-
Relativism and Pictorial RealismAuthor(s): Robert GriggSource:
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 42, No. 4
(Summer, 1984), pp. 397-408Published by: Wiley on behalf of The
American Society for AestheticsStable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/430213 .Accessed: 15/09/2013 15:02
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the
Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
.http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars,
researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information
technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new
formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please
contact [email protected].
.
Wiley and The American Society for Aesthetics are collaborating
with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 89.206.117.139 on Sun, 15 Sep 2013
15:02:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
ROBERT GRIGG
Relativism And Pictorial Realism
I.
CHARACTERIZING a work of art as "deca- dent" seems to be about
as harsh ajudgment as one could imagine. During this century,
historians and critics of art have delighted in overturning such
judgments. They have sponsored a series of daring reappraisals.
Perhaps nowhere have these reappraisals been more striking than in
the case of late- Roman, Byzantine, and medieval art.1
Nearly all of these reappraisals have been connected with the
issue of realism or naturalism in art.2 Many of the works of art
falling into the categories "late Roman" and "Byzantine" are
schematic, with figures that are misproportioned and unreal.
Elements of setting are frequently sparse or omitted altogether,
sometimes being replaced by a gold background. Prior to this
century, it was assumed that the artists responsible for such works
were simply unskilled, that they were aiming at realism (as ancient
Greek and Roman artists understood it) but simply could not achieve
it. The practice of real- ism, it was said, had decayed along with
the other institutions of antiquity.3
Historians and critics of art have tried to defend late-Roman,
Byzantine, and me- dieval art against the charge of deca- dence.
Their defenses have varied, some- times strikingly. Some of the
early ones were based on philosophical and psycho- logical beliefs
that most readers today
ROBERT GRIGG is an associate professor of Art History at the
University of California at Davis.
would find outmoded and fantastic.4 Per- haps the most popular
defense today is that the abstraction and unnatural qual- ities,
which used to be explained as due simply to a lack of skill,5 were
actually in- tended by artists as positive features. Late-Roman,
Byzantine and medieval ar- tists, it is frequently said, rejected
the standards of Greek and Roman art. Most would agree that the
motives for this re- jection were in part formal or aesthetic. Many
are also wedded to the idea that this supposed rejection must
reflect the deepest or most essential preoccupations of the age or
culture within which it occurred.6 But, when it comes to specif-
ics, there are differing opinions about the nature and purpose of
this alleged re- jection, as well as the degree of aware- ness on
the part of the artists and their audiences.
To some extent of course the varied suggestions concerning the
purpose of the supposed rejection depend upon the his- torical
background of the art being ex- plained. When this claim is made of
the late-Roman art produced under the Te- tarchs (Diocletian and
his co-rulers), ca. 300 A.D., the unnatural and "anti-classical"
features are read, according to one recent scholar, as a
repudiation of the pro-Hellenic biases of the senatorial
aristocracy. Diocle- tian and his colleagues are claimed to have
seen in this style a reflection of the simpler and sturdier virtues
of the early Rom- mans.7 Others have seen it as an expression of an
overall "spiritualization" of art.8
When this claim is made of the art pro- duced under the
Byzantines, the unnatural
? 1984 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
This content downloaded from 89.206.117.139 on Sun, 15 Sep 2013
15:02:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
398 features are read as an expression of Chris- tian asceticism
and transcendentalism.9 The abstraction of Byzantine art "was en-
couraged by the desire to achieve a higher degree of spirituality
than could be at- tained by naturalistic expression."'0 "The
advances of asceticism could not fail to foster a style
distinguished by its other- worldly character-the expression, in
visi- ble form, of the monastic principle of 'renunciation of
life'."" Again, there are many explanations that resemble these. A
complete review of each variant is out of the question here. I am
concerned with them only to the extent that they posit an imagined
rebellion against the standards of ancient art.
II.
These reappraisals have met with wide- spread success. Today we
welcome the view that other peoples may not have val- ued
naturalism or realism in art.'2 We tend to feel that the art of
other peoples, periods, or cultures should be judged by its success
in expressing their central or distinctive preoccupations. The
experi- ence of modern art seems to have proved that the proper
expression of these preoc- cupations sometimes required the rejec-
tion of realism or naturalism.13 Not surpris- ingly, the growing
acceptance of abstract and nonobjective art has encouraged the
acceptance of late-Roman, Byzantine, and medieval art. But this
acceptance has been premised in part upon an argument from an
analogy with modern art. And as we shall see in a moment, as soon
as we begin to press this analogy, it starts to break down.
Perhaps an even more fundamental rea- son for the success of
these reappraisals is the pervasive relativism of modern thought.
Their defenders can imagine themselves to be identifying with an
en- lightened form of historical or cultural rel- ativism. After
all, they are, it seems, sim- ply insisting that art must be judged
only in relationship to the standards or values of its producers.
This position has re- ceived support, if only indirectly, from the
growing numbers of relativists among anthropologists, sociologists,
and histor-
GRIGG
ians earlier in this century.14 The propo- sition that these
reappraisals rest on an enlightened form of relativism, however,
involves an important irony that has ap- parently gone
unnoticed.
In order to appreciate the irony, it will be necessary to
distinguish two different forms of relativism that relate to
realism or naturalism in art. I shall begin by out- lining in brief
a form of relativism that might have been embraced by historians
and critics. This form of relativism, which some anthropologists
and philosophers share, is based on the belief that periods and
cultures systematically differ in their perception of realism.'5
Images that we perceive as flat and unnaturally propor- tioned may
well have been perceived as "real" and "truthful" by the intended
au- dience. In short, an entirely different po- sition could have
been taken, namely, that what appears realistic or lifelike varies
with different peoples, periods, cultures, and perhaps even with
different levels of education within a culture. This position, had
it been taken by historians and critics of art, would have
qualified them as rela- tivists. But it is not the position they
took.
Instead, they attributed to artists of other cultures reasons
for rejecting real- ism. This attribution, however, is not as
simple as it once appeared to be, for, in making it, they
presupposed that the fea- tures we perceive as unnatural and ab-
stract were perceived in the same way when the works of art were
created. In other words, in order to identify instances of the
intentional rejection of realism, they assumed that the perception
of real- ism in other periods and cultures coin- cided with our own
perception. It was this tactic that allowed them to search for
reasons artists may have had for making figures that appear flat
and unnatural. The reasons, of course, were often suggested by the
modern movements. In many cases, they involve reference to some as-
pect of the ideology of the age or culture within which the work of
art was pro- duced, something comparable to the de- sire of the
Futurists to give expession to the speed and energy of the
mechanized
This content downloaded from 89.206.117.139 on Sun, 15 Sep 2013
15:02:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
Relativism and Pictorial Realism world. In other cases,
historians and crit- ics describe works of art employing termi-
nology borrowed from the ideological un- derpinning of some of the
modern schools of painting. For example, the fragmentary statue of
the Tetrachs at San Marco is often described in terms suggesting
that the artist was a proto-Cubist.16
What is ironic about the position some historians and critics of
art have taken is that the appearance of cultural relativism at one
point in their explanations, namely, the difference in value placed
on realism in art, is purchased at the cost of denying relativism
at another point, namely, the perception of pictorial realism.
