Is Art History?
Author(s): Svetlana Alpers
Source: Daedalus , Summer, 1977, Vol. 106, No. 3, Discoveries and Interpretations:
Studies in Contemporary Scholarship, Volume I (Summer, 1977), pp. 1-13
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024490
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SVETLANA ALPERS
Is Art History?
It comes as no surprise to a student of art and its history these days to open a
book on Italian painting and find an extensive discussion of barrel-gauging, or to
turn to a study of Courbet and find many pages devoted to a detailed account of
radicalism among French peasants in 1849 and 1850. The books by Michael
Baxandall and T. J. Clark to which I am referring are not eccentric texts but
among the most inventive and interesting studies of art written in recent years.1
Distinctive though their emphases are, these writers share a commitment to
consider the work of art as a "piece of history." Baxandall argues that we should
consider Piero della Francesca's pictorial engagement with solid geometric
forms in terms of the accepted fifteenth-century training in commercial mathe?
matics. Similarly, Clark argues that an attention to the situation of French rural
society enables us to understand the presence (in style, but also inseparably in
content) of Courbet's great works of 1849-1850. I have chosen these two books
as among the most rigorously argued of what is indeed a great number of such
studies. It is a fashion by now, and almost established as one of the acceptable
tools of the art historical trade. The new art history was announced in the title
of a series of book-length studies of individual works initiated in the 1960s?Art
in Context. The traditional mode of art history is represented by Pevsner's
multivolumed History of Art, which began appearing in the 1950s and considers
the history of art period by period, and country by country.2
What is worth remarking about the new look in the study of art is not its
emphasis on art and society?for that has a long and somewhat checkered
history?but rather the terms in which it is proposed. While previously it was
the history of art, conceived in terms of the development and achievement
of period styles, which was studied in the historical context (resulting in books
like Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation3), today it is individual works or
groups of works, individual phenomena located at a particular time and place.
Thus to amplify what I have just said: it is the work of art itself, not a history or
sequence of works, which is seen as a piece of history.
A corollary to this change within the discipline is the phenomenon of
historians turning to art not for confirmation of the notion of period style (one
thinks for example of the use made of art in Friedrich's The Age of the Baroque4),
but rather for the fact of individual works. It is a historian, Peter Gay, not an art
historian, who most recently employed the phrase "piece of history" to describe
1
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2 SVETLANA ALPERS
the works discussed in his book on Manet, Gropius, and Mondrian.5 The
intellectual atmosphere is one in which historians frequently turn to works of
art, and joint projects between historians and art historians flourish. Velazquez
is being studied by such a team, as is the patronage of Julius II in Rome. (The
nature of patronage is fast becoming a separate topic of study in the field of art
history.) The sense of a common enterprise demonstrated in such projects is
based on the assumption that the work of art, like any other event, is a piece of
history.
The new social history of art as it is carried on by art historians concentrates
on the circumstances of the making of an individual work. Who commissioned
it, and where was it to be placed? What function (a central term here) did it
serve and for what audience was it intended? Seen in this way documents
establishing the commission and the later history or provenance of a work of art
no longer testify to its pedigree but indeed to its very nature as an object.
Specific methods of calculating the cost of paintings?so much per each full
length figure in the case of seventeenth-century Italian commission, for ex?
ample?could determine, it is argued, the way a work looks. If, because of such
considerations, a patron were willing to pay for only seven full-length figures in
a picture of the Massacre of the Innocents, then Guido Reni, the artist in
question, would have had to come up with his innovative reduced version of this
traditionally many-figured scene. A particular compositional organization could
be due to the position of the work, the actual site for which it was intended, and
the angle from which it was to be viewed. Titian's removal of the Virgin from
her traditional central position to the right side of the worshipers in his Pesaro
Madonna?once considered a protobaroque stylistic invention?is now ex?
plained by the fact that the worshipers approached the work from the aisle to
the left of the altarpiece. A revisionist interpretation of Michelangelo's Medici
Chapel argues that it is less neoplatonic beliefs or stylistic concerns as such than
the funerary function of the chapel and the specific liturgy for the dead
composed for this place which were determining factors in the artist's in?
ventions.6 Almost unawares, such studies have come to a d?mystification of the
notion of artistic invention. What was previously puzzled over as a mystery has
now come to be understood as the task of fitting a work to a particular task, to a
particular set of describable historical conditions. If a work of art is inevitably to
be understood in terms of its particular historical circumstances, it is arguable
that great art will result from a conscious working out of this recognition. Great
art is, in short, in this essential way political in nature. However, those studies
of Reni, Titian, and Michelangelo to which I have referred do not admit to this
view. One of the things which I want to pursue later is the gap as I see it
between the implications of this new social history and its acknowledged sense
of itself and of art. In the name of clarity, rationality, and historical objectivity
the new art history embraces a potentially radical view of art without accepting its
implications.
