Art Theory: An Historical Introduction - Hardcover

Williams, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1405184140 ISBN 13: 9781405184144

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009

Synopsis

ART THEORY

ART THEORY

“[Art Theory] is a first-class introduction to the subject, revealing an unusual historical range, a command of diverse and often difficult ideas, and a natural flair for seeing the point – of art and of theory… Robert Williams has written a book I will keep on my shelf for rereading and I look forward to further works by him.”
John Haldane in The Art Book

Art Theory, Second Edition is a unique survey of Western thought about art from ancient times to today. This lucid and lively narrative, geared to the needs of the general reader and beginning students, consists of six chapters covering the major periods of Western art history: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the early modern period (Renaissance and Baroque), the Enlightenment, the nineteenth century, early twentieth-century modernism, and postmodernism. This new edition expands the original to include more in-depth coverage of contemporary art.

Wide-ranging and exceptionally balanced in its analysis, Art Theory relates theory to the practice as well as to the intellectual and cultural-historical currents of each period. This new edition is an indispensable read for students and art lovers alike.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Williams is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Art Theory and Culture in Sixteenth-century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne.

From the Back Cover

Art Theory, 2nd Edition is a unique survey of Western thought about art from ancient times to today. This lucid and lively narrative, geared to the needs of the general reader and beginning students, consists of six chapters covering the major periods of Western art history: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the early modern period (Renaissance and Baroque), the Enlightenment, the nineteenth century, early twentieth-century modernism, and postmodernism.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Art Theory

An Historical IntroductionBy Robert Williams

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2008 Robert Williams
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4051-8414-4

Chapter One

Antiquity and the Middle Ages

The Shield of Achilles

Ancient Greece and Rome produced a large and varied literature about the visual arts, but little is left of it, and the only theoretical text to survive in its entirety is the treatise On Architecture by Vitruvius. Writings of the kind we would classify as theoretical, critical, and even art-historical were in existence by the fifth century BCE - associated with the "high classical" phase of Greek art - and continued to be produced throughout antiquity, but what we know of them comes to us in the fragmentary form of citations in texts of other kinds: any effort to discuss systematic thought about art in the ancient world has to be built around the ideas of philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, and of rhetorical theorists such as Cicero and Quintilian, authors whose interest in visual art was fairly tangential to their work as a whole. Before attempting to do this, however, it is useful to consider the evidence of what might be called unsystematic thought: ancient literature also records ideas about art that reflect broadly based, "popular" attitudes, and these can be seen as the ground from which more sophisticated thought grew. Some of these ideas continued to be of concern down to the modern period, so that they were assumed to constitute the perennial or universal sources of art's interest.

The importance of the visual arts in the ancient world, their nearness to life as lived and imagined, is suggested even in myth. Creation myths often represent God as a kind of craftsman: the God of the Old Testament "lays the foundations of the earth" like an architect and fashions man "from the dust of the earth" like a potter or sculptor. In Greek myth, Prometheus forms the first man and woman from clay. Such stories reflect a regard for the skills necessary to make things, to manipulate materials, and to control natural forces. A similar regard is reflected in the magical properties often attributed to the products of craft: Hades possesses a helmet that can make the wearer invisible; Aphrodite's girdle causes anyone who looks at her to fall in love with her. Perhaps the most haunting of all stories associated with visual art is that of the sculptor Pygmalion, who carves the image of an ideally beautiful woman, falls in love with it, then, by praying to Aphrodite, obtains his wish of having it come to life. The tale reflects the capacity of images to suggest living presence, but also to inspire fantasy and to embody ideals - to supply what is lacking in life and thus to awaken desire. It reveals a very clear awareness that images can mobilize our deepest psychological resources.

Such myths suggest that art was understood and valued as a form of power over nature, a power that, even if limited, might sometimes seem to tread upon the prerogatives of the gods, and thus involve tragic consequences. Prometheus pays dearly for giving his creation the one gift, fire, that he believes will offer it some protection in a hostile world. The craftsman Daedalus is not only a master of materials but has a stratagem for almost any situation: he builds a labyrinth, devises wings with which to fly, and creates statues that move, that come as near to being alive as human power alone can make them - but he must watch his son Icarus perish with the very wings he has made for him. Orpheus, the musician, charms animals and even stones with his song; in what is surely the most haunting story about the power of music, he almost succeeds in bringing his lover Eurydice back from the land of the dead. In such tales, the artist figures as a kind of hero, struggling against the ultimately limiting conditions of human existence.