Wherever they want to claim that realism was re- jected, they do so
by presuming that other peoples, periods, and cultures recognized
the same criteria for realistic representa- tion that we recognize
today. They begin by noting that the images look abstract and
unnatural. They then look for reasons artists may have had for
making them so. They completely ignore the issue of whether what
appears unnatural to us looked unnatural to the artist and his
audience.
It may well be that the reason they fail to recognize this issue
is that they have operated under a set of assumptions about
pictorial representation that most phi- losophers and psychologists
would con- sider overly simplified. Whatever the ex- planation for
the popularity of the type of relativism that I have outlined
above, its effects have been unfortunate. His- torians and critics
of art have ignored ev- idence that supports the alternative form
of relativism that I have sketched above, i.e., relativism in
respect to the per- ception of realism (and, by implication, the
absence of realism) in images. Yet the evidence for this type of
relativism is incontrovertible.
Travelers and anthropologists have often reported with surprise
that peoples from other cultures do not feel at ease with the
images we regard as natural and realistic. We have assumed that the
"technological superiority" of our images would be widely
acknowledged. Yet to peoples from other cultures our images
399 appear unnatural and distorted. Their complaints tend to
fall into some fairly predictable patterns. Foreshortened views
appear to distort the objects represented in them and in some cases
such views suggest that parts of the object are miss- ing. Their
own images, which strike us as willfully conventional and stylized,
seem realistic and lifelike to them. Today these reports concerning
primitive tribesmen are commonplace. No one challenges them.
Similar reports made by Chinese and Jap- anese informants in this
and the last cen- tury have also gone unchallenged. The evidence in
fact is overwhelming that in- dividuals immersed in these cultures
do not agree with us about what counts as a realistic or truthful
image.'7
III.
The evidence is not limited to the re- ports of anthropologists
and travelers. Some of it is historical. For almost a thousand
years, various representatives of Byzantine culture have avowed
that their own art is lifelike. This surprises us today, for we
perceive Byzantine art to be "abstract" and "unnatural." Still, the
written testimony of the Byzantines time and again expresses the
belief that their own art was "realistic" and highly life- like.
One can do no better that to quote the authoritative summation of
Cyril Mango concerning Byzantine attitudes to- wards their own
art:
... the aesthetic values of Byzantine art ... it is claimed,
were influenced by philosophical, particularly neo-Platonic
doctrines. Whatever value there may be in such theories, it is only
fair to say that they receive little support from the texts . . .
The prevailing view of Byzantine authors is that their art was
highly true to na- ture. A perusal of the texts collected here will
confirm this statement. The work of painters is constantly praised
for being lifelike: images are all but devoid of breath, they are
suffused with natural color, they are on the point of opening their
lips in speech. ... We might think, ... that Byzantine authors
would have made some distinction between their own art and that of
the Greco-Roman period which they had before them. Yet this is not
the case. Except for the difference in subject-matter . . ., their
aesthetic appreciation of both kinds of art is identical.'l
This content downloaded from 89.206.117.139 on Sun, 15 Sep 2013
15:02:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
400
It is true that some historians and crit- ics of art disallow
Byzantine testimony as the expression of a genuine appreciation of
Byzantine art. They have found it im- possible to imagine how the
Byzantines could have regarded their own art as re- alistic and
lifelike, when it seems so ter- ribly abstract. That being the
case, they are tempted to dismiss the Byzantine statements as mere
cliches, empty phrases that were spoken simply because of the
prestige of the ancient genre of the ekph- rasis, the set-piece
description of a work of art.'9 To them the descriptions of the
Byzantine authors are nothing more than the fossilized repetition
of ancient literary descriptions of works of art.2' "Many of the
poems and epigrams referring to works of art may be dismissed as
cliches by which the scholar displayed his learning."'' By
regarding Byzantine de- scriptions and evaluations of works of art
as based merely on an authoritative liter- ary formula, advocates
of this rebuttal are evidently claiming that there was a radical
divorce between what people said and what they really thought, a
divorce that was systematic and co-terminus with late- antique and
Byzantine culture.
At this point it becomes clear, I submit, that the analogy with
modern art has been a disaster for scholarship. What is amaz- ing
is that the glaring flaws in the analogy have so seldom been seen.
But as soon as we begin to examine the analogy with modern art,
they become apparent. First, the modern rejection of "academic" or
"photographic" realism can be dated. We can answer questions like
who? when? where? But those who believe that the standards of
realism and beauty of ancient Greek and Roman art were rejected
seem unable to come to an agreement about even these basic
questions.
No one of course would expect to be able to answer these
questions with preci- sion. Still, it is disconcerting that there
is not one named artist who can be identi- fied with this
supposedly courageous rejec- tion of ancient Greek and Roman
realism. In view of the fact that ancient writ- ers had no
difficulty naming the names of Greek artists thought responsible
for
GRIGG
the development of naturalism and clas- sicism,22 it is
reasonable to expect that someone would want to give or take credit
for it-if it were regarded as an accomplishment.
It is also puzzling that historians have been unable to come to
an agreement in assigning responsibility to some specific
generation of artists. Instead, many differ- ent generations of
artists are given credit for it. The varied claims made about this
supposed rejection have it occurring any- time from the late third
century on into the seventh century.23 There are even some students
of Roman art who have it occurring as early as the second cen-
tury.24 There also appears to be little agreement about the nature
of the puta- tive change. Some represent it as a revolutionary
change; some represent it as a recurring phenomenon, as if it were
due entirely to alternating shifts in taste; oth- ers represent the
change as so gradual that they are utterly noncommittal about when
it occurred or even about whether it can be termed a rejection.25
Views about where these alleged changes first occurred are equally
diverse.26 Whatever the basis for these diverse claims, the point
here is that if we are dealing with changes so un- systematic, so
widely spread, so unclear in their geographical and chronological
ex- tent and their progression, that fact may preclude offering a
certain kind of expla- nation for them, namely, one couched in
intentional language.
