Western Art and the Wider World

Paul Wood

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118598740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte

Western Art and the Wider World explores the evolving relationship between the Western canon of art, as it has developed since the Renaissance, and the art and culture of the Islamic world, the Far East, Australasia, Africa and the Americas.

• Explores the origins, influences, and evolving relationship between the Western canon of art as it has developed since the Renaissance and the art and culture of the Islamic world, the Far East, Australasia, Africa and the Americas
• Makes the case for 'world art' long before the fashion of globalization
• Charts connections between areas of study in art that long were considered in isolation, such as the Renaissance encounter with the Ottoman Empire, the influence of Japanese art on the 19th-century French avant-garde and of African art on early modernism, as well as debates about the relation of 'contemporary art' to the past.
• Written by a well-known art historian and co-editor of the landmark Art in Theory volumes

1

Renaissance and Old World

Introduction: The Status of the Renaissance

Stato da mar. The Venetian “empire of the sea.” Sea of words. The Renaissance is a sea of words. But surely, you say, the Renaissance is nothing like that? Water is entirely the wrong figure. The Renaissance is a cornerstone, a keystone, it bears the weight of the Western canon, more than anything it provides a foundation for who we are. A few years ago, a TV series on the Medici put the received wisdom in a nutshell when it was claimed that “the whole of Western culture pivots on the extraordinary period we have come to know as the Renaissance.”¹ Dissolve again into the sea of words … “Renaissance.” Rebirth. Of what? “We.” Who is that?

Two writers, more than any others, marked out the ground of what we might call the normative sense of “Renaissance”: Giorgio Vasari writing in the sixteenth century and Jacob Burckhardt writing in the nineteenth. The arguments of both have been challenged, denied, proved false or at best partial, pulled this way and that, worn away by waves of modern scholarship. As is the way of such things, the texts themselves, let alone the paintings and sculptures, cities and libraries to which they refer, have become part of what we talk about when we talk about the Renaissance.

Both defined their Renaissances against something else. Vasari, who wrote about art, set it against “the dead tradition of the Greeks,” that is, against Byzantine painting, with its “staring eyes, feet on tiptoe,” and “absence of shadow.”² Burckhardt, who didn’t, or at least not in his principal book, set it against the Middle Ages, In his view, people then were conscious of themselves only as members of wider groups, whereas in the Renaissance, for the first time “man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.”³ Neither of these claims now command assent in progressive inquiry, but their power has been such that perspective and humanism (which is what Vasari and Burckhardt, respectively, were championing) continue to bear down on anyone who would engage with the Renaissance even now, half a millennium after it happened.

In a recent collection of debates about the status and meaning of the Renaissance today, James Elkins has commented on its strangely doubled identity. On the one hand it retains the kind of exemplary status gestured to above – he calls it an “anchor” for our broader sense of what “Art” is, and of what is at stake in our dealings with it.⁴ But on the other hand, almost no one outside the ranks of specialists in the field engages with it anymore; and in particular, people whose interests lie with modern art, especially younger people, seem to have little or no interest in it, knowledge of it, or curiosity about it. It is regarded, at best, as having nothing to do with art now and, at worst, as symbolizing that litany of values concerning authority, taste, religion, the canon – in a word, conservatism – that modern and contemporary art are set against. The fact that tens of thousands will attend a temporary exhibition by an “Old Master,” or that there is a permanent throng of tourists around the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, not to mention the fact that there is a mass audience for The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance and The Da Vinci Code only serves to reinforce the point. For most people outside of a shrinking scholarly specialism, the Renaissance seems to lie on the other side of a river of history separating a critical consciousness of modernity and globalization from the academic, Eurocentric past; and on the rare occasions that it washes up on our shore, it does so, unmistakably, as kitsch.

Yet the Renaissance is in the process of being rewritten, in ways whose implications are more far-reaching than at any time since the formation of the modern discipline of art history in the nineteenth century. The term arrived at its modern meaning, as signifying a period, in the nineteenth century. The French historian Jules Michelet used it to indicate a stage in his history of France; others, including the English writers John Ruskin and Walter Pater used it in relation to Italian art. But the definitive identification of the term with Italy was made by Burckhardt in his classic study translated into English as The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. In that book Burckhardt dealt with the state, the individual, and the wider culture rather than with art as such, although he did discuss art in other works. Nonetheless art was the principal focus for others, including Heinrich Wolfflin’s Renaissance and Baroque and Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, both of which appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century. This is not to say that in the field of art practice the Renaissance canon went unquestioned. Quite the reverse; it is one of those historical ironies that at the moment when the Renaissance was being inscribed in the new academic field of art history it was the object of fundamental challenge in the emerging French avant-garde. Less radically in some ways, in England a reaction had set in against the over-valorization of the “High” Renaissance art of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, as the self-consciously chosen name of the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” testifies. They were already, in 1848, looking back to the “primitives” of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for a vigor they felt had begun to be lost in that work which the subsequent academic tradition of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries venerated above all else. The term “Renaissance” in its modern sense might not have been used until Burckhardt but for three centuries the same names crop up again and again wherever in Europe art was seriously debated.