Ancient literature also testifies to the kind of day-to-day experience of art that seems more familiar to us. Homer's references to crafted objects indicate the significance, prestige, and fascination that painstakingly and finely made things held. His description of a simple brooch given as a present by Penelope to Odysseus may be compared with an example of the kind of goldsmith's work he might have known (figure 1.1):

It was fashioned of gold with double clasps, and on the front it was curiously wrought: a hound held in his forepaws a dappled fawn and pinned it in his jaws as it writhed. And at this all men marvelled how, though they were of gold, the hound was pinning the fawn and strangling it, and the fawn was writhing with its feet and striving to flee.

These few words capture the elemental fascination of all illusionism, of the way in which an inanimate material can be made to seem alive, of the way in which the power of artifice momentarily replaces one reality with another. A more facetious example of the same idea is an epigram associated with the mosaic image of a laughing satyr recorded in a late-antique collection known as The Greek Anthology: "Why do you laugh?" the viewer asks. The image answers, "I laugh because I marvel at how, being put together out of all kinds of stones, I suddenly become a satyr."

Beyond the mere manipulation of materials, then, illusion is another source of fascination. The Greek Anthology preserves numerous epigrams about a famously naturalistic bronze statue of a cow by the sculptor Myron: "I am Myron's little heifer, set up on a base. Goad me, herdsman, and drive me off to the herd." As in the epigram about the mosaic satyr, the image itself speaks, a device that is used to suggest - and succeeds remarkably well in capturing - the startling effect of being fooled. A more philosophical viewer might observe that this effect undermines the distinction between the categories "nature" and "art": "Looking at this heifer of Myron's you are like to cry out: `either Nature is lifeless, or Art is alive.'" To say that an image is alive, that it is made of flesh, that it seems to move or to be about to move, that it breathes, or that it lacks only the breath, that it speaks, or that it lacks only the capacity for speech, are all stock phrases; they testify both to the artist's skill and to the viewer's psychological engagement. Though we quickly tire of their formulaic quality, we must recognize that they say as much about the experience of art as most people needed to say.

One of the most striking examples of the value set on illusionistic deception is found in Pliny the Elder, a Roman encyclopedist of the first century CE, who provides a brief history of painting and sculpture in the context of his discussion of various minerals and how they are used by human beings for different purposes. Pliny's information is taken mostly from older secondary sources and is not very carefully integrated; much of what he says is untrustworthy in terms of factual accuracy, but it is important both for what it reveals about attitudes toward art in the ancient world and because it exerted such an influence on the imagination of later centuries. Pliny tells the story of a competition between two Greek painters, Zeuxis and Parrhasios: Zeuxis produced a picture of a cluster of grapes so true to life that when it was unveiled, birds flew down as if preparing to peck at it. He was confident of victory, but when he asked to have Parrhasios' picture unveiled, and found that what he had thought was the veil was in fact the painting, he had to admit defeat, for where he had deceived birds, Parrhasios had fooled an expert.

In addition to the power of images to persuade the viewer of physical presence and of life, there was also an intense interest in their ability to go a step further and tell stories. Homer describes at length a great golden shield, forged and embossed by Hephaestus, the god of fire himself, for the hero Achilles. Though the object is fictitious, and is certainly intended to surpass in its magnificence the work of all human goldsmiths, its description documents a profound responsiveness to the power of art, particularly to its narrative capabilities. Among the things represented on the shield are two entire cities:

In the one there were marriages and feastings, and by the light of blazing torches they were leading the brides from their bowers through the city, and loud rose the bridal song. And young men were whirling in the dance, and in their midst flutes and lyres sounded continually; and there the women stood each before her door and marvelled.

Nearby a trial is taking place, with one man arguing his case and the other disagreeing, while a group of judges listen and onlookers show their support for one side or the other. Around the second city a battle is being fought, with the kinds of incidents one would expect to see as part of such an event. Between and around the cities are landscapes, in which figures are shown engaged in characteristic activities: plowing, grain and grape harvesting, cattle and sheep herding, and dancing. In each case, the ability of the images to tell stories depends upon their capacity to suggest, not only physical forms, but movement, and not just visible things, but music and speech. These descriptions testify to a kind of projective engagement with the object that goes beyond the visual to involve all the resources of the imagination.