The failure to pin this thesis down to a specific historical
context in respect to agent, time, and place makes it difficult to
put it to a decisive test, one on which it would stand or fall.
That may serve to protect it, but only in the sense that it al-
lows those who want to hold it as an arti- cle of faith to do so.
Indeed, it appears to be defended as such by many of those who
embrace it. It functions as a badge of modernism, which wins
audience sympa- thy both for the author and his subject.
The second way in which the analogy breaks down lies in the
reception of this supposed rejection. It is an understate- ment to
say that the experiments of mod- ern artists were not always
welcomed.27
This content downloaded from 89.206.117.139 on Sun, 15 Sep 2013
15:02:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
Relativism and Pictorial Realism Modern art and its advocates
have been subjected to scathing abuse by conser- vative elements in
society. Yet modern western European societies, even a cen- tury
ago, appear liberal in comparison with late Roman and Byzantine
societies, where entrenched and unquestioned alle- giance to
tradition was the rule.28 Where then are the outcries against
innovation and novelty that any intentional rejection of the
standards of ancient Greek and Roman art would have occasioned from
conservatives? The sources fail to betray the slightest hint of a
controversy about style in art. Ernst Kitzinger points out, "no
ancient source alludes to the truly cataclysmic change which took
place in Roman art in the third century.'29 This silence is all the
more significant since there is ample evidence that Christians
could get extremely contentious about certain aspects of religious
art.30
It is true that there have been attempts to represent Plotinus
and neo-Platonic philosophers as advocates of the abstrac- tion of
late-Roman art.31 But those who have backed these attempts have
never been able to answer even the most basic questions they raise.
Did neo-Platonic philosophers regard the abstraction of
late-antique art as an exemplification of their aesthetic
doctrines? Plotinus could hardly have done so, since he cites Phi-
dias approvingly.32 Porphyry tells us that he shunned portraiture
altogether, without the question of style ever entering into
discussion.33 Did artists know of these aesthetic doctrines? Here
again there is not much hope of an affirmative answer, judging from
our knowledge of the social position of the artist in Roman
society.34
In a sense, however, the silence may have been broken. We have
perhaps failed to see it because we tend to regard this change
merely as a change in style, a switch from one aesthetic to
another. This disposes us to disallow certain evidence as relevant.
But there is no guarantee that the Romans would have approached
alter- native standards of art and truth with such congenial
tolerance. In the fourth century the emperors published several
related laws that reflect concern over a
401 serious shortage of skilled labor in many different
professions, including the various arts. It is at the very least an
ad- missible thesis that what modern scholar- ship sees as a change
in style was correct- ly perceived by the later Romans as the
result of a shortage of skilled labor, a de- velopment that they
tried to stem by means of economic incentives.35
A third way in which the analogy breaks down concerns the
relationship be- tween the language of art criticism and art, which
returns us to the topic of the statements of Byzantine writers
about their own art. The dismissal of their testi- mony has never
been supported by a sus- tained argument. It rests solely on an
appeal to the dependence of Byzantine de- scriptions and
evaluations of art upon an- cient models. But the argument is
hardly compelling. It does not necessarily follow that we can
dismiss what the Byzantines wrote about art as uninformative about
their real thoughts simply because what they wrote was influenced
by topoi in ancient literature. There is, after all, the obvious
possibility that the descriptions found in ancient literature were
chosen as models because they were assumed to be appropriate either
to the works of art at hand or to the aims it was assumed artists
were pursuing.
Nor is it true that the written evidence alleging realism in
Byzantine art comes exclusively from Byzantine intellectuals and
elites, classes supposedly most sus- ceptible to rhetorical
exaggeration. Some popular legends about the lives of the saints
have important implications for the Byzantine perception of their
own art. Nilus of Sinai, for example, tells us a story about how
Saint Plato of Ancyra was recognized when he made a miracu- lous
appearance to a young man in dis- tress; the young man recognized
him be- cause he had seen the saint's portrait.36 The Byzantines
believed their portraits to be accurate. They had an explanation
why they were. The saints sometimes made miraculous appearances to
artists, enabling them to render exact likenesses. The life of St.
Theodora of Thessalonika contains a typical story which takes
for
This content downloaded from 89.206.117.139 on Sun, 15 Sep 2013
15:02:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
402 granted the realism of Byzantine images. The story concerns
a certain painter named John. Even though he had never seen the
saint, he was able to paint her portrait. She had miraculously
appeared to him in a dream. Those who had known the saint vouched
for the accuracy of the portrait.37 The implications of such
stories are clear enough. But even more impor- tant was the
existence of a kind of im- age that by its very nature rendered all
consideration of style and abstraction ir- relevant: this class
comprises images that were-according to legend-miraculous- ly
created without the intervention of hu- man hands, the so-called
acheiropoietai.38
Like many problems, the problem of explaining the abstraction of
Byzantine art has been exaggerated. Some historians, thinking that
they have an explanation conveniently at hand for the abstraction
and unnatural qualities of Byzantine art, are tempted to
overemphasize the pres- ence of these qualities (and correspon-
dingly to underestimate the presence of the very same qualities in
ancient Greek and Roman art, most especially in the provinces).39
Since they have a stake in seeing late-Roman and Byzantine art as a
rejection of ancient art, they succumb to the temptation of
contrasting ancient and Byzantine art, as if there were a clear de-
velopment, just the kind one would ex- pect to find if there were a
rejection. In their histories, they tend to choose works that
support the contrast.
This has made it hard for them to inte- grate into their
discussions of the develop- ment of medieval style many works of
art that provide fairly clear evidence of a continuing admiration
for ancient Greek and Roman art.41 To explain the existence of
those works of art, they appeal to the idea of a momentary revival
(sometimes termed "'renaissance"). How it was possi- ble for anyone
to assert the supposedly rejected values of Greek and Roman art in
the highest levels of Byzantine society is left unexplained. Still
others reason that both styles coexisted, sometimes in the same
work of art, and that both styles were used for different
expressive purposes .41
GRIGG IV.
It is really not necessary to suppose that the Byzantines
rejected the values of ancient art. There are other ways of ex-
plaining how Byzantine art came to differ from ancient art. I am
not suggesting that the explanation is simple. I do not believe
that it is. Nor can I provide it here with- out writing a history
of Byzantine art. But to win the necessary freedom to do so we must
at least recognize that admiration of ancient art is one thing,
knowledge of it quite another.
Much as Byzantine intellectuals might profess admiration for
ancient art, it is doubtful that they had much understand- ing of
what it looked like. They could read about ancient art and its much
vaunted realism. They "knew" of some of the more famous
accomplishments of ancient Greek painters and sculptors by name.