This is an important point, for in that long period the tradition we think of as the “Western canon” was formed. It emerged in discussion and criticism, it was negotiated, tested, reinforced, and revised in a long process of debate. It did not emerge fully formed and stereotypical, a motionless gallery of dead white European males waiting to be knocked off their pedestals by a generation of radical art historians at the end of the twentieth century. In this sense, figures such as Burckhardt and Wölfflin are not only initiators of an art historical tradition that is now under such far-reaching criticism by contemporary scholarship, they are in the true sense of the word canonizers. They articulate something long in process. In that process, even the principal actors, whose names recur again and again, are represented as vivid exemplars. At least before the sclerosis of the academy had really set in, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, and others were there to be emulated, challenged, championed, learned from, and not merely parroted by rote.

For a long time, certainly extending into the middle of the twentieth century and the period often referred to as the crisis of modernism, despite fluctuating fashions, the Renaissance was widely accepted as the benchmark of Western art and culture. Many nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernists (including figures as diverse as Degas and Cézanne, Picasso, and Rothko), whose art took overt issue with the heritage of the academy, nonetheless repeatedly measured themselves against a range of “Old Masters” whom they particularly admired. Despite modernism’s rejection of most of the norms of Renaissance art, especially the fundamental commitment to verisimilitude, the Renaissance remained the implicit standard of value against which subsequent Western art was measured. The coining of the term “modern masters” in the early twentieth century to refer to figures such as Matisse is an example of this kind of thinking. The case of the avant-garde was, however, double-edged. Although a sense of the achievement of the Renaissance masters may have continued to inform the thinking of artists whose own work looked very different, modernist painting and sculpture drew on techniques and models that could not have been further from the Renaissance example. I shall look at some of this later on, particularly problems attendant on the concept of “primitive art,” and its relation to ideas of authenticity and expression that were so central to the modern movement.

All I am trying to establish at the moment is some of the complexity of the relationship of modern Western art to previous Western art, as well as to the arts of the rest of the world. To fill out a sense of the dual status of Renaissance art today that Elkins alluded to, that uncanny mix of persistent presence and almost complete eclipse, one needs some understanding of this multifaceted internal history of Western art itself, of what has been at stake in the shifts from Renaissance to academy, from academy to the modernist avant-garde, and from modernism to postmodern and contemporary art. Part of the problem of thinking about Western art in relation to the wider world concerns the changes Western art itself underwent, often in response to that wider world, knowledge of which came about through mechanisms of power which were themselves far removed from the world of art. It is important to bring capitalism, industrialization, and imperialism into the picture while resisting the reductionist impulse to conflate art and learning with the exercise of temporal power as such. The post-Renaissance Western tradition of art has been both continuous and conflicted against itself. Part of our problem with the Renaissance today is the way it has been invoked within the overarching cultural tradition as an originary point of Western modernity. A certain view of the individual in the active life of society, and a certain kind of verisimilitude in the representation of it, have been jointly invoked as the standard against which not only subsequent Western but all other cultures were to be measured. It is especially this latter assumption that has now come to be questioned. In fact, that is to understate the situation. That assumption is now regarded as the unacceptable symptom of a Eurocentrism which is not only an inappropriate object of continued endorsement in the present period of increasing globalization but is now widely seen as having been historically complicit in the advance and management of Western imperialism too.

It would be stating the obvious to acknowledge that globalization is responsible for the decentering of the Western canon. People who have had that canon rammed down their throats for several hundred years, while their own cultures have been systematically disparaged if not physically destroyed, are unlikely to feel well-disposed towards claims about universal aesthetics and disinterested knowledge. Rightly so. But there is another side to this: those neophiliacs whose project is to manage contemporary globalized art by cutting it free from tradition risk a form of historical amnesia that is closer to the protocols of globalized management in general than it is to any kind of informed resistance to its depredations. For my own part, I feel it is important to treat these questions carefully, above all to avoid an all too easy reductionism whereby European art is denied any measure of relative autonomy and is merely presented as either the unwitting tool or the willing servant of power. At a point when the claims of the Western canon are coming under greater scrutiny than at any time since its formulation, it is useful to investigate the changing sense that canon made of its others, both positively and negatively. It follows that the vaunted “rebirth” of that tradition from its roots in pagan antiquity is a suggestive site of encounter with received meanings and interpretations.

This work is already in train, in the form of a wide range of new approaches to Renaissance art history. In historical representation, consciously or otherwise, the horizon of the present is always drawn around the continent of the past. A period gets the Renaissance it deserves – or needs. For Burckhardt in the nineteenth century, the impetus to researching the Renaissance was a conviction of its status as “a civilization which is the mother of our own.”⁵ Contemporary historians, by contrast, are inclined to explore differences between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and our own times. Not only has our map of the societies and cultures that produced Renaissance art been substantially redrawn and expanded, our sense of what counts as “Art” itself has been subject to redescription. In a way that echoes the de-centering of painting and sculpture from the contemporary practice of the arts, our sense of Renaissance cultural practice is now moving away from an exclusive focus on painting, sculpture, and architecture. Now, painting and sculpture are being re-embedded in a matrix of ritual and building, mechanical reproduction, design and consumption, from which the modern system of the arts as it was developed in the late eighteenth century, detached them. Furthermore, the geographical boundaries of the Renaissance are being expanded, and not only from Italy to other areas of northern, central, and eastern Europe. Claire Farago has argued that “the kind of art historical practice I would like to see in Renaissance studies goes all over the world and deals with all kinds of practices, representational systems, cultural conditions.”⁶ Such an expanded field, which Farago had begun to explor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Renaissance and Old World
• 2 Enlightenment and New World
• 3 Modernism and Modern World
• 4 Avant-Garde, Contemporary, and Globalized World
• 5 “World Art History” and “Contemporary Art”
• Index