Analogous to the d?mystification of artistic creation is Baxandall's bold
attempt to demystify the problem of looking, of how we see. His study of
quattrocento art addresses itself to how works of art were seen at a particular
time by identifying habits of vision, modes of cognitive perception he calls
them, as the social practices most relevant to the perception of paintings.
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IS ART HISTORY? 3
Making what is a kind of social application of Gombrich's perceptual notion of
the "beholder's share," Baxandall argues that eyes trained to gauge the volume
of containers, to read the body language of sermons, or to respond in certain
ways to color or its absence were catered to in just these terms by their artists.
To quote him, "It is the highest common factor of skill in his public that the
painter consistently catered for."7 The delight in the complexity of volumetric
forms in a Piero or Uccello, or the careful distinction made among various
gestures in paintings of the Annunciation, is to be understood in this context.
The appeal being made is to common experience, ordinary schooling one might
say. Compare Baxandall's instance of barrel-gauging in discussing Piero della
Francesca to the claimed artistic relevance of higher, more philosophical
mathematics, invoked by Rudolf Wittkower in his landmark discoveries about
Palladio, in Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism .8 Instead of the
mathematics of the humanist we have that of the merchant. Piero himself is here
not seen in conjunction with the Golden Section (frequently cited in analyses of
the composition of his Flagellation), but with high, school mathematics for
which, as Baxandall points out, the artist himself wrote a text.
Despite a continuing concern to deal with major works, the. view of art put
forth in these studies is basically a leveling one. And in fact if we look at the
broad spectrum of phenomena that are being studied today a leveling tendency
is very much in evidence. Wolfflin, in a famous and oft-repeated passage, once
argued the stylistic equivalence between Gothic shoes and Gothic architecture.9
It was in the smallest shapes, he said, that the purest manifestation of a style can
be felt. It is thus in the grand order of styles that shoes are the equal of
cathedrals. While W?lfflin treated shoes on a par with art, today shoes and
cathedrals, but more to our point barns and cathedrals, carpets and frescoes are
all treated as products of society. The studies of so-called vernacular archi?
tecture (like barns) no longer seem eccentric in an atmosphere in which
architecture can be defined not in terms of monuments but as any changes at all
that man makes in his environment. Apartment houses and tenements take their
place beside town houses and public buildings in this enterprise. In a curious
meeting of the old and the newest, Oleg Grabar's article, "An Art of the
Object" (occasioned by the Metropolitan Museum's opening of its Islamic
installation) brought oriental carpets and designs into the pages of ARTFO
RUM.10 This publication testifies to the modern blurring of the line between art
and craft, seen also in the acceptance of pottery and weaving among the media
of art and institutionally in the interest in the historical artifacts being exhibited
by newly invigorated historical museums all over the country. But it also
testifies to the extension of serious study to the "decorative" (the term is no
longer pejorative) traditions of non-Western art. We should be reminded of
Riegl's arguments of seventy-five years ago which used the traditional motifs in
textiles as a model for the history of style.11 However, as we saw in the
comparison with Wolfflin, there is today no appeal to a higher and more
extensive historical reality such as style. It is rather their common functions as
social products that bind these various artifacts together.
There is further a healthy decentralization in the view of art, what art is,
where and by whom it has been and is produced. More kinds of objects, but also
more kinds of makers are being admitted into the circle of artists. Women,
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4 SVETLANA ALPERS
traditionally makers in the household, are a significant group. From studies of
art in China and India to Europe there is a similar scholarly attention to the
status and working conditions of artist-craftsmen and their influence on the
nature and reception of works.12 When and where were artists born into
professional families? When and where were they treated as craftsmen or
honored as members of wealthy households? Consider the double or triple
professions of many Dutch artists in the seventeenth century: Steen was a
brewer as well as a painter; Vermeer was probably both art dealer and
innkeeper. This now seems less a case of an underdeveloped country, by
comparison with Italy, than an example of a different social and thus artistic
situation. The net in which we catch art and artists is spread widely and much
more is caught for our consideration. The question, "What is art?" and the old
answer that defined it as having aesthetic rather than utilitarian appeal never
seemed further from anyone's mind.
One way in which to understand the directions being taken today in the
study of art is to see them as offering alternatives to a dominant mode of the first
great generations of modern art historians. The most influential figures among
these, Wolfflin for example, and Panofsky, largely concentrated their attention
and developed their modes of analysis with reference to the art of the Italian
Renaissance. Both because of Panofsky's influence inside and outside the field,
and because of the explicit way in which his writings lay out his assumptions, I
have chosen to let him serve as the example of a general phenomenon.