The description of works of art became a highly developed literary exercise, and the results are often as formulaic as the epigrams about Myron's cow. Those that give the best idea of the way in which, in the real world, cultivated people looked at works of art is the collection known simply as Pictures by the orator Philostratus. These little essays purport to record extemporaneous speeches made by the author in front of the paintings in his patron's collection for the edification of the patron's ten-year-old son. One of the most extensive and remarkable concerns a picture of a boar hunt. In addition to the descriptive naturalism, Philostratus admires the arrangement of episodes: the skill with which the story is told. He is especially responsive to the characterization of the hunters: "one shows in his face a touch of the palaestra, another shows grace, another urbanity, and the fourth, you will say, has just raised his head from a book." He also notes the conceptual complexity of the picture: the four hunters are led by a fifth, a boy of great beauty, with whom they are obviously all in love, so that the pursuit of the boar is paralleled by their pursuit of him. Surprised by the intensity of his absorption, Philostratus exclaims:

How I have been deceived! I was deluded by the painting into thinking that the figures were not painted but were real beings, moving and loving - at any rate I shout at them as if they could hear and I imagine that I hear some response - and you did not utter a single word to me to turn me back from my mistake, being as much overcome as I was ...

For all its self-consciousness, his experience is not unlike that implied in Homer's descriptions of the brooch or the shield of Achilles.

The representation of the emotions and inward qualities of human figures can greatly intensify the effect of presence. The sculptors Phidias and Praxiteles were credited with having "instilled the very passions of the soul into works of stone." The Greek Anthology includes several epigrams about a painting of Medea murdering her children, in which the representation of intense and complex feelings was especially admired:

When the hand of Timomachus painted baleful Medea, pulled in different directions by jealousy and the love of her children, he undertook vast labour in trying to draw her two characters, the one inclined to wrath, the other to pity. But he showed both to the full; look at the picture: in her threat dwell tears and wrath dwells in her pity.

Perhaps the most famous representation of emotion in ancient art was the Sacrifice of Iphigenia by Timanthes. The painting illustrated the episode from the story of the Trojan War in which the Greek leader, Agamemnon, must sacrifice his daughter in order to propitiate the gods. The other leaders of the Greek host were each shown expressing a different kind of horror and sorrow at the event, but the emotional climax was the figure of Agamemnon himself, whose face was covered by a veil as he performed the sacrifice: as his emotions were not explicitly revealed, the viewer was left to imagine them in all their unbearable intensity. The picture thus succeeded in representing what it did not represent; in acknowledging the limits of art, it transcended them.

Related to the depiction of emotional states is the ability to suggest the deeper, more permanent aspects of the personality: "character" or "soul." Apelles the painter and Lysippos the sculptor were famous for being able to capture not only the physical appearance of Alexander the Great, but also his heroic character or spirit (ethos). Yet not everyone seems to have believed that images could really reveal the soul, and the claim was often explained by saying that the artist represents it by depicting its visible manifestations. The form of the body and face, onto which the character of the soul was believed to be imprinted, along with the representation of emotions, might thus serve the higher purpose of revealing something beyond either physical form or transient states.

If a high value was placed on the depiction of emotions, the powerful emotional responses elicited from viewers were also a source of wonder. Apelles so effectively captured Alexander's stormy temperament in one portrait that, when the emperor's generals saw it, they trembled as if they were in his presence. The Roman emperor Tiberius developed such a passion for the statue of a young athlete that he had it removed from a public place to his bedroom; popular outcry forced him to put it back, even though, as Pliny says, "he had completely fallen in love with it." The ability of works of art to arouse uncontrollable sexual urges is also reflected in the stories of adolescent boys attacking the famously beautiful Aphrodite of Praxiteles on the island of Knidos.

Closely related to the representation of emotional states and character, yet also distinct, is the capacity of images to suggest abstract ideas. Zeuxis painted a picture of Penelope, wife of Odysseus, "in which one saw morality itself." Parrhasios did a picture of two children in which one saw "the simplicity and contentment of that age"; his image of the people of Athens, which may have been, or included, a personification, a single figure representing the idea of the Athenian people, showed them to be "fickle, choleric, unjust and variable, but also placable, merciful and compassionate, boastful, proud and humble, fierce and timid - in short, everything at once."

The most famous demonstration of the power of personification was the picture of Calumny by Apelles. The painter had been falsely accused of a crime and exonerated, but chose to memorialize his experience by painting a picture in which he sought to express the nature of calumny - what we would call vicious gossip. The picture is lost, but a description by the essayist Lucian survived to tantalize later generations (figure 1.2). A judge with the ears of an ass sat enthroned, and to either side stood female figures, representing Ignorance and Suspicion, to show that the judge was about to act under the influence of those qualities. Before him, Calumny, a lovely young woman but with a wicked expression on her face, dragged a young man, Innocence, by the hair. She was preceded by a haggard male figure symbolizing Envy, and was attended by two female figures, representing Artifice and Deceit. Behind them, ignored by all, was a female figure representing Truth. By combining personification with narrative, such a picture demonstrates the capacity of painting to make complex philosophical statements.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1405184140
• ISBN 13: 9781405184144
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 352