, and

clay, marble, bronze,
is

not seriously

aesthetic but frivolously intellectualistic,

like

cross-word puzzles and similar cari-

catures of noble

games

like chess.

If by "abstract art" is

meant geometrical

shapes as distinct from those the average

man

thinks he sees in

what he

calls

"nature" (43), then sm'ely that art exists

nowadays

in great

abundance and with

its

fascinating elegance of

own

in our

machinery and
turns out.

in

what

this

machinery

From

the elegant instruments of de-

struction to well-shaped vehicles,

from

the intricate devices for precision to toys

and writing-table gadgets and

toilet articles, I

delicate

suck delight from shapes

that enjoy the exquisite

economy
means

of

the perfect adaptation of

to ends. as

And

that

is

a beauty in

its

own way,

67

the beauty of genre

or,

on another

level,

the beauty of Holiness.

If

that be so,

why

try to juggle

with

disembodied

lines

and curves

that can

have none but a

private

strictly

incapsulated

meaning?
is

So there

but one
in

way

out of the

brambly maze

which we are blindly

beating about: follow the tenuous

of reason that will lead us

beam
to

back

the compromise between "seeing" and

"knowing'' between retinal vision and

conceptual looking, on which

art as

rests visual

an eternal function of

human
if

nature. Purely conceptual patterns,

seriously pursued, can

end in pure mathepioneer of that

matics only.

An eminent
him

sublime pursuit assured

practice gave
visions

me

that

its

and

ecstasies

beyond

belief.
is

Unfortunately the highest

mathematics
ing of those

beyond the understandnot learned

its

who have

language, a language given to few to

master.

With

little effort,
is

and some

train-

ing, visual art

communicable and

intelligible universally.

68

TV
Let us go back to the
talk
earlier part of this

which had a beginning, has no

will

middle and
there
is

have no end, because

finality to

no conceivable

what

one

may say about things not quantitative

even then!
(Statistics are quanti-

and
tative,

but what easier than to manipulate

evil intention!

them with every

I

ventured to say that our compromise

of the

human figure,

our canon of

it,

will

outlast the rebellion

it.

now raging
etc.,
it

against

Dadaists, Surrealists,

have done

nothing but exploit

and then have

and men and

shirked the struggle and deserted from

life

and

living things

women and
of the

nature for a Nirvana of

abstraction. This compromise, this

canon

human

figure,

has been studied in

a delightfully humanistic

book by the
in a

Dane Conrad Lange and

detailed and learned

most
Italian

work by the

Alessandro Delia Seta, and need not be

pursued further here.

Let us hope that students
as gifted

and

as learned will hasten to give us what, so

far as I

know,

is still

lacking, an equally

69

illuminating treatise on the compromise

which, next to that of the

human

figure,

plays the most important part in representational art I refer to landscape.^

I

have already touched upon its humble

beginnings in the Aurignacian or Magdalenian age and

its

modest progress

until the Hellenistic period. In the sur-

viving wall paintings as well as in the

so-called Alexandrian reliefs

we

find

representations of the out-of-doors that

are idyllically suburban with scarcely a

background; foliage treated conceptually

and

trees, generally stone-pines, often

(

wind-tossed
apt to be

as in nature

they are

when near

the sea.

From

this to the

landscape convention

perfected by Giorgione and Titian and

their followers

and successors down

to

the other day,

if

would have been but

had continued

a step

Antique

art

to discover

better

and ever better conventions

for

representing microcosm and macrocosm.

Instead,
it

declined to the requirements

of a slum society.
Since writing

The human figure could

K. Clark's book,

this,

into Art, has appeared, anticipated to

Landscape some extent by

Max Friedliinder's on tlie same subject. A forgotten book pubhshed by Murray in 1885 also deserves mention: Josiah Gilbert's Landscape in Art before
Claude and Salvatore.

70

not be entirely ignored even in the

catacombs, where

it

had an indispensable

role as a crude didactic hieroglyph

shall

we

say as "art engage.' But the

outer world ceased to interest a civilization, a society

reduced to hiding in hovels,

shelters piled

cellars

and make-shift

up

out of the crumbs of past amenities.