Panofsky's method of iconographie analysis originated in a series of primarily
theoretical papers. His iconographie method, loosely construed, has been
adopted by students of the pictorial (and verbal) arts of all ages. But Panofsky's
interpretive strategy was bound up with Renaissance phenomena and with the
study of Renaissance art. In his early papers (which remain untranslated)
Panofsky argued against trying to decipher meanings using the notion of style,
which was then defined psychologically by Wolfflin as "forms of beholding"
{Sehformen) or by Riegl as the sociopsychological Kunstwollen (variously trans?
lated "will to form," "artistic volition," or more literally "that which wills
art").13 Arguing instead for the way in which pictorial images are bound to
ideas, Panofsky defined their essential meaning in terms of Sinn, later rendered
as "intrinsic meaning" in his English publications. Adopting Cassirer's notion of
symbolic forms, the great achievement of Panofsky's approach was that it drew
attention to the links between pictures and ideas, between art and thought. But
whether he is defining the Renaissance as the r?int?gration of classical motif
with classical theme, or pointing to the symbolic force of the use of perspective
construction in Renaissance painting, Panofsky in effect posits and confirms a
particular notion of man and of art.14 Man here is a figure located historically in
time (acknowledging his historical relationship to antiquity) and in space
(employing the device of linear perspective to posit his picture as a window onto
a second, substitute world). Man is at the center, viewing the world beyond of
which his art is the imagined imitation. The very notion of the viewer's relation?
ship to meanings which are verbally construed and which lie beneath the surface
of his meaningful images, is bound up with Renaissance notions of art and the
primacy of language. While validating and expounding a certain view of man,
and the kind of art he produced, Panofsky was clear at least at first, that this was
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IS ART HISTORY? 5
distinguished from what came before (Middle Ages) and what came after (the
modern age).
But no mediaeval man could see the civilization of antiquity as a phenomenon
complete in itself, yet belonging to the past and historically detached from the
contemporary world?as a cultural cosmos to be investigated and, if possible, to be
reintegrated, instead of being a world of living wonders or a mine of informa?
tion. . . . Just as it was impossible for the Middle Ages to elaborate the modern
system of perspective, which is based on the realization of a fixed distance between
the eye and the object and thus enables the artist to build up comprehensive and
consistent images of visible things; just as impossible was it for them to evolve the
modern idea of history, which is based on the realization of an intellectual distance
between the present and the past, and thus enables the scholar to build up
comprehensive and consistent concepts of bygone periods.15
It is when Panofsky's method was expanded, by him and by the field in
general, to other arts and then treated as a normative standard for art and its
study that problems developed. Compelling though his study of early Nether?
landish painting is, it more and more seems to me that it compels partly by
making northern art follow the art of the south.16 Northern artists, far longer
and more persistently than those in the south, trusted to the flatness of the
working surface. Although it is true that the illuminated pages of books became
more and more picturelike in the Italian Renaissance sense, the flatness of the
surface of northern art in general was not killed off by perspective as Panofsky
suggests. Neither the flat surface nor the repetition involved in printing
techniques disturbed northern European artists, who, unlike the Italians, did
not accept the authority of the individual work, created by an individual artist
for a located viewer. As an image of the world, northern art is often more like a
mirror than like a window. This is true of Van Eyck as it is of Vermeer. The
common denominator between both aspects (flatness of working surface and
mirror) is the absence of the maker or viewer, clearly posited in space and
located in time, that is central to the creation of Italian art. Northern art, it
might be argued, moved from the eye of God (Van Eyck's mirror in the
Arnolfini Wedding) to the optical lens like a reflecting eye (the world cast onto the
surface of the canvas as in Vermeer). But all the time a human center, in
Panofsky's Italian Renaissance sense, is strangely absent. Finally Panofsky's
definition of disguised symbolism?his inventive way of analyzing the com?
bination of new pictorial realism and old medieval symbolism in the art of the
north?in effect follows Italian fashions by subordinating surface imitation to
meaning. He does not allow for the fact that the appearance of the first seems so
often to outrun the verbal presence of the second, even in Van Eyck.
If we turn to Panofsky's masterful study of D?rer, it is characteristic that he
sees D?rer as a kind of captive of the alien northern darkness struggling toward
the southern light.17 This of course is how D?rer often saw himself and it is
thus in keeping with much of his art. But it is less clear that there is a right and a
wrong, a light (the south) and a darkness (the north) here. In view of the
accomplishments of D?rer's art one might says that he was far better at a
characteristically northern task, print-making, than at a southern one, painting.
Or to pursue the contrast further, that his landscapes (northern) are far superior
to his nudes (southern).