But, apart from some scattered examples and the dwindling
collection of ancient statuary in Constantinople, they had little
first-hand acquaintance with an- cient Greek and Roman art, most
espe- cially painting, which would have had the greatest relevance
to them.42 The one cru- cial gap in most discussions of Byzantine
aesthetics is the nature and extent of Byz- antine information
about ancient art.
It is a mistake to assume that the real- ism of ancient art was
widely accessible to the Byzantines as a standard against which
they could measure their own art. The information technology
available to the ancient and medieval world did not allow the
inexpensive collection and dissemination of such information. A
bias against what Wil- liam Ivins once called "visual commu-
nication" was built into it.43 What people said or thought about
art could be commu- nicated by means of writing. But communi-
cating the appearance of works of art was another matter.
We seldom appreciate the extent to which the rise of systematic
art history depended on the technology of printmak- ing,
photography, and printing, "Histor- ians of art and writers on
aesthetic theory have ignored the fact that most of their thought
has been based on exactly repeata-
This content downloaded from 89.206.117.139 on Sun, 15 Sep 2013
15:02:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
Relativism and Pictorial Realism ble pictorial statements about
works of art rather than upon first-hand acquaintance with them."44
First-hand acquaintance with a work of art is no longer an
indispensable condition for knowledge of the appearance of the work
of art in question. And this makes it fatally easy to assume a
background knowledge about ancient art that we today possess, but
which Byzantine intellectuals had no way of accumulating. Without
documented collections of ancient art, especially paintings,
accessible for con- stant reference, it would have been hard for
them to perceive the gradual drift from an- cient art. Even those
who could see that such a drift had occurred would have found it
difficult and perhaps impossible to com- municate their perception
to others for whom such access was denied.
The Byzantines may, in some sense, have been mistaken in
regarding their art as lifelike and natural, but the point at is-
sue of course is their perception. The per- ception of realism in
art, as Gombrich and others have pointed out, is largely a func-
tion of expectation and that is based upon the "state of the art,"
namely, what one is currently familiar with.45 The limited
information available to the Byzantines about the naturalism of
ancient art is, in my opinion, one of the most important factors
helping to explain the apparent discrepancy between Byzantine art
and what the Byzantines said about their art (best in the sense
that it requires fewest unsupported assumptions).
The alleged revivals, if that is what they are, could then be
explained as the result of perceptions, never widely shared and
difficult to sustain, that Byzantine and ancient art had drifted
apart. In short, it is not necessary to assert that there were
marked and radical shifts in value. All we need imagine is a loss
of information about the appearance of ancient art, occa- sionally
relieved by rediscoveries. Doubt- less the causes of this loss of
information were varied; among them may have been the economic,
political and military diffi- culties experienced in the Roman
world in the third and early fourth century. It has been suggested,
perhaps correctly, that these encouraged the dissolution of
403 Roman workshops, reducing the number of skilled workers
(relative to demand) who could train others in their traditional
practice.46
At present it appears doubtful then that Byzantine intellectuals
recognized a clear break with the past in the way that Renais-
sance humanists had.
A violent jolt was needed to produce a different attitude
towards pagan antiquity; to make it appear as a distinct epoch, one
whose greatness shone even through its ruins. This interposition of
"dis- tance" or of a "projection plane," as Panofsky calls it, is
indeed what separates the Renaissance in its attitude towards
antiquity from the Middle Ages. In Byzantium such an interposition
was never achieved, although there are some signs that it could
have been.47
Not recognizing a break with the past, the Byzantines saw no
reason not use the "cliches" they found in ancient descrip- tions
of works of art. They assumed that the cliches were appropriate. In
contrast, Renaissance humanists not only recog- nized the need to
collect and edit man- uscripts to retrieve ancient literature, they
also were some of the earliest and most avid collectors of ancient
art.48 There were earlier collectors, like Henry of Blois and
Frederick II, the Stupor Mundi.49 But the humanists were the first
systematic collectors. Their collecting was competitive and created
a rage for antiquities.
This may explain how the Byzantines were unable to perceive the
drift of Byz- antine art from the art of antiquity; but in our
effort to understand how the Byz- antines could have perceived
their im- ages as real and lifelike, we also have to talk about
psychological receptiveness. The Byzantines viewed their religious
im- ages, most especially portraits ('icons'") with a sympathy that
we find hard to rival today. Their attitude was not quite the dis-
engaged aesthetic attitude that we tend to value today. The
Byzantines addressed their images in prayers, treating them as if
they were sentient. They clothed them, they decked them with costly
jewelry, they censed them, they illuminated them with candles and
lamps, and they carried them in processions." Those parts of
the
This content downloaded from 89.206.117.139 on Sun, 15 Sep 2013
15:02:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
404 person that were most important in com- munication,
especially the eyes, were the focus of attention in the images. The
ab- straction of the setting reflects the fact that for this
narrowly conceived purpose elements of setting were not only unnec-
essary, they might actually prove to be a distraction. Icons may
seem abstract to us, but they gave a human face to the in-
scrutable and transcendent will of God. Far from creating images
that were unnat- ural and untruthful, the Byzantines in- sisted
that their portraits of the saints were "exact likenesses,''
produced either during the lifetime of the saint or later by an
artist to whom a vision or dream was granted, providing him with
the occasion for producing an authentic image.
V.
I have argued then that it is a mistake to compare late-Roman
and Byzantine artists to the pioneers of modernism. Unlike the
critics who defended the modern move- ments by advancing new
standards of art, late-Roman and Byzantine writers contin- ued to
praise works of art in terms formu- lated by ancient Greek and
Roman critics. Some historians and critics today have
implied-little of an explicit nature has ever been written-that
there must have been a nearly total divorce between the language of
art criticism and the thoughts of artists and their patrons. That
position, because it dismisses out-of-hand an enor- mous amount of
Byzantine testimony, seems to imply that the intentions of the
artists are directly and independently ac- cessible in the work of
art. The intention of the artist can indeed be inferred from the
work of art, but only under certain conditions.51 The dismissal of
Byzantine testimony about their perception of their own art can
hardly be taken seriously. As I have argued here, one of the
underlying reasons for this dismissal is a commitment frequently
made to a certain form of rela- tivism, but it is a "safe,"
narrowly con- ceived relativism. It essentially asks us to believe
that people once thought as critics and aesthetes frequently do
today. The evidence and arguments presented here
GRIGG
not only are inconsistent with that propo- sition, they support
an alternative form of relativism, namely, relativism in respect to
the perception of realism in art.