Ai't

survived after a fashion at Con-

stantinople

and

its

coasts

and with the

Macedonian emperors continued by the

Comneni
44 Miniature from the Menologion
of Basil
II, 1

settled

on a formula

for land(

scape that

we find in the Menologia

44

ith century a.d.

and other illustrated manuscripts

as well

45 JAN VAN EYCK?

Baptism of Christ, Miniature from the Trivulzio Book of Hours

as in mosaics. It

was reduced

to escarped,
like

ribbed

hills

with an opening

an

inverted triangle in the middle, and one

or

two

trees

growing out of the metallic

trees as a rule consisted of a
tuft.

rock.

These

thin stem

and a thick

relatively

naturalistic painting of a plant or

two

appeared

in the crinkled fore-edge.

This token landscape which satisfied

the mediaeval world gave place without

rhyme

or reason, with no notice of

to exquisite evoca-

impending change,
tions of

dewy
Hours

distances and cool space

that

we can
of

still

enjoy in the Trivulzio

Book

45 ) but no longer in

the Turin one, destroyed

by

fire

some

decades ago.

If

not by the van Eycks, then

inventive and creative.
their followers in the

by an

artist as

With them, and

72

Low Countries, began and prospered and

triumphed the views, the scenery that
reached their culmination in Patinier
(

46

and Henri de

Bles,

and decHned
be
a

for

hundred years

or more, to

rein-

vigorated, restated

by Rubens,

Fleming

who,

as

no other northerner, profited by

the sunlight and the bread and wine of

Italy.

46 JOACHIM PATINIER
Rest on the Flight into Egypt

47 TITIAN
Noli

me tangere

Rubens brought Titian

the Titian

to the North,

who

perfected the concept of

it

landscape and gave

which, with
all sorts

generic shapes

of variants, prevailed
(

well into the XlXth century

47,

48

This receipt massed lush foliage in

graceful assemblage with crisp edges, and
revelled in glen-like middle distances

and romantic horizons. Colour glowing and

radiant, tending to rich brown. This

pattern of "nature^ in which both seeing

48

RUBENS
of Steen

and knowing united

to create the scenery

Landscape with Castle

49 JULES
Tlie

DUPRE

best suited to a sensuously idyllic yet

Hay Wagon

noble existence, had become by the

beginning of the XlXth century so juiceless,

so shrivelled that little

(

was

left

except the brown tree

I

49 )

cannot recall in what English author,

Leslie,

whether Northcote or Haydon or

I

read of a discussion about the

trees.

way
to

they were painting

interlocutors

One

of the

was challenging the other

look out of the

as

window and discover one

suc-

brown

as

they were doing them.

The Titianesque landscape was

by Constable
50 JOHN

ceeded by the experimental one furthered

(

50

and pursued by many

CONSTABLE

zestful painters of the last century,

Weymouth Bay
51

French

for the
(

most
.

part, culminating in

PAUL CEZANNE
Sainte Victoire seen

Cezanne
effort
is

51

My admiration for their

like his

Mont

boundless, and could Cezanne

from Bihemiis Quarry

have been succeeded by talents

76

own, who knows but that landscape

might now be well on the way

to trans-

lating into his, Cezanne's, terms the space

compositions of Perugino and Raphael,

the idylls of Giorgione
( (

54

and Titian

60

the grave magnificence of Poussin

of
it

and the enchantments

(

Claude Lorrain

59

and Turner. But

(

ended with

bump!

52
is

A
are

convention
as, to

largely a matter of

notation

an overwhelming degree,

mere

fashions. In the painting of

is

landscape foliage
element.
52 NICOLAS DE STAEL
Sicilian

most important
its

How

to

convey a sense of

incalculable detail requires an unusually

careful

Landscape

compromise between seeing and

iit_

n^^^
53 13th century mosaic, detail from
Tlie Last

knowing. Except when close at hand

we

Judgment

see masses of green with dabs of yellow

Baptistry, Florence

and

russet, or sparkling

amber and crim-

son leafage and spiky outlines. Ribbed

and ragged conifers represented trees

in

Mesopotamian
already been

art,

and reference has

to the

made

way they were

conventionalized in ripe and late Antiquity as well as in the

in

Middle Ages. Thus

Byzantine mosaics (53) (now for the

Italian soil only)

most part found on

79

trees could take the highly convention-

alized shape of elaborate patterns as

remote from what

54 GIORGIONE

we

call

"nature" as the

foliage in XVIth-century Persian rugs.