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6 SVETLANA ALPERS
As heirs to this southern emphasis, students of the northern tradition have
until recently been inordinately interested in those artists and works which are
bound in some way to the south of Europe. Motifs and meanings have been
tracked down with great energy. Despite the evidence of the pictures them?
selves, an entire moralistic school of interpretation of Dutch seventeenth
century realism has developed on the assumption that hidden meaning, not the
surface, is the key to pictorial significance. Despite their pictorial balance and
presence, Vermeer's women, for example, are seen as emblems of sin. Although
moralizing emblem books were popular in the Netherlands and some paintings
followed suit, the impetus for this kind of interpretation can be explained at
least in part as an attempt to lend the right kind of significance to an otherwise?
by Italian standards?insignificant art. This attitude is widespread. Lord Clark
introduces his book on Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance19, by asking how such
an artist could rise from the mediocrity of Dutch art. And he goes on to
expound Rembrandt's greatness in terms of Italian models. He thus speaks from
a specifically Italian notion of greatness and incidentally leaves precious little
room for the more obviously native achievements of a Saenredam, a Ruisdael,
or a Vermeer.
Although he is suspicious of subjectivity, Panofsky's view of art and its
history is clearly on the side of certain values, certain notions of man, art, and
history for which he claims objective validity. Thus although his methods for
studying art and its history were historically located as appropriate ways of
dealing with Renaissance art, he came to treat them as normative and so they
came to be seen by the discipline itself. In the course of his well-known "The
History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline," Panofsky makes the statement that
man is "fundamentally an historian" and that "to grasp reality we have to detach
ourselves from the present."19 He speaks as a Renaissance viewer, located in
time and space, detached from what he observes as he is from the process of
observing. The very title of this essay, which long has been given to our
students as a standard definition of and defense of the study of art history, can
now be seen as grounded in Renaissance assumptions about man and art. What
happens, one wonders, if the art one wants to study is itself not based on such
humanistic principles? Is it not art? Can it not be studied by art historians?
These questions lead us back to the concerns occupying students of art
today. My argument is that much of what was previously considered margin?
al?in terms of kinds of objects, whole civilizations, but also in terms of the
questions one would ask about them?is presently holding our attention. In
effect, then, questions about our assumptions are raised by what is being done
in the study of art as a piece of history. I say "in effect," however, because they
are hardly being voiced as questions except by Marxist critics.20 To them,
nothing that I have said will seem new, and much of what I have said will seem
mild or too superficial in ideological terms. To ask why such questions are not
being addressed is to speak not only to the inertia inherent in any academic
discipline, but also to strike to the heart of the discipline's sense of itself as a
discipline. For as scholars, art historians all too often see themselves as being in
pursuit of knowledge without recognizing how they themselves are the makers
of that knowledge.
It is often in recognizing the assumptions underlying one's research, one's
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IS ART HISTORY? 7
habits of mind in a sense, that new problems are clarified and new issues are
made clear. If we recognize our current intellectual stance as a challenge to the
previous hegemony of the Renaissance, we should go on to reconsider some
things that we have made basic to the study of art. Three issues, basic operating
procedures actually, built right into our study of Western art come to mind: (1)
the notion of the role or the authority of the individual maker; (2) the notion of
the uniqueness of the individual work; and (3) the notion of the centrality of the
institution of painting.
It is common procedure to begin any study by attributing and dating the
works to be considered and separating them out from any possible imitations.
On what basis (other than market value) must we consider the authority of an
individual maker as the central feature of every work? Entire modes of art which
we are now beginning to include in our studies do not depend on such
identification. The assertion of the identity of the maker is properly studied
against the background of a much larger production of anonymous objects
which were made apart from such a recognition of self. Perhaps there was a
conscious attempt at self-effacement, an attempt to blend into an admired style
or mode of image-making. In studying a tradition such as Chinese painting,
where imitation of an admired style is the rule and attribution a chancy and
demanding procedure at best, would it not be useful to ask how appropriate the
task of attribution is? How is the individual maker related as an individual to
such a powerful and absorbing tradition? How should we deal with the
collaborative effort of workshop products, such as medieval illuminated manu?
scripts or Renaissance frescoed rooms? Should our aim always be first to sort
out, to identify the hands? What is the status or nature of collaborative efforts at
different times, in different societies? What were the conditions of working
together?
Turning to the works themselves, our assumption about the absolute
uniqueness of the original work is a counterpart to this notion of individual
creators. There are first of all types of objects?prints, but also tapestries or
photographs?which are designed to be replicated. Not only does our current
method of print connoisseurship lead us, against this very fact, to continue to
sort out when and in which order each individual pull of a print was made, but
further the very notion of the value of repetition is hardly faced at all. If as
William Ivins has argued in his feisty but powerful Prints and Visual Communica?