' These reappraisals are discussed by O. Brendel, Prolegomena to
a Book on Roman Art (1953) (New Haven and London, 1979), pp. 25-37;
E.H. Gom- brich, Art and Illusion, 2nd ed. (Princeton Univer- sity
Press, 1961), pp. 15-43; R. Goldwater, Primitiv- ism in Modern Art
(1938) (New York, 1967), pp. 15-43. The reappraisal of Byzantine
art is discussed by K. Weitzmann, "Introduction," in Age of Spiri-
tuality: A Symposium [hereafter Symposilum], K. Weitzmann, ed. (New
York, 1980), pp. 1-5. The taste for reappraisal in art criticism
was of course well established before the 20th century: see F. Has-
kell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion, and
Collecting in England and France (Cornell University Press,
1976).
2 K. Weitzmann, ed., Age of Spirituality. Late An- tique and
Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Cen- tury [hereafter Age]
(New York, 1979), p. xxvi.
See especially Alois Riegl, Spatromisc he Kunstin- dustrie nach
den Funden in Oesterreich-Ungarn (1901), 2nd ed. (Vienna, 1927), p.
48, who first fo- cused favorable attention on the Constantinian
friezes on the Arch of Constantine.
3 This view is not entirely a product of the Renais- sance.
During the Middle Ages, there was a series of revivals based on the
perception, sometimes exag- gerated, that previous centuries were
barren of ac- complishments in the arts. See Leo of Ostia, elev-
enth century, who made exaggerated claims about the decay of art in
Italy- Thle Chlronicle of Monte Cassino, III, xviii, pp. 26-32. H.
Bloch, trans., in A Documentary History of Art, E.G. Holt, ed. (New
York, 1957), I, pp. 9-17. Ghiberti's Second Com- mentary represents
the decline of art as occurring with the public acceptance of
Christianity under Constantine the Great. The acceptance was sup-
posedly accompanied by an attempt to eradicate idol- atry, which
involved the destruction of art and the persecution of artists. See
C. Gilbert, ed., Italian Art 1400-1500 (Englewood Cliffs, 1980), p.
77. See also Vasari, Le Vite, R. Bettarini, ed., II, pp. 37 and 97.
The most comprehensive treatment of the theories of decline and
rebirth is of course E. Panofsky, Renais- scance and Renasences in
Western Art (Stockholm. 1960), pp. 25f., 34, for Ghiberti and
Vasari.
4 A. Riegl, Stilfragen (Berlin, 1893); idem Spa- tromische
Kunstindustrie; F. Wickhoff and W. Ritter von Hartel, Die Wiener
Genesis (Vienna, 1895); W. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy
(1908), 3rd ed., M. Bullock, trans. (Cleveland and New York, 1967),
and idem, Form in Gotllic (1912), 2nd ed. (New York, 1957). For an
evaluation of Riegl's views, see M. Podro, The Critical Historians
of Art (New Haven, 1982), pp. 71-97 and 234-36 (for
bibliography).
5 Goldwater, p. xix: "The most contemptuous criticism of recent
painting comes from those who say 'any child of eight could have
done that'.'"
This content downloaded from 89.206.117.139 on Sun, 15 Sep 2013
15:02:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
Relativism and Pictorial Realism Kenyon Cox, who was outraged by
the works of Matisse included in the 1913 Armory exhibition,
compared them to the scrawls of a nasty boy (Oliver Larkin, Art and
Life in America, 2nd ed. [New York, 1960], p. 363). This challenge,
directed at the artist's supposed lack of skill, has typically been
countered by showing evidence that the artist had in fact mastered
the skills of the academic tradition.
For the unpopularity of explanations appealing to inability or
undeveloped skills, see Worringer, Form in Gothic, pp. 8-9.; idem,
Abstraction and Empathy, p. 12; and Gombrich, Art and Illusion, pp.
21, 77.
h H. Kahler, The Art of Rome und Her Empire, J. Foster, trans.
(New York, 1963), pp. 165 f., 187 f., 191; E. Kitzinger, "On the
Interpretation of Stylis- tic Changes in Late Antique Art," in The
Art of By- zantium and the Medielval West (Indiana University
Press, 1976), 32 ff., regrets that almost all successful efforts to
correlate art with its historical and cultural background have been
in the domain of iconographi- cal studies. Stylistic analysis,
which is used mainly for dating, according to Kitzinger, can be
used to probe the mind of the artist and his contemporaries. In
saying this, Kitzinger (op. cit., p. 35) works from the postulate
that stylistic change is a "pure reflec- tion of the artist's
mind."
7 E. Kitzinger, Byzantine Art in the Making (Cam- bridge, 1977),
p. 12. Cp. G. Hanfmann, Roman Art (Greenwich, 1964), p. 41.
8 H.P. L'Orange, "Late-Antique and Early Chris- tian Art:
Introduction," Encyclopaedia of World Art, IX (1964), col. 62.
9 E. Kitzinger, "Byzantine Art in the Period be- tween Justinian
and Iconoclasm," in Berichte zum XI. Internazionalen
Byzantinisten-Kongress (Munich, 1958), p. 46; J. Beckwith, Early
Christian and Byzantine Art, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 221;
and G. Ladner, Ad Imaginem Dei: The Im- age of Man in Mediaeval Art
(Latrobe, 1965), pp. 20 ff., and 46 ("in the preceding centuries
spiritualism had striven to devaluate the body. ... "). 10
Weitzmann, Age, p. xxvi.
11 J.R. Martin, The Heavenly Ladder of John Cli- macus
(Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 163. See also E.T. DeWald,
Italian Painting, 1200-1600 (New York, 1961), pp. 10-15, and A.
Smart, The Dawn of Italian Painting 1250-1400 (Oxford, 1978), pp.
7-9.
12 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, pp. 4 ff., almost apologizes for
dealing with representation in art: "never before has there been an
age like ours when the visual image was so cheap in every sense of
the word" (p. 8).
13 In the work of the Brucke, . . ."there is a deliberate
coarsening of technique, . . . Here the desired effect is of
something unstudied, less artisti- cally and consequently truer to
the inner qualities of the subject. . . . Nolde praised primitive
pottery and sculpture because it was executed directly in the ma-
terial which it expressed, without the distortion in- troduced by
preparatory drawings. . . . The wood- cuts of Kirchner and
Schmidt-Rottluff are influenced rather from the 'primitive' German
woodcuts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as is evident
not only in technique but also in the prevalence of reli-
405 gious subjects" (Goldwater, pp. 118-19). A clear analysis of
abstraction and distortion in modern art is given by H. Osborne,
Abstraction and Artifice in Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford
University Press, 1979).