The Tempest

The

revival of curiosity in the

XVth

55 JEAN-BAPTISTE-CAMILLE

century led to the observation that f ohage

COROT

was composed

of single leaves

and

A View near Volterra

accordingly the temptation to paint each

leaf, as

even

in a

Perugino or Raphael,
to

must have been hard

overcome, and
(

seldom was before Giorgione

Titian.

54

and

No

notation

more

successful than

the compromise of the two last between seeing and knowing, sight and concept.

No wonder

their convention lasted

(

till

the other day

55 )

Early in that century, before Giorgione

and

Titian,

Fra Angelico treated

dis-

tances in a startlingly unconceptual way.

With a medium
Cezanne

as ductile, as plastic, as

exploited, the one beatified 81

artist

might have anticipated that master

to

an interesting degree. AngeHco's

younger contemporary, Fihppo Lippi,

painted forest glens with a freshness
evocative of

mushrooms and other earthy

and herby odours. Neither was taken up

because with Baldovinetti and with the
Pollajuolo the topographic, ahiiost carto-

graphic, interest based on mathematical

perspective prevailed, and no doubt the

absorbing preoccupation with the nude

militated against intensive interest in the

outer world. For which reason Michelangelo's reluctant landscapes are as

abstract as those of the aged

pastels. Botticelli offers

Degas

in his

but glimpses

through windows, and then of flowers and

foliage chiefly. Except in his Berlin Saint

Sebastian and to some degree in his

frescoes of the Sistine Chapel,
I

can recall

no extensive views As

of the out-of-doors.

for Leonardo, although himself a

art of transfiguring

magician in the
nature, he

had

little

but contempt for

landscape, Botticelli's in particular, and

wi^ote that all

you had

to

do

to paint

one

was

to slap

any clear surface with a

in

sponge dipped

pigment. Or was

it

malicious hint that such a result was truer

to actual seeing than the over-conceptual

82

one then obtained and obtaining? Later

Florentine landscape,
di
I

mean that of Piero

Cosimo, Fra Bartolommeo Andrea del

Sarto, Franciabigio, etc., did not go

much
the

beyond Perugino's

patterns, although
felt

Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea

influence of Giorgione, while Piero di

Cosimo

in his later years suffered the

attraction of

German

engravings.

North
56

Italian Quattrocento painting

(

ANDREA MANTEGNA
of the

was overshadowed by Mantegna

56

The Adoration

Shepherds

who circumscribed man and "nature^ and

all

the shapes he saw, with the precise

to

and elegant contours he willed them

have.

The

effect

is

of being transported to

a gem-like, jewel-like world, as

man-

made and owing

as little to nature as

Venice does as a town. His Ferrarese

followers, Tura, Cossa, Ercole Roberti, go

even further

in creating

worlds of hard

semi-precious stones, strange edifices and

fabulous distances. But two of

tegna's followers, Girolamo da

Man-

Cremona
in

and Liberale da Verona, discovered

their miniatures the fascination of the

dawn, and

his brother-in-law

Giovanni

Bellini the sky after sunrise

and before

sunset, as well as settled serene full

daylight. Bellini's presentations of nature,

although over-conceptual from our point

of

view and held back by knowing from

seeing and therefore given to an over-

naive notation

compare

his foliage

with
47
)

Titian's in the Feast of the

Gods

57,

where both painted successively), are

57 Detail from
fig.

58.

yet,

throughout his long career, among

the most impressive and most transport-

ing in existence.