tion , one function of a pictorial image is the communication of information (as in
a map, or the illustrations to a study of botany, both of which were worked on
by Dutch artists in the seventeenth century) then the possibility of repetition is
a prime virtue, not a vice.21 That Rembrandt fought this possibility, often
creating essentially unrepeatable etchings, is a different but not necessarily on
this account (though it may be on others) a superior artistic achievement. There
are entire schools of art, such as the Dutch, or artistic enterprises, such as
Monet's series of haystacks or poplars, which might be better understood in the
light of a more general appreciation of repetition. The strength of the hold
which the original (in the sense of the originating or first in a sequence of
inventions) has on us is made clear even in such an independent study as George
Kubler's The Shape of Time. Kubier begins by proposing that "the idea of art can
be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things."22 He proceeds
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8 SVETLANA ALPERS
to search for an order in which to put all these things and insists on establishing
distinctions between what he calls "prime objects" and "replicas." In arguing,
for example, that "with European objects we often come closer to the hot
moment of invention than in non-European ones where our knowledge is so
often based only upon replicas of uniform or debased quality," he seems to me
to reveal a European cultural bias (but of course also an appropriate cultural
responsiveness) which we are just starting to reflect on as we expand the bounds
of art and its history.23
As a final example of new directions in which to turn, consider the notion of
painting as an institution?I mean the sense in which in our study of Western
art a new subject, like landscape, is considered to have truly arrived only when
it is rendered in the most permanent and expensive media, paint. One notes the
ease with which students of Western painting commonly speak of sources in a
minor medium such as prints, as if they were there just to serve painting. It is as
if the transition from one medium to another was not in itself problematic and
worthy of assessment. Gombrich, for example, has demonstrated most elo?
quently that it is not a new look at the actual landscape on the part of painters in
the north of Europe, but rather a theory making landscape a suitable subject for
art contributed by southern writers that led to the establishment of the new
genre of landscape painting. "Here then," he writes, "was a frame into which
the admired products of northern skill and patience could be fitted."24 And he
goes on to discuss their classification in terms of heroic and pastoral types. Yet
as Gombrich himself admits a few pages earlier, citing the example of D?rer,
northern skill and patience had already flowered. For D?rer was indeed "one of
the world's greatest landscape painters" though in his topographical watercolors
done for his own pleasure, not in paintings for purchase.25 Is the topographic
watercolor not art? And when we look at the great northern landscape paint?
ers?Bruegel, and then Van Goyen and Ruisdael?is it true that topography
could not be the motif or function for paintings (as contrasted with a water
color)? Is the birth of landscape painting in the north so at variance with the
function of the lesser media? What if the entire tradition of northern art is
indeed rather like painted prints? Is the human measure?what Gombrich
means by the institution of landscape as a type of painting?essential before
pictorial renderings can be considered in the realm of art? We have here indeed
the recipe for the makings of Renaissance art, but surely not for all picturing.
Far from being limited to a revisionist study of art, the questions we are
touching on here, the very mode of thinking that leads me to pose them, is
shared by many thinkers today. The status or nature of the individual creator is,
for example, a central concern in all of the works of Michel Foucault.26 His
account of what he terms the archeology of knowledge emphasizes, like
Braudel's study of the Mediterranean, what Braudel calls "that other submerged
history, almost silent and always discreet, virtually unsuspected either by its
observers or its participants."27 This view of the human situation, the slow
process of continuing transformation enacted between us and our environ?
ments) is also confirmed in much contemporary art. We might take as a prime
example the writing and the earth-works of the late Robert Smithson?be it his
evocation of Olmsted's Central Park as an "ongoing development" of slow
geological changes interacting with an environment for man, or his Spiral Jetty
made out of, and subsumed once again into, the Great Salt Lake.28
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IS ART HISTORY? 9
To ask these questions is then to acknowledge a common enterprise with
historians, critics, artists, and writers of our time, and one would think, to gain
strength and insight from such a common intellectual cause. From this vantage
point we can now return to our earlier remarks on Panofsky and to his
generation of art historians in a slightly different light. For in marked contrast to
the generation of Panofsky art historians today, far from acknowledging that
they live and work at a certain time and place, in the company of others (all of
which would be considered subjective factors) deny this in favor of a notion of
objective historical research. Baxandall, a most sophisticated spokesman, argues
that "quattrocento intentions happened in quattrocento terms, not in ours."29 It
is characteristic of art history that we teach our graduate students the methods,
the "how to do it" of the discipline (how to date, attribute, track down a
commission, analyze style and iconography) rather than the nature of our
thinking. In terms of the intellectual history of the discipline our students are
woefully uneducated. How many have been asked to read Panofsky's early
untranslated writings, or Riegl, or Wolfflin? Supporting this is that prejudice
for the original object and against the desk-bound scholar. To think, to write is
itself somehow to forsake the works. At issue is not the method one uses but
rather the notion of aft and its history, the notion of man and the form that his
knowledge of the world takes. For all of Panofsky's claims to employing an
objective method (his three levels of meaning, for example) he accepted the
responsibility for his own thought and his commitment to certain values. In
studying Renaissance art he was aware of having made certain choices; he was
aware of the phenomena that he excluded by making them. He celebrated the
accomplishment of a humanistic art and despaired at the loss of it. A certain
latitude was possible within this set of mind. Panofsky celebrates what he saw
as a kind of cultural wholeness testified to in the symbolic content of Renais?