The rationale for the expressive abstraction and distortion of
the Expressionists is laid bare in the following statement (1912)
by Franz Marc:
Today we search behind the veil of external ap- pearances for
the hidden things of nature which seem to us more important than
the discoveries of the Impressionists. . . . We seek and we paint
this spiritual side of ourselves in nature, and this is not from
caprice or the desire to be different but because we see this other
side just as before they suddenly saw violet shadows and the at-
mosphere before everything else. Art in its pur- est essence is and
has always been the most au- dacious departure from nature and the
natural. It is the bridge to the world of the spirit. (Quoted in
Osborne, p. 60.)
14 Two of the best known defenses of relativism in history are
Charles Beard, "Written History as an Act of Faith" in The
Philosophy of History in Our Time, H. Meyerhoff, ed. (New York,
1959), pp. 140 ff., and R. Aron, pp. 152 ff.
15 E. Gombrich seemss to be a relativist in this sense: "The
point is precisely that without an articulate formulation of what
constitutes lifelikeness there are no easy grounds for a negative
judgment. The illusion given by paintings and works sculpture,
after all, is always a relative judgment"- -"The Lea- ven of
Criticism in Renaissance Art," in The Heri- tage of Apelles
(Cornell University Press, 1976), p. 112. The same is true of N.
Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd
ed. (Indianapolis, 1976), pp. 34-39. (Also refer to note 17 below.)
P. Feyerabend, Against Method (London, 1975), pp. 236 f., likewise
seems to favor this position. He points out, however, that ancient
Egyptian artists favored the use of stereotypes over close
observation, even though we know they were capable of the latter.
See note 29 below for a related observation.
'6 See note 7 above and Cornelius Vermeule, "Maximianus
Herculeus and the Cubist Style in the Late Roman Empire, 295 to
310," Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 60 (1962), 8
ff.
17 For the reactions of "primitive" informants to images and
photographs, see Gombrich, Art and Illu- sion, p. 139. For Chinese
and Japanese informants, ibid., pp. 84 ff. and 267. F. Boas,
Primitive Art (1927) (New York, 1955), p. 158, on the meaning of
realism to north-west coast Indians. Other anthropo- logical
discussions of this phenomenon are found in M. Segall, D.T.
Campbell, and M. Herskovits, The Influence of Culture on Visual
Perception (Indian- apolis, 1966), pp. 32 f. (the perception of
photo- graphs), and J.B. Deregowski, "Pictorial Perception and
Culture," Scientific American, 228 (1972), re- printed in Image,
Object, and Illusion (San Fran- cisco, 1974), pp. 79-85 (with
bibliography).
This content downloaded from 89.206.117.139 on Sun, 15 Sep 2013
15:02:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
406 'l C. Mango, ed. and trans., The Art of the Byzan-
tine Empire, 312-1453 (Englewood Cliffs, 1972), pp. xiv-xv. See
also his "Antique Statuary and the Byzantine Beholder," Dumbarton
Oaks Papers, 17 (1963), 65 fif.
19 For the ekphrasis genre, see G. Downey, "Ekphrasis,"
Reallexikon fur Antike und Christen- tum, 4 (1959), 921 ff.; A.
Hohlweg, "Ekphrasis," in Reallexikon zur Byzantinischen Kunst, 2
(1971), cols. 33 ff.; H. Maguire, Art and Eloquence in Byzantium
(Princeton, 1981), pp. 22f., and idem, "Classical Tra- dition in
the Byzantine Ekphrasis," in Byzantium and the Classical Tradition,
Margaret Mullett and Roger Scott, eds. (Birmingham, 1981), pp.
94-102.
2( R. Cormack, "Painting after Iconoclasm," in A. Bryer and J.
Herrin, eds., Iconoclasm (Bir- mingham, 1977), p. 157, and
Beckwith, p. 345. Mango, "Antique Statuary," 65 ff., himself writes
that the statements of Byzantine intellectuals cannot be taken at
face value. H. Maguire, "Truth and Convention in Byzantine
Descriptions of Works of Art," Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 28 (1974),
113-40, is more concerned with the overall descriptive accu- racy
of Byzantine descriptions than with the issue of realism. Even so,
his article is useful in cautioning against a blanket dismissal of
Byzantine descriptions of their own art.
21 Beckwith, p. 345. 22 See J.J.G. Pollitt, The Art of Greece,
1400-31
B.C. (Englewood Cliffs, 1965), and idem, The An- cient View of
Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Ter- minology (Yale University
Press, 1974).
23 Kitzinger, Byzantine Art in the Making, pp. 9, 12 f., sees
the decisive rejection as occurring in the age of the Tetrarchs, a
belief commonly shared. Yet he also sees repeated assertions of
abstraction later on in Byzantine art, implying that later
generations replicated the rejection of the generation of the Te-
trarchic period (ibid., pp. 99 ff., especially 103). (E.g.,
Kitzinger writes of a "major stylistic shift around the year A.D.
550 . . . a bold reassertion of abstract principles of design that
had been in vogue around the year A.D.500").
24 G. Rodenwaldt, "The Transition to Late-Clas- sical Art," in
Cambridge Ancient History, 12 (Cam- bridge, 1939), p. 554, who sees
the crucial changes foreshadowed in the era of Antoninus Pius. Also
see Kahler,ArtofRome,pp. 165f., 187f., 191.
25 Although he recognizes a period of preparation in the
provinces, the decisive adoption of abstrac- tion, according to
Kitzinger in Byzantine Art in the Making, p. 12, was in the age of
the Tetrarchs. Ladner, pp. 25 f., especially 69, n. 1, emphasizes
the gradual nature of this change (". . . a direct causal nexus
between such theological views and the prac- tice of art cannot be
established. It is only claimed here that these views and their
vicissitudes represent attitudes of mind which . . . nourished the
concep- tion of the human image which can be perceived in the works
of art themselves").
26 R. Bianchi Bandinelli, Rome: The Late Empire, P. Green,
trans. (New York, 1971), pp. 41 ff., sees it as the expression of a
native "plebian" taste, a theory held earlier by Rodenwaldt, pp.
546 f. E. Kit- zinger, Early Medieval Art (London, 1940), pp. 11
f.,
GRIGG and Byzantine Art in the Making, pp. 10 f., sees it as
originating in provincial Roman art. Others see it as "oriental"
(D. Talbot Rice, Byzantine Art, 4th ed. [Harmondsworth, 1968], pp.
50 ff.)