He

was,

if

not the

inventor, one of the earliest painters of

the emotional and even the Romantic

landscape the landscape which with

sorts of

all

developments and variations led

84

58 GIOVANNI BELLINI

The Feast

of the

Gods

through Giorgione and Titian (54, 47),

Rubens and Salvator Rosa, Both and

Cuyp, Rembrandt and Seghers, Claude
(

59 ) and the Vernets, the Norwich School

to Corot,

and Turner,

and to the

so-called

"impressionists^ almost to our

own

day.

59

CLAUDE LORRAIN
his

Shepherd and

Flock

V
I

have done, but not ended. There

is

no

end to what one can hope to discover and

think about any subject of interest. Every
serious subject
I
is

infinite.

do not want the reader

I

to leave

me

with the idea that

expect the confusion,

struttings, blusterings,

solemn puerilities
taught, admired

that are

now practised,

and proclaimed

to last forever.

The man-

quake through which we have been

reeling during the last fifty years

may

trouble us for another

fifty years,
is

another

hundred

years; yet

what

even a cen-

tury in the history of mankind!

We have
shall

been through

as

much

again and again in

the last few thousand years.

settle

We

down some day and

all

stop enjoying

the sadistic or masochistic pleasure of

ignoring or combating

values except

those that arise from the part of us that

is

below the

belt.

Eyes and ears

to

will

reconquer their rights

inform head and

87

heart,

and these

will use

them

for

new

compromises between seeing and knowing,

between feeling and thinking.

In the past ages, art has sunk as low,

although probably with no such smirking

self-adulation, as
it

has to-day. After the

civilization
B.C.,

collapse of

Aegean

some-

where around 1500

there followed a

decline, a desiccation

known

as the

Geometrical

style. It

reduced the human

figure to isosceles triangles

their apexes,

meeting

at

which served

as waistline. It art
it,

had many
of to-day

affinities

with the abstract

and would have equalled

with the
to
will,

had not
gift

artists arisen

the

and steadfastness

work

zestfully

until they

attained the compromise

call

between seeing and knowing that we

"Greek
art!'

After the internal and external disasters

that overtook the

Roman Empire, reprein

sentational art sank so low,

the

88

Latin part of

it

at least, that sculpture

almost entirely disappeared and painting

produced but vague and involuntarily

grotesque attempts to reproduce
shapes.

human

Where Bvzantine

influences

could

persist, as in Italy, in Catalonia, in

Ottonian Germany, the disintegration

was never complete and recovery began

earlier.

In inaccessible regions like the

still

French Massif Central we can

frescoes of the Xlth

descry

and even Xllth

centuries

which

illustrate

Holy Writ and

Golden Legend with

positions of a crudity

figures

and com-

and absurdity that

critics

rouse the admiration of

and

perhaps the envy of certain painters of

to-day. Yet
its

by 1300 Italy had its

its

Cavallini,

Cimabue,

Giotto as well as the

Pisani,

and France and Germany already

Saint Gilles, Chartres,

had Moissac and

Rheims and Amiens, Bamberg, Naumburg

and Meissen.

89

60 TITIAN

The Rape

of

Europa

61

BARNETT NEWMAN
I

Day

Representational art

is

a function of

anthropoids ever since they have been

human, and

it

may be doubted whether

ihustrated papers and the movies will

put a stop to the psycho-physiological

urge to create with a more subtle instru-

ment than the camera.

I

do not hesitate

to

prophesy a revival
as arts

of sculpture

and painting

based

on the human nude

as the essential, the

vital factor in figure representation.

We

shall

come

to a

new compromise between

seeing and knowing which will serve as

a rolling platform for the artists
it

whom
and new

will carry

on

to

new

visions

creations.

VALLOMBROSA,

SUMMER

1948.

Design by Peter Oldenburg

Composed by
Finn Typographic Service,
Stamford, Connecticut.
Printed by
Inc.,

Livermore and Knight Company,

Providence, Rhode Ishmd.

Bound by

Colonial Press, Inc.,

Clinton, Massachusetts.

Photographic credits:
3,

Copyright A. C. L. Brussels;

26, Charles Uht;

33> 36, Soichi Sunami;

34, 61, Geoffrey Clements; 43, Ferdinand Boesch.

Seeing and knowing,

mam

701 1B489S 1968

3 IELdE D33flD

TISE