sance images. Aby Warburg, more psychological in his sensibility, studied that
precarious balance among competing human impulses that is achieved by a
society in the ordering of its rituals (the Navajos served him as an example) or
by an individual in his patronage of art. In the midst of the current rush of
alternatives to an earlier mode of studying art, it is only the radical critics of the
field who engage those issues of society and history, those questions of moral
values that were, by earlier scholars, accepted as an essential part of their
scholarship. To what view of human and societal values, and to what under?
standing of the sequence of objects that we call history do we tend in our
current mode of equating all works as separate but equal pieces of history?
One of the few people to see and address this as an issue has been E. H.
Gombrich. Best known for his studies of representation and artistic illusion and
the perceptual processes at work in receiving and forming images of the world,
Gombrich has devoted himself on a number of recent occasions to the problem
of maintaining the values of tradition.30 His long-standing critique of the notion
of Zeitgeist is extended here in an argument directed against the social historiciza
tion of the study and perception of art and the relativistic view of all values that
results. On the one hand Gombrich is firm in his belief that a disciplined study
of what he calls "the psychological and technical resources of the visual media"
is necessary. But he also speaks to the value of personal response, which, with a
characteristic confidence in right-mindedness, he feels will inevitably support
traditional canons of taste, support in short the value of tradition itself.31
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10 SVETLANA ALPERS
Gombrich's concern with the perceptual processes of vision can be easily
accommodated to artistic notions of modernism, even as his analytic rigor can
be accommodated to current structuralist modes of analyses. In contrast to
modernist art and thought, however, he insists that our visual perception, like
our judgment, is validated by external phenomena. For Gombrich the "behold?
er's share," that happy phrase by which he evokes the part we play in perceiving
any representative illusion (or by extension one might say make a judgment),
depends on a notion of constancy, constant objects in the world, constant values
posited outside ourselves. This is, as Gombrich has often argued, simply a
matter of common sense.
But it is common sense?taking this to refer to a community able to agree on
certain realities and certain values?that is today being challenged by experi?
ence and by research. Many do not share Gombrich's confidence in tradition.
Those who do, do not share Gombrich's urgent sense that it needs reiteration.
Some of the most interesting work is being produced out a sense of this
situation. The studies by Leo Steinberg, Michael Fried, and T. J. Clark that I
particularly have in mind are perhaps more accurately called writings. For they
are all acts of writing as much as they are reports of research accomplished.32
These three scholars differ from one another greatly in subject, attitude, and
manner of address. But they share a meditative stance which testifies in each
case, I think, to work which is not only reflective in nature but which might also
properly be called reflexive. Each one clearly establishes where he stands. It is
useful to recall that several years ago in these pages, Leo Steinberg argued
eloquently against what he called the rule of objectivity and the shrinking self.33
For Steinberg the self is a psychological presence, for Michael Fried it is rather a
beholder, in a more philosophical sense, of pictorial fictions or images, whereas
for T. J. Clark the self is a member of a particular society and class.34 To the
sensible question of whether it is appropriate to deal with Michelangelo, say, or
Greuze or Courbet in terms of viewers so conceived, the answer these scholars
seem to give is some mixture of evidence from the lifetime of the artist and from
continuing human necessity. Surely Baxandall's disembodied desire?one
shared by many art historians today?to see quattrocento art in quattrocento
terms is as much an intellectual structuring of our time as the others. This too is
knowledge we make.
Of these three writers, T. J. Clark comes closest to providing a response to
the present problematic of our field as I have described it here. To repeat
something said earlier, if art is most powerfully understood in its particular
historical circumstances, then it is arguable that great art would result from
conscious working out of this recognition. It is this claim that Clark makes for
the art of Courbet in the years 1849-1850. Clark's Image of the People leads us
with care through the social and political upheavals in France during these
years. He traces Courbet's roots in the fractured and radicalized world of rural
Besan?on, his experimentation with popular imagery and popular forms taken
from the example of simple popular engravings until Courbet finally comes to a
pictorial definition of his audience. In Clark's analysis, the Burial at Omans
subverts the expectations of the normal public for high art by filling a work of
monumental proportions and presumptions with the disorderly actualities of
village society. In contrast to the traditional treatment of Courbet as a realist,
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IS ART HISTORY? 11
his art is here not only seen as a piece of history but is shown to have been made
as such. One of the virtues of this study is that it understands its assumptions.
Clark argues for the ideological determinants of art and he attempts to locate
these in the complex surface, the figures, but also the very colors and brush
strokes of a work. Let us extract some sentences from Clark's description of the
Burial at Omans.