27 See J.O. Hand, "Futurism," Art Journal 41 (1981), 337-42, for
the reception of Futurism in the United States. See T. Buddensieg,
"The Early Years of August Endel: Letters to Kurt Breysig from
Munich," Art Journal, 43 (1983), 47 ff. for Kaiser Wilhelm's
denunciation of anarchy in art. See Meyer Shapiro, "The
Introduction of Modern Art in America: The Armory Show [1952]," in
Modern Art, 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers (New York,
1978), pp. 135-78, for the reaction to the Ar- mory Show: "For
months the newspapers and magazines were filled with caricatures,
lampoons, photographs, articles, and interviews about the rad- ical
European art. Art students burned the painter Matisse in effigy,
violent episodes occurred in the schools, and in Chicago the Show
was investigated by the Vice Commission upon the complaint of an
outraged guardian of the morals. So disturbing was the exhibition
to the society of artists that had spon- sored it that many members
repudiated the vanguard and resigned; among them were painters like
Sloan and Luks, who the day before had been considered the rebels
of American art. Because of the strong feelings aroused within the
Association, it broke up soon after, in 1914" (p. 136). As Shapiro
explains, what disturbed them was not so much that the paint- ing
was nonobjective as that it was premised upon a deliberate
rejection of the image (pp. 142 ff.): ". . . the new painters
seemed to be coarse ruffians, and their art a reversion to
barbarism. These artists were aware of their own savagery and
admired the works in the ethnological museums, the most primi- tive
remains of the Middle Ages, folk art and chil- dren's art, all that
looked bold and naive"(p. 147). One academic spokesman, Kenyon Cox,
claimed that Cezanne was "absolutely without talent" and "could not
learn to paint as others did, .. ." (p. 165). Modernism was still
under attack in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when it was linked
in the minds of late 1940s and early 1950s, when it was linked in
the minds of some reactionaries to the Communist threat (p.
176).
28 For the conservatism of late-Roman society, See A.H.M. Jones,
The Later Roman Empire 284- 602 (Norman, Oklahoma, 1964), pp.
873-74.
29 Kitzinger, "Stylistic Change," 36. There is at least one
instance, namely, the Hellenistic art of Egypt, in which the
evidence is clear that ancient ar- tists deliberately chose an
unrealistic style over a na- turalistic style. Some of the
surviving Hellenistic mummy shrouds feature paintings in two
strikingly different styles-the naturalistic style that we nor-
mally associate with Hellenistic art (which was used for portraits
of the deceased) and the hieratic sche- matism of Egyptian art
(which was used for images of the Egyptian gods). There is one
other context in which there may have been an expression of pref-
erence for relatively nonnaturalistic styles-the context of art
collectings: "Quintilian tells us of con- noisseurs who preferred
the austere art of the 'primi- tive' Greeks to the more nearly
perfect masterpieces
This content downloaded from 89.206.117.139 on Sun, 15 Sep 2013
15:02:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
Relativism and Pictorial Realism of later times" (Gombrich, Art
and Illusion, p. 144). With the rise of art criticism and
collecting in the an- cient world, there naturally came into
existence an awarness of alternative styles, for which see J.
Onians, Art eand Thought in the Hellenistic Age (London, 1979), pp.
53 ff. But that is another issue, which by no means compromises the
basic truth that ancient Greek and Roman critics assumed unani-
mously that verisimilitude was a value in the pictor- ial arts.
30 For Iconoclasm, see E.J. Martin, A History of the
Iconoclastic Controversy (London, 1930) and the recent studies of
S. Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm During the Reign of Leo III (Louvain,
1973) and Byzantine Iconoclasm During the Reign of Constan- tine V
(Louvain, 1977).
3' For the alleged influence of Plotinos, see A. Grabar, "Plotin
et les origines de lesthetique medie- vale," Cahiers
Archeologiques, I (1945), 15-34; Ma- thew, Byzantine Aesthetics,
pp. 19 f. For a critique of these theories, see P.A. Michelis,
"Comments on Gervase Mathew's 'Byzantine Aesthetics'," British
Journal of Aesthetics. 4 (1964), 253-62, and idem "Neo-Platonic
Philosophy and Byzantine Art," in Aisthetikos (Detroit, 1977), pp.
152-81.
32 Plotinos, Enneads V, viii, 1; in J.J.G. Pollitt, The Art of
Rome c. 753 B.C.-337 A.D. (Englewood Cliffs, 1966), p. 217.
33 Porphyry, Life of Plotinos 1; in Pollitt, Art of Rome, pp.
215-16.
34 J.M.C. Toynbee, Some Notes on Artists in the Roman World
(Collection Latomus, VI [Brussels, 1951]), pp. 5, 17-18, and 54 ff.
Toynbee contests the view that the Romans were prejudiced against
the arts. Even so, as she points out, "the outstanding artistic
personalities, . . . were, for the most part, if not always pure
Greeks by race, bearers of Greek names, men of non-Roman and
non-Italic origin, ..." (ibid, p. 54).
35 See C. Pharr, trans. and ed., The Theodosian Code and Novels
and the Sirmondian Constitutions (Princeton, 1952), p. 396. Some of
them are re- printed in Mango, ed., Art of the Byzantine Empire,
pp. 14-15, 50. For their significance, see A.H.M. Jones, '"The
Greeks under the Roman Empire," Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 17 (1963),
15.
36 Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire, p. 40. 37 Ibid., pp. 210
f., for this and similar stories. 38 E. von Dobschutz,
Christusbilder: Untersu-
chungen zur Christliehet Legende (Leipzig, 1899), pp. 61 ff. and
83 ff. A. Grabar, La Sainte Face de Laon, Le Mandylion dans I'art
orthodoxe (Prague, 1931), and E. Kitzinger, "The Cult of Images in
the Age Before Iconoclasm," in The Art of Byzantium, pp. 121
ff.
39 For provincial Roman art that anticipates some of the
features of Byzantine and medieval art, see A. Schober, "Zur
Entstehung und Bedeutung der pro- vinzial-romischen Kunst,"
Jahreshefte des osterrei- chischen archaologischen Instituts in
Wien, 28 (1939), 9-52; Kitzinger, Early Medieval Art, pp. 11 f.;
and idem, Byzantine Art in the Making, pp. 10- 11. For Roman
portraiture that anticipates the cubic simplicity of the style of
the San Marco Tetrarchs,
407 see J. Breckenridge, Likeness: A Conceptual History of
Ancient Portruiture (Evanston, 1968), figs. 14, 88, 89, 91, 98,
122. The argument is sometimes made that the qualities of
Tetrarchic and Constantinian art were anticipated in a native
"Italic" tradition or Roman popular art. But the portraits referred
to in Breckenridge do not sustain that thesis. Many were not the
work of native Italic artists. Many were in fact produced for
aristocratic patrons.