He has painted more than forty-five figures life-size in a great frieze over eight
yards long, arranging the figures in a long row which curves back slightly round
the grave itself; and in places, following the conventions of popular art, he has
piled the figures one on top of the other as if they stood on steeply sloping ground.
And towards the right of the picture he has let the mass of mourners congeal into a
solid wall of black pigment, against which the face of the mayor's daughter and the
handkerchief which covers his sister Zo?'s face register as tenuous, almost tragic
interruptions. He has used colour deliberately and dramatically, in a way which
has little to do with the careful materialism of the Stonebreakers, to symbolize
matter; almost, as our eyes move right, to threaten the faces put upon the solid
ground. . . . Beyond this point, when we start to ask about the picture's meaning,
the real difficulties begin. What, to put it briefly, is the Burial's affective atmo?
sphere? What are the mourners' attitudes and emotions, and what is Courbet's
attitude to the event portrayed?. . . We have to answer such questions in the face of
an image which deliberately avoids emotions organization: by that I mean the
orchestration of forms to mimic and underline the emotional connotations of the
subject. ... Is the Burial a sacrament or merely a social occasion? ... It was
precisely its lack of open, declared significance which offended most of all; it was the
way the Burial seemed to hide its attitudes, seemed to contain within itself too
many contraries?religious and secular, comic and tragic, sentimental and gro?
tesque. It was this inclusiveness, this exact and cruel deadpan, that made the
Burial the focus of such different meanings. It was an image that took on the
colours of its context; and perhaps it was designed to do so.35
But despite all this there are things that are left out. Clark does not intend a
traditional assessment of the oeuvre of a master. The exclusions that he makes?
many other works, but also other aspects of those he chooses to discuss?are
made consciously. One can understand why they do not appear here. Clark can
tell us of the social function of the Burial at Omans, but what about Courbet's
extraordinary self-portraits? Surely a discovery of self went along with Cour?
bet's discovery of the state of his society when he returned to his village
birthplace to paint in 1849-1850. And what if the issues are not self and society?
How are we to understand that he painted landscapes and still-lifes as he did?
The importance of Clark's work, like Steinberg's and Fried's, is not to
demonstrate the strengths or the limits of a particular approach. It is rather that
these writings set a standard, offer a level of thinking, of looking, of pictorial
analysis that we in art history sorely need. In distinguishing the preeminent prob?
lems in our field today, the criticisms that I offered about how they are being dealt
with are less criticisms of the particular assumptions made, than criticism of
assumptions not perceived, not acknowledged. The pressing need in other words
is to recognize just what it is that we are about.
It is curious to note that each of these three very different scholars has been
at pains to give an account of the nature and attentiveness of past viewers of the
works that they are studying. Steinberg characteristically sets his studies in this
very frame, summarizing for us how a work?Michelangelo's Last Judgment, for
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12 SVETLANA ALPERS
example?has been seen through the ages. Fried in studying the critiques of the
eighteenth-century French salons and Clark in studying the reactions to the
exhibitions of Courbet's works of 1849-1850 have made the reactions to the
basic material of their research and analysis. More important than the dis
tinctiveness of their approaches (Steinberg might be called a psychoanalytic,
Fried a formalist, and Clark a Marxist critic) is the common claim made by these
scholars, against the evidence of most art historical writing today, that not only
research about, but looking at a work, takes time. They all show that it took time
to look in the past and they offer us ways in which it can today.
In the greater expanse of art history this fact has frequently been lost sight
of, though indeed in reading Riegl, W?lfflin, Focillon, or Lawrence Gowing,
for example, we find writers who did not. But it is a particularly pressing issue
today in the atmosphere and with the kind of intellectual engagements outlined
in the opening part of this essay. With such a profusion of objects and cultures,
with old hierarchies crumbling, how does one justify such an occupation as
looking? It is a daunting question.
References
Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Florence: A Primer in the Social
History of Style(Lor\don, 1972) and T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolu?
tion (London, 1973). Two remarks should be appended by way of introduction to this essay. First,
although the examples of both present and past work in art history will come largely from those areas I
know best, the Renaissance and after, I think that the points I shall make are not limited to these areas.
Second, in choosing to emphasize the directions being taken by innovative work I do not mean to deny
that much excellent scholarship of a more traditional kind continues to be done.
2John Fleming and Hugh Honour (eds.), Art in Context; Nikolaus Pevsner, The Pelican History
of Art (London, 1953- ).
3Werner Weisbach, Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation (Berlin, 1921).
4Carl J. Friedrich, The Age of the Baroque (New York, 1952).
5Peter Gay, Art and Act: On Causes in History?Manet, Gropius, Mondrian (New York, 1976), p. 3.