40 E.g., some of the early icons from the monas- tery of St.
Catherine on Mt. Sinai, for which see K. Weitzmann, The Monastery
of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai: The Icons, I (Princeton
University Press, 1976); the pavement mosaics of the Great Pal- ace
of the Emperors in Constantinople, for which see P.J. Nordhagen,
"The Mosaics of the Great Pal- ace of the Byzantine Emperors,"
Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 56 (1963), 53-68; as well as the Joshua
Roll and the so-called Paris Psalter. E. Kitzinger, "The
Hellenistic Heritage in Byzantine Art," Dum- barton Oaks Papers, 17
(1963), 98 ff., acknowledges that the existence of the techniques
of Hellenistic il- lusionism in Byzantine art is regarded as
problematic by some scholars.
41 David Wright, "Style in the Visual Art as Ma- terial for
Social Research," Social Research, 45 (1978), 139, alludes to "the
numerous classical re- vivals which characterize the early Middle
Ages." Noting the coexistence of both naturalism and ab- straction
in Byzantine art, Weitzmann, Age, p. xxvi, claims that artists
deliberately used both modes even within a single work for
different purposes: "the highly sensitive artist [of the apse
mosaic of St. Cath- erine's Monastery at Mt. Sinai] has employed
the abstract form for the divinity and more naturalistic forms for
the human figures." Interestingly, others have pointed out that the
occurrence of the "spiri- tualized'" style is not limited to
religious subjects and that many of the more naturalistic and
classical works in Byzantine art have religious subjects. In short,
the association Weitzmann refers to seems en- tirely spurious. For
this see Dale Kinney, review of E. Kitzinger, Byzantine Art in the
Ma-king, in Byzan- tine Studies, 9 (1982), 318-19.
42 There was a large collection of ancient statuary in
Constantinople throughout most of the Byzantine period. It was for
the most part collected during the fourth and fifth centuries. For
this, see Mango, "Antique Statuary," passim, and idem, Byzantium,
pp. 273 ff. The relevance of these statues to Byzan- tine art,
however, was limited by the comparatively minor role statuary
played in Byzantine art as well as by their subjects, which made it
difficult to regard them as plausible models. This is important to
real- ize, for the disinterest shown by the Byzantines in ancient
statues does not mean that they were disin- terested in ancient
art, as Mango, Byzantium, p. 274, seems to suggest.
43 William M. Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Com- municution
(Cambridge, 1953), pp. 2-3. For a more extended discussion of the
role of the technology of reproduction in the development of art
history, see Estelle Jussim, Visual Communication and the Graph- ic
Arts: Photographic Technologies of the Nine- teenthl Century (New
York, 1974), pp. 4 f., 7-17, 78-
This content downloaded from 89.206.117.139 on Sun, 15 Sep 2013
15:02:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
-
408
79, 236-78 ("The New Technologies and the History of Art
History").
44 Ivins., pp. 2-3. 45 Art and Illusion, pp. 28 ff., especially
ch. VII
("Conditions of Illusions"). J. Onians, "Abstraction and
Imagination in Late Antiquity," Art History, 3 (1980), 1-24, argues
that through the use of imagina- tion and hyperbole late antique
rhetoricians often had to make up the distance between the work of
art and the standards expected of works of art. They could not
afford to insult wealthy and powerful pa- trons. Some patrons,
however, could not participate in the lie, accounting for the
"exceptional" revivals of naturalism in the late antique art (p.
20). Onians concludes that the rigorous standards of classical art
were relaxed as a result of the relationship between the patron and
the rhetorician (p. 23).
46 Jones, Empire pp. 15-16. 47 Mango, "Antique Statuary," 68-69.
48 For Italian humanists as collectors of art, see
Richard Krautheimer, "'Humanists and Artists," in
GRIGG
Richard Krautheimer and Trude Krautheimer-Hess, Lorenzo Ghiberti
(Princeton, 1956), pp. 294-305.
49 J.B. Ross, "A Study of Twelfth-Century Inter- est in the
Antiquities of Rome," in Medieval and His- toriographical Essays in
Honor of J.W. Thompson (Chicago, 1938), 308-09, and E. Kantorowicz,
Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1928), pp. 482- 83,
and the Erganzungsband (Berlin, 1931), p. 210.
O50 Kitzinger, "Cult of Images," pp. 96 ff.; idem, "A Virgin's
Face: Antiquarianism in Twelfth-Cen- tury Art," Art Bulletin, 62
(1980), 11 f., for use in processions. See also P.J. Nordhagen, The
Frescoes of John VII (A.D. 705) in S. Maria Antiqua in Rome (Rome,
1968), pp. 75-76, 89 for evidence that certain protraits of saints
painted on the walls of Santa Maria Antiqua, Rome, were especially
venerated and evidence that jewelry or adornments may have been
added to them as votive gifts.
'51 R. Grigg, "The Constantinian Friezes: Inferring Intentions
from the Work of Art," The British Jour- nal ofAesthetics, 10
(1970), 3-10.
This content downloaded from 89.206.117.139 on Sun, 15 Sep 2013
15:02:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Article Contentsp. [397]p. 398p. 399p. 400p. 401p. 402p. 403p.
404p. 405p. 406p. 407p. 408
Issue Table of ContentsThe Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Summer, 1984), pp. 371-481Volume
Information [pp. 477-481]Front MatterEditorial [pp. 371-373]The
Rhetoric of Incommensurability [pp. 375-381]The Tonal and the
Foundational: Ansermet on Stravinsky [pp. 383-386]The Poetry of
Theory: Reflections on after the New Criticism [pp.
387-396]Relativism and Pictorial Realism [pp. 397-408]Expression of
Emotion in (Some of) the Arts [pp. 409-418]Delimitating the Concept
of the Grotesque [pp. 419-426]Art, Religion and Musement [pp.
427-437]Afterwords: Criticism and CounterthesesThe Relativity of
Refutations [pp. 439-442]Kant and Greenberg's Varieties of
Aesthetic Formalism [pp. 442-445]
ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 447-448]Review: untitled [pp.
448-451]Review: untitled [pp. 451-452]Review: untitled [pp.
452-455]Review: untitled [pp. 455-457]Review: untitled [pp.
457-459]Review: untitled [pp. 459-461]Review: untitled [pp.
461-463]Review: untitled [pp. 463-465]Review: untitled [pp.
465-467]Review: untitled [pp. 467-469]
Books Received [pp. 471-472]American Society for Aesthetics News
[pp. 473-475]Back Matter