61 am referring here to the following studies: Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters (London,
1963), p. 10 n. (Reni); David Rosand, "Titian in the Frari," Art Bulletin, 53 (1970): 206 (Titian);
L. D. Ettlinger's as yet unpublished study of Michelangelo's Medici Chapel.
7Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Florence, p.40.
8Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London, 1949).
9Heinrich Wolfflin, Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur (1886), reprinted in Kleine
Schriften (Basel, 1946), see p. 44.
10Oleg Grabar, "An Art of the Object," ARTFORUM (March 1976): 36-43.
nAlois Riegl, Stilfragen (Berlin, 1893).
12To give but two examples in the work of colleagues at Berkeley: James Cahill's recent study
(unpublished), "Life Patterns and Stylistic Directions in Ming Painting," and Joanne Williams,
"Caste and the Role of the Painter in Mughal India" (also unpublished).
13Erwin Panofsky, "Der Begriff des Kunstwollens," Zeitschrift f?r Aesthetik und Algemeine
Kunstwissenschaft, 14(1920); 321-339.
14See Erwin Panofsky, "Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renais?
sance Art," Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, 1955), pp. 26-54.
15Erwin Panofsky, "Introductory," in Studies in Iconography: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the
Renaissance (New York, 1962), pp. 27-28. First published in 1939.
16Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, Its Origins and Character (Cambridge, Mass.,
1955).
17Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Alhrecht D?rer (Princeton, 1955). First published in 1943.
18Kenneth Clark, Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance (New York, 1966).
19Erwin Panofsky, "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline," printed as the Introduction
to Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, 1955); see pp. 5 and 24 for the quotations cited.
20There are of course some exceptions. Early on James Ackerman voiced concerns about the
direction being taken by art history in "Western Art History," in Art and Archaeology (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J., 1963), where he pointed to the noninterventionist stance of American art historians. He
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IS ART HISTORY? 13
has not been alone among art historians since then in turning to the film (Ackerman has even made
one) by way of being more in touch with the realities of modern society. In this connection we
should remember that Panofsky himself wrote a piece welcoming and, in certain respects at least
definitively defining, this newest of artistic media. As always Panofsky located just where he stood
in relationship to it: "It is the movies, and only the movies that do justice to that materialistic
interpretation of the universe which, whether we like it or not, pervades contemporary civilization."
"Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures," Critique, 1, 3 (January-February, 1947), reprinted in
Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism (New York, 1974), pp. 151-169).
21William M. Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). First
published in 1953.
22George Kubier, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, 1962), p.l.
23Ibid., p. 39 ff. and p. 44.
24E. H. Gombrich, "The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape Painting," in
Norm and Form (London, 1966), p. 114.
25Ibid., p. 108.
26See particularly Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" Partisan Review (1975): 603-614.
27Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean, tr. Sian Reynolds (New York, 1973), vol. 1, p. ,16.
28Robert Smithson, "Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape," ARTFORUM
(February, 1973): pp. 62-68.
29Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Florence, p. 151.
30For example, see E. H. Gombrich, "Art History and the Social Sciences," The Romanes Lecture
for 1973 (Oxford, 1975).
31These comments are based on Gombrich's Erasmus Prize acceptance speech as published in
Simiolus, 8 (1975-1976): 47-48.
32Leo Steinberg has published books, articles, and reviews on many different areas of art. See his
Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art (New York, 1972), or more recently
Michelangelo's Last Paintings (Oxford, 1976). Michael Fried, first known for his studies of contempo?
rary artists, has also written on nineteeth-century French art and is now studying its antecedents in
the eighteenth century. See his "Absorption: A Master Theme in French Painting," Eighteenth
Century Studies, 9 (1975-1976): 139-177; and "Towards a Supreme Fiction: Genre and Beholder in
the Art Criticism of Diderot and His Contemporaries," New Literary History (Spring, 1975): 534
584. Besides his study of Courbet mentioned earlier, T. J. Clark has also written a book on
Daumier, The Absolute Bourgeois (London, 1973), and has now turned to Impressionism and after.
33Leo Steinberg, "Objectivity and the Shrinking Self," Daedalus (Summer, 1969): 824-836.
34A specific woman's sense of self is also being articulated in art studies today. The ground for
such writing was laid (was in effect cleared) by Linda Nochlin in an article first published in 1971,
"Why Have There Been No Great Woman Artists," reprinted in Thomas B. Hess and Elizabeth B.
Baker (eds.), Art and Sexual Politics (New.York, 1973). It has been part of the groundswell of
revisionist views of art history. If I have not selected out any single woman writer here, it is because
it seems to me to be more a chorus than distinct individual voices. A major virtue of the woman's
movement in art is that the chorus joins art historians with critics and artists in an easy relationship
not usual in these tight professional worlds. This promises much.
35T. J. Clark, The Image of the People, pp. 82-83.
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